Editor’s Note
Readers, as you will note, I have once again this month vacated my space in this note so that we might continue to offer a new element, instead: the authors of the poems (or translations, or both) speaking of their works’ origins, their raisons d’être. I think you’ll find the results fascinating, and enlightening, enriching your reading of the poems,
Editor’s Note
August: and you’ll be pleased to discover, Readers, that you’ll be spared another chapter in the ongoing Lawless saga. Instead, a new direction, one which I hope will quickly become the direction: contributors speaking of the origins (for the most part, anyway) of the poems you are about to read in the issue. Enlightening – and fun, I hope. I
Editor’s Note
July: and, given the length and discursiveness of last month’s note, a reprieve, Reader: the briefest of remarks this time – little more than two passing images as I write a few hours before our deadline. But, really, a way of answering if only to myself that hackneyed question all poets are confronted with from time to time: Where do
Editor’s Note
June: and considering again my recent, um, ruminations of the centrality of cigarettes in my almost-teenager life in the latter sixties, I thought, tonight as I write, I might extend that reverie. Easy enough – after all, it was not only cigarettes that organized and ensorcelled those distant hours – from acquisition to accoutrements – but, of course, and for
Guest Editor’s Note: David Breskin on Campaign
This month, for the second time in three months and in Plume’s relatively brief history, I happily step aside, offering this space instead to David Breskin, who fills it — admirably is far too feeble praise — with selected pieces from his work, Campaign. I confess, I was going to preface the poems with a few of my own thoughts
Editor’s Note
April: and, alone in another city, lost (as usual) as I wander around the back of a strip mall, three figures huddled on a small loading dock provide my subject this issue: cigarettes, and their many pleasures in my youth. Maybe no surprise either (I am from Kentucky, after all) that it would be so – how many years I
Guest Editor’s Note: Chard deNiord on Tom Lux
This month, with much to mourn, I happily cede this space to Chard deNiord’s remembrance of Tom Lux. Tom was going to read for us at AWP, before, well. I spoke at some length to Chard over those few days, learned of his long friendship with Tom, and discovered he had an essay we might publish – and here is
Editor’s Note
February: yes, readers, the shortest month, and in acknowledgment of or rather aligning with such I want to offer today the briefest of these editorial missives on record. Not altogether coincidentally my note this time begins with a passage from last month’s fine Featured Selection of Bill Knott’s work, most ably introduced by Tom Lux. I’m sure this is the
Editor’s Note
January: and as I write tonight, mid- December, winter or what passes for such in Florida. Far ahead of schedule on this Editor’s Note, for I want to have the issue behind me before heading to Louisville for the holidays. Although, really, I am already there, in a way, as I am, always. In the house I grew up in,
Editor’s Note
December: and once again I find my subject in that recent trip home to Louisville, freshened this time by a chance encounter with my ancient Master’s thesis, discovered in a storage bin at my mother’s home, as I hunted for something else. Its connection to Louisville: I wrote it in its entirety while I lived at the Tavner Apartments there,
Editor’s Note
November: and just back from a trip home to Louisville, where I met my cousin B—, come to visit my mother, out of the blue, on her birthday – 93! We had been close, B— and I, when we were children, in fact until we were teenagers: nearly the same age, their house one block over from ours. Thirty years
Editor’s Note
Readers: Welcome to Plume Issue # 63 – October: and, naturally enough, given this month’s Featured Selection on the work of the recently passed Max Ritvo, as I cast about for a theme for this note: thoughts of death, early. I imagined at first that I’d say something about Max’s consciousness of his impending departure and how that did
