One reason it seemed like a good idea to launch a litmag 20 years ago was that, with the exception of Threepenny Review, founded five years earlier, the West Coast didn’t have a great one. Or so it seemed to one wannabe editor.

The universities that might have had eponymous reviews didn’t. Probably with good reason. In any case, a bunch have since entered the fray: with biannuals, Seattle Review, University of Washington, 1985; MANOA, University of Hawaii, 1998; 14 Hills, San Francisco State, 1998; The New Review of Literature, Otis College of Art and Design, 2003; and now Black Clock, CalArts, 2004; or with annuals: Faultline, UC-Irvine, 1985; 580 Split, Mills College, 2001. (Alaska Quarterly Review, 1981, is in fact biannual; Berkeley Poetry Review, 1974, is an annual; Stanford’s Sequoia, once resuscitated by the young Dana Gioia, expired some ten years ago.)

Two West Coast quarterlies were launched by wealthy individuals in the nineties: Glimmer Train, by a hi-tech entrepreneur and her sister, in Portland, 1990; Tin House, by a real estate mogul, also in Portland, 1999. Also in the nineties, a couple of celebs moved their litmags to San Francisco: Francis Ford Coppola, Zoetrope, in 1998, because he lost its freebie office space in NYC; Dave Eggers, McSweeney’s, in 1999, as the crown jewel of a storefront literary/educational empire. (Alas, McSweeney’s, once a lavish quarterly hardcover, now seems sporadic at best.)

There’s room for all of us, for the simple reason that writers, multiplying at Malthusian rates, need us. And, although it doesn’t always seem that way, readers must need us as well. God bless us, everyone.

Two years ago, we published a poem in Spanish without a translation, simply because that was the way it had been submitted. About that time, we also stopped italicizing Spanish words in our other texts, because Spanish, at least in California, no longer seems like a foreign language. How could it, since half of us speak it, more or less fluently?

Meanwhile, the Queen’s English extends its hegemony around the world, inflected by all sorts of accents and malformations and injections of energy. Not the least pernicious is Instant Messaging, with its wild disregard for spelling, grammar, and nuance. Disregard is a luxury afforded the young and the disenfranchised; upholding high standards is the last resort of privileged seniors. As Myles II Go once rapped: That ain’t which, verse’d be worse, you my dawg.