If you saw my most recent posting about Gravity to rec.arts.poems, you may recall that I mentioned a great redesign of the magazine and renewed effort on my part to make it more widely known on the 'net. Didn't happen. I did, of course, give the boy holding the books a rest, figuring that if I'm going to steal images from someone, it might as well be from great sculptors as from some shmoe who scans an image from a Dover clipart book.

All that aside, the "theme" aspect of Issue 10 is, well, sort of covert. It is there in many of these works - loss of innocence, loss of love - but the seeing often takes a little searching on the reader's part. That's fine. The theme was actually inspired by the recent deaths of James Dickey and Allen Ginsburg (for whom I never developed a great love but in whose memory I tipped a glass or two...or nine), but the thing kind of foundered. Ah well. Maybe a "bad beatnik" theme later. Maybe I'll quit trying this theme thing. It all works well enough without it.

Read the poems. Of particular note this time are Dancing Bear's "(internet poet)" and Perry Thompson's bracing (and interestingly titled) "Shit". Caron Andregg's "My Body's Lost Religion" is also cool - Caron's releasing her third chapbook, Of Chemistry and Voodoo, next month, and I'll be trying to get a review of it placed by the end of May. It's only $3, and even the galley copy is well-done, so check it out.

Welcome to newcomers Scott Ross, Sarah Hector and Jude Roy.

Oh, I've made one other change. From now on, all of the writers' bios will go on one page, which will have info on all the writers who've been in Gravity and will be updated every month. Although that page is far from comprehensive at this point, that's the plan from now on, so if you're on there now (the file is named "bios.html") and I didn't use the right version of your life story, let me know. Eventually all of the backissues will be linked to that, then who knows what I'll do in the name of saving drive space on the server? Maybe a zipped FTP backissue archive?

I'm rambling, so let me give the last word to a favorite muse, Galway Kinnell:

Yes, I want to live forever.
I am like everyone.  But when I hear
that breath coming through the walls,
grace-notes blown
out of the wormed-out bones,
music that their memory of blood
plucks from the straitened arteries,
that the hard cock and the soaked cunt
caressed from each other
in the holy days of their vanity,
that the two hearts drummed
out of their ribs together,
the hearts that know everything (and even
the little knowledge they can leave
stays, to be the light of this house),

then it is not so difficult
to go out, to turn and face
the spaces which gather into one sound, I know now, the singing
of mortal lives, waves of spent existence
which flow toward, and toward, and on which we flow
and grow drowsy and become fearless again.