Fall 2002

For our second issue of Blackbird we received a startling range of innovative work, particularly in poetry, from the formal, complex, and tightly controlled to the speculative and wild.

Many of the poems seem to focus on travel of one kind or another—at times from one sort of world to another. Here are widely recognized poets at their best, including Stanley Plumly, Lynn Emanuel, Terese Svoboda, Henry Hart, and Eric Pankey, as well as poets whose work we recommend for your greater familiarity, if you don't already know them well, Clara Silverstein, Richard McCann, and Victoria Redel among many others—and to our very good fortune we can offer the first part of an astonishing Buddhist-inspired, futurist epic by Norman Dubie, The Spirit Tablets at Goa Lake . Dubie has been so very well known for entering the minds of persons from the past that here it is fascinating to watch him venturing in time's opposite, even more volatile, direction.

The fiction submitted was no less varied or sublimely deft of craft, from the cautionary tale, "Desperado," by Rick DeMarinis to the postmodern explorations of Leon Rooke and Christine Schutt. Nonfiction for this issue features literary essays: Mark Jarman writing on Donald Justice; Leonard Rogoff on Louis D. Rubin, Jr.; and more; and introduces a previously unpublished prose work, "Bell's Tavern," by the late Larry Levis. You will also be able to follow a cyber trail of sorts that connects the winner of the 2002 Levis Reading Prize, Steve Scafidi, to Levis's work as examined in an essay by Randy Marshall, and to an audio recording of Larry Levis reading his masterful poem, "Caravaggio: Swirl & Vortex."

Our Gallery offers the performance of excerpts from playwright Douglas Jones's Songs from Bedlam , as well as an exhibition of recorded texts and images by sculptor Myron Helfgott and a video work-in-progress by Song-yi Kim. The spoken word and moving image. Here are evidenced the greater and more pleasing freedoms gained by presenting an electronically realized journal. All in all, a selection of work that we hope will feed your interest in the artists presented and whose voices we are sure will sing their own songs in your memory. We welcome you to Blackbird , online, issue number 2.