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The Alembick



Vol. XIV

I. All Saint’s Day 2019
II. Christmas 2019
III. Shrovetide 2020
  1. Editor’s Note
  2. Letters
  3. Quanitative Verse for English
  4. Quantitative Verse Examples
  5. Green Winter
  6. Young Randy
  7. Toward Philadelphia
  8. Emblanketed
  9. Willy’s Inkblots

IV. Quarantine 2020

Vol. XV

I. Michaelmas 2020

Submissions     ︎


Editor’s Note


February 22, 2020

Dear Reader,

    I love this time of year - the sun growing stronger, the clear skies, the overnight frosts (but then the days reaching toward forty), the grass coming green on the banks… I was saying as much to a friend, the other day, and was brought up short by her saying that I praised each season as though it were my favorite. I think it was an accusation - of inconsistency and flightiness, at the very least - but isn’t it rather a compliment? I thought so. It pleases me to think ofmyself as someone who can take pleasure in all the changes as we go around the year. A capacity for enjoyment, surely, is a virtue, and it’s no less a virtue when it’s turned on more subjects than one season or one weather or one anything.
    Recently, also, I was going on about the attractions of the church calendar, to which, as our regular readers will have noticed, we key the issues of this magazine. Of course the church year aligns with the climatic year, and so the seasons are reinforced by their appropriate holidays, and the whole pattern, moving together, gives order and regularity to the flow of time. Which, I will never tire of asserting, is fundamental to human happiness. Thus I won’t apologize for this intro following so exactly the pattern of all my other letters, business and personal, in which I move from the weather to a general observation on human experience - unsubstantiated by any personal experience, I may say, other than my own perhaps congenital enthusiasm for life and living. You’ll see that most of this issue is taken up by an essay on quantitative verse in English. Just like the seasons and the church calendar, this project has at its heart the establishment of an orderly relationship with time. Well? It’s on my mind. In the meantime, one enjoys one’s days.
    Please take the essay lightly - though it makes a real and serious point - and forgive us the intrusion into your regularly-scheduled frivolity, of which there is, we hope, enough to tide you over. After Lent comes April.

Yours truly,
    A. Pinguis (ED.)
Running on Cargo