Ironwood, nos. 31/32, "The Final Issue." Tucson: Ironwood Press, 1988.
Tucson translator and editor Michael Cuddihy published the poetry journal Ironwood from 1972 to 1988, with his wife Mary serving as the journal's business manager. In a "Final Note" prefacing this final issue of the magazine, Cuddihy gives a perceptive summation of an editor's work:
"The [editorial] process can teach you more than any single magazine does its readers. It is not skills or learning so much as it is becoming a focal point for a continous traffic of ideas, poems, and the tendencies they embody. What is needed is enough flexibility to bend with the current without being swept away. Even if one starts a magazine sure of the kind of work to be fostered or encouraged, experience shows that the work with the most vitality has little in common with our preconceptions."