Hey, I didn't write the headline for this piece. Five cows did and student artist Nathan Banks has the videotape to prove it. This September, while the editors and I were scratching our heads to come up with ideas for nidus #3, Banks, a senior art student at Purchase College in New York, spent two days painting words on dairy cows.

The idea was to allow cows to make poetry as they graze. Let's see: 64 cows at two sides each, minus a few sides for uncooperative heifers . . . that's over a hundred words to play with. Something's bound to happen if the cows would just cooperate.

"Don't worry," counseled the founding editors to the green managing editor. "The issue always comes together at the end."

Moo, moo, moo.

And the weeks followed and submissions slowed. We watched and waited. There was bad luck (misplaced originals, unanswered emails, poems left in San Diego) and happy accidents. "Away" broke loose from the herd. "Eccentric" stood next to "Art." The files were found; people said yes. We had an issue.

It's eerie, it's exciting, and somehow it all makes sense.

In nidus #3 Campbell McGrath asks, "Why have all of us acquiesced to this horrible plastic culture being foisted upon us?" Then Arthur Saltzman writes an appreciation of fast food. Meanwhile, the character in "Lose Me" gives up burgers because of his cholesterol. And Jo Ann Beard explains why she assumed the voice of the dead in the creative nonfiction piece, "Undertaker, Please Drive Slow."

In poetry there are questions and doom. The words line up in the sky. My god, we even have cows.

But there's no magic here. What nidus or any journal sets out to do is to create the environment to allow things to happen. We set up interviews with writers who talk about their work. We find inviting visual art for the cover. We read every single poem and story we receive. Then we wait and we listen.

We become readers on the other side of the fence. Good work is already out there and if we are attentive to it, the issue comes together and surprises us. As Dagoberto Gilb says in an interview, "Experience teaches by surprise, unexpected blows, not reasoning, not by being clever, not by working plot and ideas."

In other words, being in the landscape is required to feed the imagination.

"Those art people tend to do things that are a little bit outside the box," said Gerry Ruestow, who allowed his dairy cows to be used by Banks. "We did get some people who wandered by to see what the crazies up the road were doing."

I don't know if what the onlookers in the pasture saw was "organic conceptual art as poetry," but nidus continues to roam outside the box. It's where we belong.

Lynn Wagner

Managing Editor, nidus

The AP story of Nathan Banks and the cows can be found on the Guardian Unlimited <http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-2212675,00.html>

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nidus is an online publication supported by the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh's English Department.