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Dear Reader,

#6 is not like the others. The poetry side of the plate is filled only with 16 promising young hot shot poets in the very earliest stages of their long careers (though the same hot shot reviews, essays, and recovery projects are still, as always, on the other side)—for some of these 16, this is their first publication. 8 poems from each poet are included so that the reader can get a more complete representation of the work. And each selection is introduced, each poet endorsed, by a more established poet. The ones giving the introductions are D.A. Powell, Dan Beachy-Quick, Matthew Rohrer, Heidi Lynn Staples, Jonah Winter, Matthew Zapruder, Dara Wier, Andrea Baker, Wayne Chambliss, Tony Tost, Donald Revell, David Lehman, John Koethe, Timothy Liu, Chris Vitiello, and Dean Young.

This issue does not pretend to be an exclusive list of young hot shot poets. There are more of those than this Octopus can count. It is only meant to be a service to both these particular young hot shot poets, and to the poetry-reading community. For the poet, a chance to make a good clean entrance with a larger selection of poems, and to be the spotlight of the issue rather than the bridge between the poets we know so (too?) well. And for the community, this issue marks an historical recording of an important (perhaps) poet’s early stages, flags a starting point, for these particular 16—a dog-eared page in cyperspace for us all to refer back to. For those of you who were watching MTV in the 90’s, this issue is a good solid episode of 120 Minutes for po-biz. All of these 16 are already writing terrific stuff and are each, as Jonah Winter puts it in his introduction, “sitting on a goldmine of poems.” Octopus wanted to be there upon the initial discovery of the mine, before the excavation.

I wonder if a journal becomes among the living dead of journals when the readers know exactly what they are getting, even when the poetry is good, when the risk is low and the reader is already familiar with the poets and poetry they’re flipping (or clicking) to—when each issue is a shuffled version of the one before it. Here though, the pickins are fresh. The poetry is the new kind. Don’t know what to expect.

Yrs,

Zachary Schomburg, editor

July 2005