Monday, February 03, 2003

Frustrations. A part of living, eh? Oh little dewdrop, here comes the sun! Gonna warm you right up! Mm MM. Warm you right up. The chill of the night birthed you, little wet, now here comes the warmth of day.

OK OK.

While we wait to evaporate

let's ruminate

on the press notices of friends. Michael Martin emailed me a link to an article in the Gainesville Sun about his literary magazine The Hogtown Creek Review. First picture I've seen of his co-editor, Elisa Maranzana. Google hits on "Hogtown Creek Review" are growing. Used to be you'd get one or two. A call for submission posted on a bulletin board perhaps ... Now poets are naming it bios! How fun. I'd happily edit a literary magazine. If somebody else would do all the business stuff. Consult me on design, sure, but fund it, call the printer, shlep it around to bookstores -- ugh. I do enjoy reading slush piles. And discovering good stuff. I do like that part quite a bit. I don't mind reading lots of bad poems because when you get to the good ones they seem so much better! 'Course one can lose one's head. But one feels intimate with the poems one discovers. And reads over & over in the process of choosing, typesetting, proofreading, flipping through the finished magazine. One takes a proprietary interest. And looks for the poet's further success. That's how I looked at it. When I worked on Berkeley Poetry Review at UCB. And my few other brushes with publishing.

You know, I still have a few copies of the issue of Berkeley Poetry Review for which I served as Ed-in-Chief. If you'd like one, I'll mail you one. Just write me with your mailing address and I'll put one in an envelope and send it to you. Free. Yup. It is a few years old. And I have zero contact with the kids who are working on BPR now. I don't even know whether somebody is working on BPR now. So don't assume you'll learn anything about the sort of poem BPR publishes these days from reading my old ish. This offer is while-supplies-last, you know. Which may be forever if nobody asks. So don't be shy!

Isn't that dewdrop dry?

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