Ironwood

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."

In a fitting tribute to the longevity and importance of Ironwood, its final issue was packed with literary luminaries from the Tucson community and from all over the world (including three Nobel laureates). 

Nathaniel Mackey's "Outlantish" would later be published as a chapbook from Tucson's Chax Press. This brief excerpt reveals some of Mackey's central preoccupations as we see him experiment with fragmented, accumulating imagery.