Editor’s Note
Approaching the deepest, wildest terrain of this editorial process, mid-correspondence with many of the writers whose work appears here, I opened a pivotal email. A poet asked whether I was seeking work around a particular theme. I replied: “I’m looking for poems in which structure and meaning are so tightly woven they can’t be separated—structure fully realized,” then paused, waiting for the image to arrive, before adding, “and expressed like the shape of a flower.”
As metaphors that are allowed to take their time often do, this one brought new clarity. The poems and stories I was choosing bloomed into flowers. Their interweaving of structure and meaning, content and form, emanated from deep within—distinct yet elusive, like the golden scent of a purple bearded iris, my favorite flower.
Is the smell of an iris simply part of the iris, or does that beauty require our help? Don’t we, with the most ancient of our five senses, need to play our part in the ritual of its scent? And don’t we need to be there for a poem, also? To cocreate, through our experience, how a line of amphibrachic meter, villanelle, or free-verse stanza dances its infinitely granular interpenetrations through us?
Like the scent of an iris, the interweaving of form and meaning in a poem is mortal; it demands to be recreated anew in each encounter. It is solitary; we can point it out, even signal the way, but we can’t convey it directly into another consciousness. The sublimity of an iris or a poem can’t cheat. It is or it isn’t. And we need it so much that even if the process doesn’t “work” fully every time—after all, a flower or a nose, a poem or an ear, is not a machine—it will call us back again. A poem whose elixir of structure and meaning wafts through us like the scent of a flower nourishes us in a way so primal that we, even as we yearn for it, may not know, or need to know, why we yearn. Its spell can know us better than we know ourselves.
We have a perfect way to smell an iris, an organ just suited to it. Similarly, we have a perfect way to experience a poem or story: the ear (outer or inner). These seventy-five poems and three tales are designed to be experienced in your ear, equally by your will, mind, body, heart, and spirit. In the Age of the Page, paper or electronic, we have mostly forgotten how to experience poetry and prose this way. If we find something written in words that only our minds can read, we tend to think it is meant only for our minds. This understandable but deadly mistake cuts us off from literature’s best gift: acknowledging our full humanity. Luckily, like a taste for love or clean water, our taste for sensing our full humanity can never be weakened—only obscured. The simple process I call SpeakItThrice can reawaken it.
To SpeakItThrice aloud: speak the poem three times in a whisper, shout, or anything in between. Feel the syllables in your mouth; weigh each second of line-ending pause until it impels you to dive back in. The second and third reads, invite yourself into alternative enunciations and interpretations; feel the poem change, in your will, mind, body, heart, and spirit, under the changing pressures of your voice. The same process will work for the three prose pieces, as well. Even if you read them only once, allow the words to resound in real time, and you will open yourself to a holistic experience of the story.
To SpeakItThrice silently: read the poem three times silently, allowing one syllable at a time to resound physically within you. Try moving your lips as people did when silent reading was new, in the Middle Ages. Experience each syllable in real time, allowing space for it to resonate and subside before the next. Attend to the lifespan of each line-ending, just before the line break, noticing how its impact lands in your will, mind, body, heart, and spirit. This kind of reading heals; it makes us whole. (Tip: make sure you are in a safe spot and won’t be interrupted, because it won’t be clear to passers-by how busy you are.) To let a poem live viscerally, in the body, makes tangible the words of the great healing poet Audre Lorde: “poetry is not a luxury.”
During the “Poetry Wars” of the 1980s, 90s, and beyond, I might have felt awkward discussing structure and meaning at a time of such raging uncertainties, unspeakable cruelties and injustices, and looming violences as our own. Then, slam poets, Language poets, MFA-style free-versers, and New Formalists barricaded themselves into separate magazines, presses, and conferences as each movement’s standard-bearers ignored or attacked the others. Since my own poetry drew from all these camps, I felt dismembered, doing my best to weave communication across battle lines through editing, criticism, and community building. Still, it often felt as if vital aspects of poetry—form and content, mystery and wisdom, passion and politics—had been unnaturally separated from one another, turning each into a caricature of itself.
The beautiful process of editing this issue has convinced me that those wars are finally over. These vibrant, generous poems and tales, created by living legends, renowned contemporaries, or brilliant emerging writers, manifest our continued powers of transformative action, clear truth-telling, embodied craft, heart-wisdom, and joy. Experienced with outer or inner ears and thence with wills, minds, bodies, hearts, and spirits, they can move us forward into—and leave a legacy to nourish—the new, more fully human world we’re creating together. Whether you browse this issue willy-nilly, let it fall open again and again through bibliomancy, or absorb yourself uninterrupted in its narrative from cover to cover, here’s wishing you the tickle in your ears, the eagerness in your tongue, and the passion in your throat that will lead you to SpeakItThrice!
