Introducing Melic XVIII's Guest Editor

It is my pleasure to introduce Sherry Saye as Guest Editor for Melic XVIII. I have purposely not read her selections and will not until the issue is released. I want to enjoy the magazine like any reader, free of the encumbrances of critical thought which editorship imposes.

I've known Sherry for years and have published her but never met her. After she assisted in selecting poetry for Melic XVII I was so impressed I invited her to fly solo. Serendipitously, both her poetry and that of her Assistant Editor for this issue, Sharon Kourous, can be seen in the current issue of Terrain, whose editor, Simmons Buntin, also landed two poems in Melic XVIII. I assure you we do not practice reciprocity, but it is a nice coincidence.

Since I've thought of Sherry as mainly a nature poet, her avowed love of the surreal in her editor's message comes as a bit of a surprise. But I like surprises. Val Cihylik, Fiction Editor, has written a separate introduction for our prose offerings.

And now I turn you over to Sherry and Val and the authors they preferred.

C.E. Chaffin, Editor

Melic XVIII: Found Objects

"Convulsive beauty will be veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magic-circumstantial, or it will not be." -A. Breton

Andrè Breton and his friend, Giacometti, once eagerly strolled through a flea market in 1934 in search of "little human constructions" possessing the sense of the marvelous, "found objects" charged with associative and interpretive qualities and which answered analogous necessities. I have attempted such engagement with this issue.

Look what I've brought home! Special thanks to Diane Wakoski for sending her gorgeous new treasure of a poem. There's also a piece from my friend Rick Carnes, a poem full of language and exposition. Dr. Gilgun has moved remembrances from my old St. Jo college days with a couple of his powerfully honest poems. I've plucked some work from the poets who participate at Melic's forum, the Round Table; and I've collected several pieces from poets who have kindly submitted during the reading period.

The visual on the cover is "Creation of the Birds," by Remedios Varo, 1958. I find it beautifully horrible and surreally appropriate to the creation of our poems and stories, and it echoes Diane's close, "I Remain Yr Lady of the Surrealist Café."

Thanks to everyone who has helped me with my first fumbling at Guest Editor: my patient writers; Assistant Editor for Poetry, Sharon Kourous (who will edit Melic XIX); Proofreader, Kathleen Chaffin; Fiction Editor, Valerie Cihylik for her calm and devoted involvement; and C.E. Chaffin for his compassionate hand-holding. From all of this soul bargaining, here it is, fellow wanderers and creators in the heart of the marketplace of words, Melic XVIII.

September 2002,
Sherry Saye