From the Editor’s Desk  Kate Bernadette Benedict

For A Poetry Syllabus, this issue’s Extra, contributors were asked to send poems that drew inspiration from the subject matters studied in school or college. Your editor imagined this might be a fertile scheme—after all, the tribe of poet is well-read and well-educated—but never imagined it would touch such a chord with submitters.  No Extra we’ve ever featured brought in so much work of such high caliber.  Some excellent offerings did not make the cut simply due to space reasons or because only one poem came in on a particular subject (alas, poor Home Ec!).  Since the majority of work dealt with just four “school subjects,” those are the ones featured:  science, English, history and math.  Astute readers will notice that we’ve adapted our Bumbershoot contents template for this Extra.

Along with a host of excellent journal editors, this editor was recently featured on Nic Sebastian’s comprehensive poetry blog, Very Like A Whale, and there she was heard proclaiming that an important goal for Umbrella is to keep the roster fresh.  Undeniably, there are a number of poets who appear regularly in the journal, poets I’ve read with in New York City or gotten to know via online communities or who just keep submitting work of such high distinction that it feels impossible to turn it down.  Nevertheless, we have an open door policy here.  The vast majority of the poets in this issue make their Umbrella debut with this issue.  Welcome aboard.

Call for Submissions

The Winter 2009-10 Umbrella (publishing December 1) will be a non-themed issue. This will be our third anniversary edition so help us celebrate with great blasts and bonfires of ringing poetry.  Please read the Guidelines.  Deadline: November 10th.    

This Issue’s Art

Nanette J. Purcigliotti, last month’s featured artist, returns this time to illustrate our issue contents page. Nanette writes feature articles and is an illustrator in New York City. Her work has been exhibited at the Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators and in The Marymount Manhattan Review. Her illustration “The Runners” was one of the selected posters in the juried show of ACM SIGGRAPH, the special interest group of the Association for Computing Machinery on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, founded in 1947 and the world's first scientific and educational computing society.

She recently finished Orpheus Redux, her novel for young adults which portrays Orpheus in the 21st century, plucking his strings and kicking a soccer ball.    Visit her website.

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