Editorial

When we thought of Multum in parvo as our Issue 4 Feature Theme, we congratulated ourselves on a cunning choice, one that would surely lighten our workload. But we failed to reckon with an apparently inexorable principle of the webzine universe — call it MacSpaunday’s Law of Compensatory Volume. That’s to say, while we were able to keep the M in P corpus appropriately slim (though certainly not slight), the bodies of the other sections insisted on swelling accordingly. We were in the situation of a household in which one person is dieting and the other members of the family are therefore eating more of the choc-chip cookies.

Well, we did manage to be fairly ruthless in selecting the longer poems — only nine authors there. But the general section includes five substantial prose pieces, and the Spotlight Feature has grown and grown. The fact is that John Whitworth, our Spotlit poet this time, has numerous friends and admirers in the poetry world who were clamouring to have a say. We’re very grateful to them all for coming to this party, and of course to John Whitworth himself for the long and candid interview and the ten poems (mostly unpublished) he has supplied for the feature.

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Our nominations for upcoming Internet poetry awards

Best of the Net (work published on the Web between July 2007 and June 2008)

   Alison Brackenbury, "In the Gap" (Issue 1)
   Catherine Chandler, “Writ” (Issue 3)
   Rose Poto, “The Petition” (Issue 3)
   Peter Richards, “An Adolescent Contemplates Leaving” (Issue 1)
   Michael W. Thomas, “Never a Bone Between Them” (Issue 3)
   Gail White, “After She Died”  TC2 (Issue 2)  

Pushcart (work published in print or online during 2008)

   Catherine Chandler, “Writ” (Issue 3)
   Stephen Edgar, “Time Out” (Issue 4)
   Stephen Edgar, “Out of the Picture” (Issue 4)
   George Good, “The Exchange” (Issue 2)
   Rose Poto, “The Petition” (Issue 3)
   John Whitworth, “Four O'Clock” (Issue 4)
  

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Issue 5 of The Chimaera, scheduled to go online in January 2009, will include, as usual, a section with a miscellany of verse and prose on various themes. Our special Feature Theme section in that issue will focus on light verse. If you are interested in submitting work to The Chimaera, please see our Submissions page and be sure to read the guidelines carefully.

Waiting to step into the Issue 5 Spotlight is Australian poet Stephen Edgar, three of whose previously unpublished poems appear in this issue. We look forward to working with Stephen and to publishing more of his poems in The Chimaera.