Paul B. Roth founded The Bitter Oleander and The Bitter Oleand er Press as a young man fresh out of college, eager to make his mark on the literary world.  He has nursed his journal and p ress for over 35 years. Interviewer Andrew Tobia is a recent graduate of Suffolk University.

 To begin with, where did the name The Bitter Oleander come from?  

In the early 1930’s, Federico García Lorca was visiting New York and was in rehearsals for his play, “Blood Wedding.” His producers of that play felt that the title would be an impediment to getting many Americans to the theater. Right then he decided to call it “The Bitter Oleander.” It’s a little known fact, or it was, until you asked me.

What has it been like to watch your journal and press grow from the day you founded them to today?

I like to think that the most important thing is being able to give poets and writers the opportunity to present their wares in the most provocative and powerful atmosphere as possible. The feedback I receive on a day to day basis is usually very positive and it’s always nice to hear that someone picked up a copy of TBO and felt like they found a home.

Backtracking a little, you founded TBO in 1974 - what drove you to start a literary magazine (and press, for that matter)? 

After graduating from Goddard College in the early seventies, and because I’d been a poet and writer of various sorts since the age of seven, I’d always spent time exploring various journals considered influential or ground-breaking in libraries and old bookstores. I accepted the fact that these publications represented the attitudes and insights of North American poetry. Although these journals showcased traditional forms in an exacting manner about which I should be impressed by the magnitude and effort of their expression, I was simply uninspired by their contents. When I was introduced to poets and writers from Latin America, Asia, Western and Eastern Europe, Africa and our own Native American culture, I understood why I was uninspired by most American poetry: it was truly unimaginative and, if at all experimental, was clearly amputating language from its true reality. Not a reality that seeks to make conventional thought unique but instead seeks to dwell in what is unseen among the seen, unknown among the known, especially in the natural world. The desire to build a press and a journal, was to seek out the most imaginative poetry possible. Poetry written by poets who did not just write poems but lived the lives of serious, thoughtful poets. The human condition was very important to me. I sought it through poetry and through my own life. I mostly found it among those whose work was not necessarily accepted in the regular marketplace nor had any connection to the academic community where acceptance and notoriety are bred and bargained. These poets needed to have as formidable a venue for their work as possible. In this regard, the founding of the press and the magazine was not as much a reaction to what was firmly in place but a way to help others be on the same playing field within the same arena. Because we also publish a considerable amount of poetry and short fiction in translation, along with features of both domestic and international poets, we’re offering the poetry reading public—both through our books and our biannual journal—access to the contemporary world it wouldn’t ordinarily enjoy.

I was hoping that you could elaborate a little on what, to you, a serious and thoughtful poet is.

The fact that a person sits down to write a poem out of a demanding inner need, immediately makes him or her a serious and thoughtful poet. The freedom of expression drives poets in various ways. All of them are important because they fill a need for every kind of writing. As an editor, to recognize the singularity of a poet in his or her language, is all I do and all I look for in the thousands of submissions received each year.  What I receive mostly in submissions are poems from four distinct categories of poets. The first are novices whose emotions get lost in a very structured and generalized language because that’s all they’ve ever experienced in school. The second group consists of those who have gone through MFA programs and their rigorous curriculums believing they’ve found the secret to expression but have only learned to be good emulators and not yet necessarily individual creators. The third group consists of those who’ve been writing for years, have found their niche among other writing groups independent of strict academic circles, but have somehow fallen prey to repeating the same thoughts from long ago dressed up in either a more refined state of expression or an experimentally diluted one in order to project its inaccessibility by simply becoming more inaccessible. The fourth group is the rarest group of all. From these comes a constant flow of poems opening places in my perception that otherwise would have been left in cold storage. These particular poems come from the deepest of human conditions, dwell on what’s ultimately important in life by either expressing the suffering and injustices that abound our civilization or the rapture of seeing, hearing or feeling something one never knew existed. That there are particulars to things, deep specifics, which unfold their beauty even from the most unexpected of things in nature and human life becomes very evident in their work and is inspirational. When poets write in this manner, to me, they are serious and thoughtful.

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