“To the already turgid field of small press publications add:
GLITCH
Glitch—noun— a natural phenomenon
which cannot be explained
by current scientific theories.
A few comments.
We make the history, chorology, mythology of the continent. All of us. Whatever pretensions motivate this magazine, I hope they can be summed up in this quotation from Pound, Canto XCVI—
If we never write anything save what is already understood, the field of understanding will never be extended. One demands the right, now and again, to write for a few people with special interests and whose curiosity reaches into greater detail.
Detail. Spans of attention. The periodicity of insight measuring the continent, the culture, the conditions of life. And each work of art a klystron not a kludge.
The editorial perspective revolves, suggests a center. We respond to exemplary activity— Walt Whitman dressing wounds, Louis Agassiz observing the nature of a glacier, Ezra Pound incarcerated in St. Elizabeth’s asylum, or Lorine Niedecker in Wisconsin. Such activity suggests the editorial stance.
A little more. A magazine is a front. In two sense. Military. Meteorological. The small press can be more than an alternative to big publishing houses. It can serve as an orientation within confusion. Certain lines must be drawn, contours made discernible, tactical strategies followed with the aims high, aims to overcome the here-and-now of the markets. Force the big publishing houses to turn to us for direction, if they will not market our work. The stance can be political, cultural, even ephemeral. A certain group of people is periodically defined by a system of high or low pressure. And whether the result is a mild April shower or a raging hurricane, the point is that there is something happening which we can respond to—
A PRECIPITATION:”
(From Glitch 1, edited by Paul McDonough and Jane McGriff; undated, but probably 1978? There doesn’t seem to be much on the internet about this little magazine, which seems to have lasted until issue 4/5, published in 1981.)