As another kernel of proof that more than just corn grows in the Midwest, the debut issue of Maize (www.indianawriters.org/Publications/MAIZE.htm) was recently published by the Writers' Center of Indiana, a community-based nonprofit literary arts organization in Indianapolis. The biannual journal will emphasize the work of writers from Indiana and the surrounding region, with 80 percent of each issue dedicated to Hoosier poets and fiction writers.
Evidently the time has come for Our Time Is Now (www.ourtimeisnow.org), a new literary magazine featuring poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction by writers under the age of 24. Staffed by high school juniors and seniors at Stivers School for the Arts in Dayton, Ohio, Our Time Is Now will be published biannually, each issue containing an interview with a nationally known writer offering advice to emerging writers. In the first issue, published in January, Dave Eggers discusses his regret about everything he writes, the anxiety of influence, and the inevitability of humor. The second issue of Our Time Is Now will be published in June and will include an interview with U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins.
The third issue of UR-VOX (www.probook.net/urvox.html) will be published this month. Edited by Lee Ballentine, UR-VOX is an annual journal of "the limbic or underlying voice (the ur). It embraces all phases of surrealism early and late, experiments in broken and erotic grammars, works of ecstatic religion or unreligion, and heady documents of the machine age (the vox)." Past issues have included work by Garrett Caples, Marcella Durand, Clayton Eshleman, Kristin Prevallet, and Cole Swensen, and scattered throughout is a bizarre collection of found photographs that will intrigue even those readers who still don't understand the journal's name.
Founded by editor Stephen Reichert in 1998, Smartish Pace (www.smartishpace.com), a Baltimore literary magazine that appears in April and October, has published an impressive roster of poets in its first five years—Stuart Dybek, Ray Gonzalez, Allen Grossman, X.J. Kennedy, William Logan, Jay Parini, Harvey Shapiro, and Henry Taylor among them. The magazine's Web site features Poets Q&A, an interactive forum for readers to ask questions of well-known poets such as Eavan Boland, Robert Creeley, Stephen Dunn, and Robert Pinsky. Answers to questions include Pinsky's replying that he would have liked to have become a jazz musician if not a poet and Carl Dennis's admitting that he doesn't expect others to be interested in his early poems.
After nearly 50 years of handling the correspondence, bookkeeping, and initial screening of manuscripts for the Beloit Poetry Journal (www.bpj.org), editor Marion Stocking is turning her duties over to John Rosenwald and Lee Sharkey. And in July the journal's editorial office is moving from Lamoine, Maine, to Farmington, Maine.
