can we have our ball back?

What a zine is can we have our ball back? It's not so much a pub as a project, and a secretive one at that. The home page is plain to bland, the editors clearly favoring the poetry over the presentation: a line of issue numbers linking you to a page of names linking you to poems . . . and absolutely nothing else. No masthead, no contact address, no editors page, no submission guidelines, no invitation to submit. Oh, and no design. That is, no icons, no graphics. Each issue is set up with a different color background (most are psychedelic reds, pinks, dark-room blacks, tie-dyed-LSD-tripped-out color swaths). No nothing but the poems.

Now, whose idea was this? No mention. Who maintains it? No mention. What are the editors' perferences, biases, standards? No mention. You have to figure these things out from the poems. One clue is the (ultra) inclusive list of contributors, living and dead, avant guardist and standard, Established and unknown, serious and quirky, technical and sentimental, celebrated and ridiculed. Among the better known: Anselm Hollo, David Lehman, Naomi Shibab Nye, John Tranter, Amiri Baraka, Rod McKuen, Ira Sadoff, Claude McKay, Andrei Codrescu, Robert Pinksy, William Corbett, Kathleen Ossip, Charles Bernstein, James Tate, Dara Weir. Among the weird: Mickey Z, JFK (a poet, and apparently not one of the dead Kennedys), mIEKALaND (a license plate?), Jumper Bloom, Christopher Shit.

There are names that pop up in more than one issue: Buck Downs, Andrea Baker, Murray Moulding, Anselm Berrigan(?), Joseph Torra, Chad Parenteau, from just a quick scan. Suggesting what? Pals? Is that what this is? An anti-pub made by pals in some New York pub project? Through three years and 17 issues (counting the .1 release)? And then there are the "guest edited" issues simply labled "Tuscon," "Montana," "Western Massachusetts."

I admit it. I am thoroughly left behind. One of the most eclectic and inclusive online pubs on the web with absolutely no invitation to join in!

can we have our ball back?, apparently, launched in 2000. Its most recent issue, #17 (which is indistinguishable from #16), was posted in March 2003. Just about the time the U.S. invaded Iraq. Hmmm. There is an issue "X" and an issue "8.1." In this way, the pub is like an online poetry version of Adbusters Magazine, determined to call forth and then violate every publishing convention.

So you've really got only one purpose to go poking around can we have our ball back? The poems.

Speaking of which, here's a sample or two: