As I might have mentioned, I am working through a stack of old Ideals magazines which I have accrued from book sales or have rediscovered in my chairside magazine rack as my liminal before-bed reading. It has often, but not always, been my habit to read just a little bit in my bedroom here at Nogglestead for a little bit before turning in. For a while, I had a large lamp on the bedside table, and I read the Bible, part of the Book of Mormon, and some nonfiction there. That was years ago; since, we have moved things around, and I can’t actually think which lamp it would have been–certainly not the blocker project lamp, which is actually on my to-do list for finally finishing up after a decade, although I might have to repaint it from scratch. But this time, I’ll know that acrylic paints dry in hours, not days, so I will move faster on it. When I get around to it. Someday.
At any rate, after the bedroom makeover or remakeover or whatever happened to that lamp, we’ve moved a chair in the corner, we received a lamp with a bad switch when my mother-in-law moved one of her recentish moves; in 2023, probably, Nico swapped out the switch to a kind that she would not have wanted, so it ended up by that red spinning chair.
So I’ve been reading poetry there at night, chapbooks, college literary magazines, complete collections, and so on. I winnowed the stack of literary magazines to just Ideals, though, as I was not looking for a lot of prose right before bed. Just light verse where I could read a couple and leave off.
These particular issues are from the 1980s mostly, and I have a preponderance of Mother’s Day issues because they made great gifts apparently. They stretch from their final years in Milwaukee and beyond to the first couple of years in Nashville. We see some editorial shifts over the years; some issues have recipes, prose, travel items, and “reader submissions” where readers submitted poetry, and those published got $10 (which is more than most poets make today on publication). But, sometimes, they feature something else: Pages torn from the magazine.
Ah, gentle reader, do you remember an era when people would tear poems out of their magazines or their newspapers and put them on their refrigerator or on their bedroom mirrors? I think I came at the end of that era–it was something the preceding generation(s) did, and although I might have done it once or twice, it’s not a regular thing. Of course, I suppose that could be partially because newspapers and magazines do not regularly publish poetry these days. The same people who regularly interacted with nice, serviceable, lightweight poetry probably also dabbled in it.
But not me. Although I can discard a lot of magazines which I’d rather keep from current subscriptions (First Things and New Oxford Review come to mind), I cannot mar a copy of a literary magazine or Ideals. I have a lot of former textbooks with highlighting, underlining, and marginalia, but my “dialoguing with the text” days did not extend past college where the professors really insisted on it. I received an embossing tool for Christmas a couple years ago (maybe a decade, but not so long ago when you’ve gathered several decades in memory), but I have not stamped my monogram into any books. Nacho cheese dust is a different matter, I admit.
I have always kind of thought that I was just a caretaker for these books and magazine, that I was holding onto them for the next generation. I’m not sure that my boys will want them, although the oldest is starting to read again. He recently asked if we had a copy of Summa Theologiae–of course I do (on the to-read shelves). When the youngest was in fourth grade, he boasted that whatever book his teacher mentioned reading we already had (although this was no longer true when they went to public high school and some of their reading became more current topically). Wouldn’t it be nice if they retained some or all of this library to have that same opportunity for their children? If they have children. If they read.
Ah, but likely not. I won’t be marking, discarding, or donating my books during my lifetime (unlike some reified potential in the garage and maybe, soon, my closet). Well, except for those duplicates I find and put on the free book cart at church.
As to my poems, I suppose it would be pretty to think someone would tear my work out of a magazine for their mirror, but that’s…. Unlikely. My latest publication appearance was in an online university literary magazine (still up in 2026 but maybe not in 2027). Not a peppy little uplifting poem to brighten one’s every morning. Well, maybe one of the two is. But. I guess the best I can hope for is that someone reads them at all.
I guess I need to make a checklist of Ideals magazines that I can use out in the wild to see if I’m buying the same ones over and over again (which happens). Maybe something to mark whether an issue is missing pages so I can look for a more complete copy. That would require two things: One, organizing my collection (not too bad now since it’s only a stack about 12 inches tall, the equivalent of a modern branch library’s philosophy section when you strip out the Buddhism. Two, I need to finish my upcoming game and build an app for just such a thing. Maybe next week.
