by Eva Dameron
Daily Lobo
Women didn't have equal footing in Albuquerque's poetry scene until poet Lisa Gill started The Rag in 1999.
The Rag, which used to be a monthly poetry broadside for women poets, was part of a series to boost their productivity and means for an outlet.
This included quarterly public open-mics, a radio series and a reading group called the Herland Reading Series.
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"There were some problems for women at the time," Gill said. "Getting harassed after they read onstage and also a lack rules for women to be in power. Most of the open-mics were hosted by men. I want to develop a situation where women could run the reading. Over the course of the first two years, I published over 100 women - and that's a lot, especially for a small publication."
Gill designed The Rag to feature guest editors for themed issues and to pass under the management of a variety of editors.
"It was meant to keep moving," she said.
After a string of editors, Carol Lewis, 79, took over in 2003. She allowed men to submit to The Rag because the only response she got when she asked why men weren't involved was, "You had to have been there."
"That wasn't an answer," Lewis said. "I couldn't understand this because all the workshops I'd been in were both sexes, and there was never any trouble in a gender kind of way. A troublemaker was a troublemaker, male or female."
Although The Rag was a reference to menstruation, Lewis said she kept the name because it's also slang for a newspaper.
Lewis said she judges what gets printed based on originality and freshness of language.
"A different viewpoint - conciseness," she said. "Get it as tight as possible; don't use three words when one word will describe the action. Outside of that, I have no restrictions on subject matter. I sometimes state a theme, but usually when I state a theme, people ignore it. People send their poems in any old time."
She said The Rag has six distributors, and they each get 10 issues.
"They fan out all over the city and distribute them according to their own fashion," Lewis said. "Some leave them at their favorite coffee shop, some distribute them to their friends - I don't know what happens to them. Some probably stuff them into a wastebasket, but I don't know."
Copies of The Rag can be found at Winnings Coffee on 111 Harvard St. S.E. Lewis also mails out about 60 copies to subscribers who pay $15 a year. Poets of all ages can submit their work. The Rag has no specific goal at the moment, she said.
"Just happy to exist," she said. "I don't have rules, except the poetry has to be good. If you want to write in forms, OK. If you want to rhyme, OK - as long as you do it well."
Sometimes, people who submit their work seem in need of poetic guidance, so Lewis sends them a sheet of paper with names of poets she likes.
"I send them one of these as a suggestion," she said. "They find out which poets they like and start buying their works. Right now, one of my favorites is Maxine Kumin, who wrote a poem I love, called 'Mulching.'"
Lewis said "Mulching" is about a woman who mixes torn-up newspapers with her mulch.
"She's reading the headlines as she's putting in dirt," she said. "And she goes onto a little separate riff, like, 'I used to always love America, and I always stood up straight when the 'Star-Spangled Banner' went by, parades.' And then she goes, 'And now, I just like to lie down in the mulch with the newspaper.'"
Lewis' eyes welled up with tears at the thought of modern America.
"That's so much the way I feel," she said. "I was real patriotic when I was a little kid, and I lost my country. I didn't know I'd get so emotional about her."
Sometimes, she includes statistics on the back of The Rag about Iraqi civilian deaths and U.S. soldier deaths.
"I'm very happy with what Carol's doing," Gill said. "It's a different thing, but I'm all for broadsides."
