The HyperTexts

Hot off the Press (June 2003):  It is a distinct pleasure for The HyperTexts to be among the first literary publications (perhaps the first) to announce that Jim Barnes, our Featured Poet for the month of June, beginning with the fall semester of 2003, will be Distinguished Visiting Professor of English at Brigham Young University. The Chariton Review will follow its longtime editor to BYU, and we want to applaud Truman State University for entrusting The Chariton Review to the most capable, loving and nurturing of hands.  And we want to applaud BYU even more thunderously for awarding one of America's most accomplished poets and editors such a distinguished, hard-won and well-earned position.  In the short time that I've known Jim Barnes, I have been struck, as if by lightning, first by his poetry, and then by his amazing sincerity and down-to-earthness (amazing to me in the light of the man's formidable talent and sheer refinement of that talent; as with Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop, in his best poems it's hard to quibble with a single word).  Any lover of poetry interested in assisting the slow, laborious, but exhilarating rebirth of poetry should take the time to write a letter of congratulations to BYU's English Department for its wise decision, and then he or she should do as I intend to do:  take out a subscription to The Chariton Review and make a small (or not so small) donation.  The better poets who visit these pages should also submit their best poems forthwith.  As Bob Dylan said, in between nominating Smokey Robinson (!!!) and Artur Rimbaud (???) as America's best living poet, "You better start swimmin' / or you'll sink like a stone / for the times they are a-changin'." No one ever swam the English Channel by folding his hands meekly in resignation. It's time we all did what we can to see poetry regain its rightful place in the world of the arts and, more importantly, in the world. -- MRB

The HyperTexts