Open City magazine has published its last issue. It has had a great twenty-year run. They printed wonderful stuff. Poems from the magazine were chosen for The Best American Poetry, most recently in 2010; Amy Gerstler picked Stephen Campbell Sutherland's inventive "SATs," a poem in the form of a multiple choice examination.
I have a special fondness for the magazine, because in September 2004, Joanna Yas, the magazine's co- editor, heard me read some of my sestinas at a poetry reading. After the reading she approached me with an imaginative propositioin. Would I write two sestinas on command -- one based on the fiction titles, the other on the poetry titles, in the next issue of the magazine? Always a sucker for a challenge or a game, I said yes. The hitch was she would be able to give me the list of contents on a January day and would need the two sestinas within ten days. Well, I wrote the two, they were duly published in Open City, and one of them "The Hotel Fiesta Sestina," made it into my book Yeshiva Boys. I am indebted to Joanna and to Open City, for without their intervention these poems would have remained unwritten.
Click here.for more on the history of Open City. -- DL
