10th Anniversary Poets & Artists

Ten years ago, the inimitable publishing force of nature known to the world as Didi Menendez expanded her empire from MiPOesias and MiPOradio to include a new magazine known as Oranges & Sardines. That's right. After the Frank O'Hara poem, "Why I Am Not a Painter." You know the one: 

----
for instance, Mike Goldberg 
is starting a painting. I drop in.
...
"You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
...
But me? One day I am thinking of 
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange ... 
There should be 
so much more not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is,
and life. Days go by.
...
My poem is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES.
----


Yeah okay it's better if you read the whole thing. 

But Didi wanted to put painters and poets together in a magazine and when she wants to do something she does it. I had been working on a poetry podcast for MiPOradio called "Hard to Say," and when Didi was looking for people who might like to work on the magazine, I suggested my friend, the really amazing now-semi-retired-from-poetry poet, David Krump, who ended up editing the first several issues. At some point, I don't know when, the title of the magazine shifted over to Poets & Artists. At some other point, Didi added other publications: OCHO, Jujubes, iARTistas, and a chapbook series on Magzster, and she started doing shows, and exhibitions and artist catalogs, and poems from her magazines started getting selected for Best American Poetry and artists from her magazines started selling their work, and everyone more or less benefitted hugely from their connection with Didi, who never really seems to notice that people are grateful to her and amazed by her. She kind of just keeps on executing about twenty projects at once in a very straightforward and businesslike manner, all of which create really positive communities of writers and artists, and excellent venues for literary and visual work. 

I'm really pleased to have three poems in this tenth anniversary issue ("Existentially Accurate Mollusk Substitute," "Poem with Three Worlds," and "Poem while Reading Instructions for a Blowtorch"). The MiPO media family was a really important part of my life from about 2005 - 2010, and I like to think I helped in a small way to provide some forward momentum to Oranges & Sardines by connecting Didi and David. So it's cool to see the magazine turn ten, and to be part of it. And the issue's really great. I especially love Bob Hicok's three poems in it, Conor Walton's paintings "Thoroughly Modern Danae" and "Asymmetrical Warfare," Nin Andrews' "Venus after Amy Gerstler" and Alessandro Tomassetti's paintings, especially "How Soon Is Now?" Didi is now running her dynastic empire out of Patreon, now, and so if you're interested in the issue, you can preview it here, at the Poets & Artists site, and then you can connect with Didi on Patreon, here.  

Check it out!


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