Letter From the Editor, 2012, Ping-Pong

Dear Reader,

Thank you for picking up this magazine. Inside you will find a world of wonders. If you are like most people you will flick through and look at the art first. We are proud to feature gallery prints from iconic photographer Kim Weston. The art editor and I met Kim a few years ago at the Henry Miller Library over dinner, and have been trying to get his beautiful photographs in our magazine ever since. It is thanks to the dogged tenacity of River Tabor that we are able to feature work by an astounding member of the Weston dynasty.

Inside you will also find a folio of responses to French poet Jean Arp’s poem, “What Was That?” This folio is the brainchild of the newest edition to the Ping-Pong family, Joanna Fuhrman, who joins Christine Hamm as poetry editor. We would also like to welcome our new creative director, Jenny Donegan. Everyone who works on Ping-Pong is extremely talented. I am humbled by their brilliance.

And by the brilliance of our artists. Tim Youd did an entire art exhibit based on a passage out of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn.  We have a poem by Big Sur visitor and raconteur Richard Brautigan. This poem seems to embody the internal landscape of the author. Steve Heilig’s essay goes on to dismantle some of this landscape in his book review of Brautigan’s Big Sur: Civil War by the Sea. We are fortunate to have so many talented people in the planisphere that is the Henry Miller Memorial library, and are happy to have so many West Coast writers and artists featured in this issue. The Library is an amazing cultural venue, a local’s hang out, a bookstore, a concert venue, and a film theatre, but it is also a fragile watershed. Our commitment to keeping this delicate ecosystem in check is part of why this year we have launched into our capital fundraising campaign, in an effort to retrofit Emil White’s little cabin into a place that hosts such acts as Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth.

I met Thurston on a damp afternoon at the library. I am not an interviewer per say, but I do love listening to people’s stories. Thurston Moore and I talked about poetry and art under a persimmon tree, the interview featured herein is the fruit.

The East Coast is always well represented since half of our editors live in Brooklyn, which I like to call the poetry capital of the U.S. of A. We have the wondrous poets Leah Umansky, J. Hope Stein, Joanna Penn Cooper and Angela Wong who all reside in this cultural milieu. We are also happy to feature the Dublin-based poet, Alan Jude Moore in these pages again, as well as the translations of Catallus by Rick Snyder.  Richmond-based performance artist Tara Rebele’s twelve-page meditation on twigs is part of the reason why Ping-Pong exists.

As an emissary of the Library, Ping-Pong is a citizen of the world. If we are anything, we are a reflection of the global relationship between artists, who support each other’s originality, even as we stand in awe of it. I know a bit about global citizenry.  I am an American poet living in a Muslim country. I write this letter while looking out on the Malacca Straits in Penang, Malaysia.

Enjoy!

Hot Frogs,

Maria Garcia Teutsch