Volume 101, Number 1/2
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You can observe a lot just by watchin’. —Yogi BerraWatching baseball sitting in the sun eating popcorn reading Ezra Pound —Lawrence Ferlinghetti Cover Caption: “Shoeless” Joe Jackson and Ty Cobb, courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC. |
Editors’ Page
Now and then when we decide not to publish someone’s poems in Poet Lore, we send out a “nice” note. I guess it’s the equivalent of being invited into the baseball clubhouse during spring training and told you have talent but you’re not going to make the team. Well, not this time. Is the nice note a pat on the back? Yes and no. We hope poets who receive a nice note will send us more work in the future. Some poems curve and others brush the reader back the first time. A good editor should be able to recognize Ty Cobb whether he is hitting or running the bases.
Our advice to all writers is to keep working at developing the craft. Write not for publication but for joy of playing with language. Poetry is the American pastime and not baseball. Is this heresy? Not really. The only way to explain how the Red Sox and White Sox have won the World Series the last two years is to turn to poetry. Is it too difficult to understand how they did it? Well, read the poem again. A good literary magazine offers the box score of what’s going on in a society. We turn to poetry because it takes us inside the game.
At Poet Lore we believe that if we publish good poems readers will keep coming back to our pages. Baseball is back in D.C., and this magazine is back in your hands.
Poetry
Poems by Denise Duhamel, Sandra Beasley, Greg McBride, Melissa Morphew, Jeffrey Harrison, and others.
Poets Introducing Poets
Michele Wolf introduces Amy Beeder
Reviews
Belongings by Sandra M. Gilbert
Selected Poems by Peter Sirr
Dark Track by Julia Wendell
Women of America by Charlie Smith
Bellini in Istanbul by Lillias Bever