In the April of T.S. Eliot's poem, following the April of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, life starts to emerge from what looks like inertia, a cold dry earth. Chaucer gives us sweet showers to pierce March's drought and bring flowers up into blossom. And we all know that bulbs and roots underground are just waiting for the weather to improve before they grow.
Here at the magazine, we haven't been just waiting, even if it might have looked like it. (That is, even though I haven't updated the blog for too long.) We're putting together the Spring/Summer issue now, and we're starting to accept pieces for the Fall/Winter issue.
But it's also been an unusual year for us. Two of the editors went to Dublin for their MFA residency; one of us (okay, me) taught in London from January to March--not, perhaps, the months you might want to spend in London if you want to admire the flower gardens, but an excellent time to see the museums. I'm still marveling at the National Portrait Gallery exhibit on Charlotte Bronte, with her tiny handwritten Angria novel and her almost as tiny boots. I'd always thought of her as having big footprints to follow...
And now we're back, we're reading your work, we're on the job again refreshed, even if what we got was not April showers but a small snowstorm. We hope you continue with the work of poetry, too, refreshed, ready to send us more to read, and maybe even ready to read a new Common Ground.
Let us know if you want a current issue--in April and May, we'll send you one for $12, or a sample issue for $5.
