The spring of 1973 was a heady time at Salem State for anyone interested in reading poetry and fiction—and writing it. The hip Beat writers Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso energized the campus at Professor Jay McHale’s legendary symposium on Jack Kerouac.  And a new literary publication appeared, forty-two pages of fresh writing and photography called Gone Soft. This self-declared “national literary magazine” represented the labors of editor Ron Bogan ’77 and his board of fellow students. None could have predicted that their magazine, whose name would change to Soundings and then Soundings East, would still be keeping Salem State on the nation’s literary map some forty years later.

Bogan, in the inaugural issue, thanked the Student Government Association’s president, former Congressman John Tierney ‘73, for advancing the funding. But credit went “first and foremost” to advisor John Currier, a skinny twenty-six-year-old English instructor. Currier and his student writers would discuss poetry (and life) late into the night in neighboring apartments on Rosyln Street—or in the Pig’s Eye, the Gridiron, and St. Joe's Polish Club. When Bogan wrote that Currier “moved us from a barroom scheme to a published magazine,” he meant it.

Recalling Currier now, the students on the Gone Soft board (including Salem State’s former Director of Media Services Jay Cattogio) speak of a witty, self-possessed bespectacled man who loved Bob Dylan’s lyrics, R. Crumb’s comic art, and Denise Corban, his Trinidadian wife. Currier, they also knew, suffered from lung disease.           

What they didn’t know is that Currier, before earning his master’s degree in creative writing at Hollins College, had also attended Salem State, graduating in 1969.

And as an undergraduate, Currier had published in—and worked on—an even earlier campus magazine, Runes, devoted exclusively to the writing of Salem State students. Published between 1963 and 1970, Runes had, in turn, two faculty advisors, Ken Stein (two issues) and Patricia (Curran) Gozemba (eleven issues).

In Gone Soft, Currier and Bogan broke the mold that Runes had established:  their magazine went beyond student writing to attract the best work written anywhere. By the second issue, after a subscription order arrived from Oxford, the now thirty-two-page magazine deemed itself “an international literary magazine.”

And so it would be. In its run of forty years, the magazine that renamed itself Soundings in 1978 and then Soundings East a year later (to distinguish it from a Tennessee publication of the same name) would receive submissions from all over the English-speaking world. Student writing was included, too—the Student Government Association would not otherwise fund the publication—but only when it met the same high standards other contributors were held to. (Student artwork also enlarged the campus’s footprint.  And—perhaps cagily—the editors in 1974 included a poem by then-Salem State president Frank Keegan.)

Currier would die young, at 29, of cystic fibrosis, in the Bahamas, where he had gone for his health—and to teach at St. John’s College. Of the magazine’s eight succeeding advisors, his immediate replacement, Claire Keyes, was the longest serving, with her name on thirty-one mastheads. Looking back, she jokes that she had been “hired off the street” to teach freshman composition to the burgeoning student population in the 1960s. As a poet starting to be published herself, she was tapped in 1974 to oversee the magazine. Keyes retired in 1996 after three decades of teaching. In 1998, when Soundings East ran its twenty-fifth anniversary issue, it was Keyes who wrote the celebratory commemoration.  Still an active poet, she published her latest collection, The Question of Rapture, in 2008 and teaches for the Salem State Explorers.

Long-serving as well was author and English professor J.D. Scrimgeour, who guided twenty issues to press in his two tenures (1997-2008 and 2015-2018).  Scrimgeour recalls that “it really was the student editors who ran the show and made the decisions.” In 2000 he established the Salem Poetry Seminar, bringing together promising student poets from across the Commonwealth. These young stand-outs were highlighted in Soundings East’s Fall 2000 issue.

The publication’s other faculty editors include William Joyner (1975-1976), William Cunningham (1990-1992), Sarah Messer (1996), Regina Flynn (2004), Vanessa Ramos (2011-2012), Rod Kessler (2009-2010, 2013-2014), J.D. Scrimgeour (1997-2008, 2015-2018), and Kevin Carey (2019-Present). 

Much, much longer is the list of student editors and board members, including those who would produce books of their own—George De Stefano, Martha Carlson Bradley, Carole Borges, Joseph Salvatore, and Brian Brodeur, among them.

The magazine’s moments of glory include two issues—now collector’s items—devoted to the 1973 Kerouac symposium. In its sixty-seven editions we find Seamus Heaney, Lawrence Ferlinghetti,  Denise Levertov, Tess Gallagher, Erika Mumford, Paul Marion, Jacqueline Crews Malone, Denise Duhamel, Robin Becker, Martín Espada –even Sri Chinmoy, the Indian-born spiritual master and guru.

Alumni and faculty writers appear, too, as do North Shore and Boston-area icons—including Roberta Kalechofsky, Michele Leavitt, Susan Donnelly, Helena Minton, Bill Coyle, John Tamilio, Wendy Mnookin, and Michelle Tea.

Today Soundings East is funded by the Center for the Creative and Performing Arts and run by a dedicated team of undergraduate students, graduate students and alumni.

Adapted from “SOUNDINGS EAST LOOKS BACK ON FORTY YEARS” by Rod Kessler