Introduction to Special Issue 14

The Traveling Wilburys: Misfit Editors Edition

As your intrepid editors, we felt compelled to share some of our globetrotting activities with our readers to demonstrate, once and for all, that beyond the magazine, we actually have lives: real, verifiable, active lives. And sometimes we even go places and do interesting things.  As the places we most recently were more stimulating (to us, anyway) than trips to Dizzyworld or the corner store, and inspired our creative juices to flow, we put together a selection of some of the sights and sounds (in our own words) of Spain, Paris and South West England. Consequently, as we are quite different people and have different ways of expressing ourselves, each selection is unique, and self-contained. Jennifer offers photos and poems of her Spanish experience. Gene excerpted poetry and paintings from one of his recent Paris collections, and I put together a sort of travelogue with poems and pictures.  We hope you will take this journey with us, supply your own music, and read on. The Traveling Wilburys worked for us as we overheard selections from their album in an outdoor market in Wells. Whatever works for you, tune it in and enjoy. 

I should also mention that I told many poets, whose work I accepted, that the next issue would be 14 and their poems would be in this issue. Do not despair, the issue is on as promised, and will be issue 15 instead. I had toyed with the absurd idea of calling the interim editors issue 13 ½ but as it was pointed out to me, by a significant other, quite correctly I might add, that would be a totally irrational thing to do.  As I am prone to irrational thinking, this almost persuaded me to stick with the original, absurd idea, but she added “irrational and possible insane idea,” so I gave in and numbered the issue, accordingly, 14.  To be followed by the regular, all poetry issue 15, with a special feature of short poems by a wide variety of practitioners of the form.