The Measure #1

The Measure is an email magazine of poetry and prose distributed as a Word Document.

The magazine will publish poetry, fiction, reviews and essays. It will be sent by email, as an MS Word file attachment with minimal formatting (virus checked), to all subscribers.

Submissions of up to 3 poems or 1 prose piece at a time may be at any time. Previously published work will be considered, but earlier publication must be fully acknowledged. Writers should submit brief (3 lines) biographical details. Selection will be according to the personal taste, interests and prejudices of the editor, Rod Riesco.

Submissions and subscription requests should be sent to measuremag@aol.com

The first issue came out recently. It contains a good set of poems, the equal of any found in most decent small press magazines. There is no prose (lack of suitable submissions). The best work is by Idris Caffrey, Linda Chase and Jim Bennett.

My only problem with a magazine such as this is the format. Why should the reader (let alone the contributors) bother with it? How do you read it? Would you print out 28 A4 loose pages to read at your leisure, or fire up Word for Windows and read it on screen? If you want to go back to it, you'll have to find where you saved it among your other documents. And what if you don't have a PC but a MAC or you don't have Word for Windows. It might have been better to have distributed it as an .rtf file rather than a .doc file.

I've known a few in-print magazines that have offered copies in .doc or .pdf format to avoid postage costs and delays (especially sending abroad) but hard copies were still available and deposited in the copyright libraries.

Similarly I've known magazines that were distributed by email, but they also had a presence on the internet. Having neither a hard-copy version with assigned ISSN, nor a website that can be linked to, I have to question whether The Measure can really call itself a "publication".

The first issue's contents assure us that the editor can attract good work (even though the best were mostly first published elsewhere). To attract readers, however, I think the editor needs to offer either the permanence of print or the accessibilty of a proper web presence.

Reviewed by Gerald England