As co-publisher of Nine Mile I’m deeply saddened to report the passing of Bob Herz who founded our press. Bob was a poet, a translator, a legislator, a businessman, a community leader, and above all, a keen supporter of the arts. It was the good fortune of many to know him. Bob loved poets. He especially admired young poets and took pride in helping to get their work into print.
Plato wrote: “The soul takes nothing with her to the next world but her education and her culture. At the beginning of the journey to the next world, one's education and culture can either provide the greatest assistance, or else act as the greatest burden, to the person who has just died.”
Nine Mile Magazine continues
in memory of Bob Herz...
Not long before Bob entered the hospital I shared with him my sense that the art of aging should involve a compensatory lightening of the spirit—a giving away of old grudges, that we might sail back to the stars unburdened. We agreed on this. Two aging men who could not read the future. But I’m secure in the knowledge that the education and culture of Bob Herz are the signature materials of a life well-lived.
Now we’re working to assure the future of Nine Mile Magazine and its book series. With the magazine, we’ve made the decision to go digital. No one needs to subscribe, and it’s our hope as editors that readers will share Nine Mile widely.
I want to close with Bob Herz’s own words:
“One of the great powers of poetry—an oxymoronic power, to be sure—is to affirm individual worth against the world and against time, in the sense that the poem as written is a poem that could only have been written by that individual as himself or herself, in that individual voice, written today but not only for today. The oxymoron is that in an economic sense, nothing has less value than a poem: It cannot be owned, auctioned, willed, or retailed, only shared . . . I suspect that it is the felt recognition of the individual value of the poem, of the act of writing a poem, that has resulted in the explosion of poetry in our time, for there are more poems, poets, readings, festivals, workshops, and books being published than at any time in my lifetime; and it may be that each of these acts is a revolt against the drag of the present’s loss of individualism and agency, a way of saying: Here, this could only have been done by me, and look, it has been done, and its value is the value only I can give it!”
What a great way to think of poetry: “this could only have been done by me!”
Nine Mile will continue the work Bob started. We will continue to publish books by Upstate writers and writers of merit. We will continue to publish the new Propel Disability Poetry Series. Nine Mile Magazine will move online. You can read our first online issue, the Fall ’23 issue, here. The submission period for Spring ’24 is now open and we welcome your submissions here.
We will be in touch.
Stephen Kuusisto
Publisher
Nine Mile
Submit Your Work
Nine Mile Magazine's spring reading period has begun!
Please send us 3-5 poems in a single Word or text document. No PDFs, please. We also accept poetry in translation, poetry reviews, and essays on poetry.
We try to respond to all submissions quickly. If you do not hear from us within a month, please contact us at ninemilemag@gmail.com.
Announcing our first three Propel poets. Click here.
Poets Reading their Poems in Nine Mile
