After almost ten years of editing 32 Poems Magazine with Deborah Ager, I am stepping down. It is no small step for me, yet I do believe it is, as well, a step in the right direction. First, I want to thank all the poets who submitted work to the magazine during my tenure. I owe gratitude to not only the poets whose poems were accepted but also those poets who sent in work that just somehow wasn’t a fit. What a blessing to realize the great diversity of American poetry in our midst. I have been acting as some kind of magazine editor for more than 15 years now (Chattahoochee Review and American Literary Review, as well), and it is time for me to pay more attention to my own writing and, more importantly, to devote closer attention to Auden, Bishop, Larkin, Eliot, Shakespeare, Dante, and my other favorites.

I wish the best to George David Clark, who is taking over my duties. He is a discriminating reader who I believe will make the magazine better than I have made it. I will stay on in an advising/contributing editor capacity, but after this December, I won’t be choosing the poems any more. It has been an honor and a pleasure. Even if so many of our poets and poems hadn’t won Best New Poets and Best American Poets and NEAs and Guggenheims and MacArthurs and published books with 32 POEMS on the acknowledgments page, I would still believe that we were publishing the best poems in America.

And finally, I thank Deborah Ager who has made 32 Poems Magazine a constant pleasure for all of us.

I know it’s old fashioned and probably a small sacrifice, but please subscribe. And tell your friends they ought to. It’s poetry.

John Poch

One reason we can survive is that we keep our costs down. This year, I decided we’re not spending $600 or more dollars on the AWP Conference. Having a table at the conference can be fun — people know where to find me — yet it’s also exhausting and, as I said before, extremely expensive. The number of sales and subscriptions we receive from it is not worth the money to pay for it, and I must spend on increasing subscriptions.

Anyway, I digress.

Charles Jensen posted that creating a niche for a magazine is the way to stand out from the crowd. 32 Poems aims to do this by publishing a small number of poems in a nicely designed package. Do we need to do more? Please read Jensen’s list below. We welcome your thoughts.

1. Do it differently. I think magazines that niche themselves are better off than the “everything to everyone” magazines. Tin House and Passager are good examples of this, as is the print version of MiPOESIAS, with its huge glossy pages dominated by photography. It’s gorgeous.

2. Do it cooler. Whenever a technological advance democratizes the means of production of something, the outmoded way becomes a form of fine art (like letterpress printing, for example–formerly the norm, now an art form). So magazines like Ninth Letter really up the ante on quality and innovation in design. I say that’s a good call. Another great example is the print version of spork, which was community-made, hand-bound, and beautiful.

3. Do it smarter. American Poetry Review seems to understand the temporary nature of its work, and prints its issues on newsprint, which I’m sure saves buckets of money each year.

What would make you want to subscribe to 32 Poems?

By the way, I am not scared of your criticism. I’ve survived workshops with The Most Hated Man in American Poetry, so whatever suggestions you have for this magazine will be milk in comparison.