Editor’s Note
Readers: Welcome to Plume Issue # 55 – February: A cold snap here in Florida as I write – 42 degrees last night. I know. But remember: we also have Rick Scott (who has denied the ACA again and emptied the mental health care coffers, for starters), some of the lowest high school graduation and annual income rates in the
Editor’s Note
Readers: Welcome to Plume Issue # 54 – January: And why not bid farewell to the holidays, happy as they have been – stuffed with gifts (a box of rapidly staling pfeffernusse, anyone?) — or unhappy as the case may be (see: already-effervescing rehearsals of familial lore, for which read childhood slights and long-simmering animosities brought to the boil)
Editor’s Note
Readers: Welcome to Plume Issue # 53 – December: Yes, and of course: Paris. Where when I first stepped foot there many years ago, felt…home. A sensation that has never left me: I was born in the wrong place. And now: Unthinkable cruelty. One watches television in utter disbelief, and yet: not. The familiar horror, the facile explanations, the
EDITOR’S NOTE
Readers: Welcome to Plume Issue # 52 – October/November: Yes, you have read that correctly, but may have inferred that we have gone to a bi-monthly format – most assuredly not the case. Nor a double issue. Instead, merely a matter of the unforeseen strains accompanying the installation of our new website exacerbated no doubt by the incompetencies of
EDITOR’S NOTE
Readers: Welcome to Plume Issue # 51 – September: Our fifty-first first issue! As you see, at last, now, our new, new redesign. I hope you like it: the same format of twelve poems and a Featured Selection, but, I think, easier to read, the font clear and sharp, and some nice little widgets and additions. (E.g., Under Staff in
EDITOR’S POST #49
Readers: Welcome to Plume Issue # 49 — July: And at last – it seems so long – we put our farewells behinds us and turn to happier subjects. For instance, a look over our – Plume’s – shoulder, where we find among other things, an uncanny antecedent, thanks to the remarkable-in-all-ways Ron Slate*, who founded and served as editor of
EDITOR’S NOTE #50
Readers: Welcome to Plume Issue # 50 – August: Our fiftieth issue! Astonishing in every way, this little whim now so…corporeal. To celebrate, we’ll be running some very fine poets especially recruited for this issue – and the next, and the next after that, for as it turns out, and I should have expected this, the response to my
EDITORS NOTE #48
Readers: June: And once again we find ourselves saying good-bye to a poet passed from this world: Franz Wright. And who better to write of him than his long-time friend, David Young? The latter’s essay has the ring of everything true in it, and embraces the man in full measure: heart-breaking and beautiful. Once more, you will find it
EDITOR’S NOTE
Readers: May: As promised I am happy to report our own wave good-bye to Phillip Levine in Plume: the “secret poem” Phil’s “Belief,” with a marvelous introduction by Christopher Buckley in this month’s Newsletter. For this reason, I strongly urge you to subscribe to that short monthly report. Unsubscribe if you like immediately thereafter – it’s a matter of a
EDITOR’S NOTE #46
Readers: April: my birthday month: the 19th. I tell you this not to elicit congratulations or condolences (61!), nor to observe the tragic events which lately have plagued this star-crossed date: Waco and the Oklahoma City bombings. Terrifying, incomprehensible. Yet: one recalls Braudel’s observation: “Events are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed
Editor’s Note
Readers: March: month when “…even your good friends will turn into monsters.” A trenchant observation from one of my hometown’s illuminati: Hunter S. Thompson. And though he was speaking of March Madness avant le letter, and if one can give some legroom to that “good friends” and include the incorporeal companions of one’s reading, then perhaps I can return
Editor’s Note
Readers: January: in Latin, as you know, Januraius, after Janus, god of beginnings (and by necessity endings) and transitions; the two-faced god – looking into the past and the future at once. And as I began this little note tonight, I thought I’d scratch out another of those dreadful reports in which the author, CEO-manque — reminds his audience of
