February 1, 2006

Key Satch(el) (1997-1999).

I miss Key Satch(el). Back when I was first seriously playing around with the prose poem as a form, four times a year in 24 saddle-stapled pages, I could get a run-down of where everyone else was at with their own experiments. From Gary Duehr's brief briefs like "Song:"

Someone may have sorrow, and sing it, yet no one able to tell with whom it belongs [2.2 (1998) :11].

to embarrasingly my first exposure to Maxine Chernoff in 2.3(1998) and Cid Corman in 2.4 (1998), Key Stach(el) was a crutch in my learning curve to the genre.

The last page of the last issue is a lament that everyone considering running a journal (print or otherwise) should ponder before the leap of faith and no-more-free-time and anemic bank accounts.

In fact, pairing this with T.S. Eliot's "The Idea of a Literary Review" [The Criterion 4.1 (1926)] might be a good jumping off point for editors in general.