Introduction: Clarity and Surprise
Almost weekly, I exchange drafts of poems with a friend, and we discuss them over the phone. He lives in Cambridge, and I’m in a fifteenth-floor apartment in Manhattan. My desk looks across West End Avenue to a building where men prepare to restore the facade. One leans over the railing of a steel scaffold, hoisting a long plank from the street by rope, hand over hand, laying a platform from which they will begin the project.
Below, constant traffic, including a rush of ambulances, cruisers, and fire engines. I’ve learned to distinguish sirens as I once identified birdcalls. Dogs bark. Children squeal among cheering, yelling, and arguing, the last of which is mostly incomprehensible, always vehement. I try to decipher these inscrutable expletives, inventing context according to tone. There is anger and sometimes forgiveness. Once, I clearly heard regret.
These outbursts remind me of mysterious instances in writing I admire. They stop me short in the best way. I might not fully grasp them, but they have an effect that transcends the rational.
In Alan Dugan’s poem, “On the Long Island Railroad System,” (Poems Six, 1989) the speaker recounts hating to ride the train with his father as a boy because:
He’d make me fake it that
my I myself was under twelve and half a fare when I was six feet tall
and fourteen.
The triple pronouns are at first befuddling, but perhaps Dugan felt this teenager’s rage could not be contained by just one. For me, it’s the poem’s most memorable phrase.
When Allen Grossman’s editor at New Directions received the manuscript of The Woman on the Bridge over the Chicago River, he questioned the title. Allen said, “I asked the book its name, and that’s what it told me.”
There are similar moments in the stories and poems in this issue. Most are straightforward, but you will also find the enigmatic. A painter who taught studio art began every one of his classes by writing on the board: Clarity and Surprise. That phrase could stand as my editorial guideline.
The business and ruckus of the neighborhood continues while I engage with my friend’s lines on a sheet of paper. I am aware this leaf comes from the same source as the timber being hauled to a height of roughly a hundred and fifty feet across the way. (Let me add that I am not one who believes for a second that “to articulate sweet sounds together / Is to work harder than all these …”)
Sometimes, while we discuss a poem, I feel I’m in a still life or freeze-frame. Two people, states apart, leaning over the same page. And on that page, marks forming letters arranged into words, into sentences, fragments or lines. They tell a story, recall an event, and sometimes explode in a dream-like fit. We are serious in the best way: frank and jocular, chiding missteps and complimenting each other when deserved. We are serious, yes, but it is not a matter of life and death. We will not fall from a scaffold. But if we are unable to take dictation as it has been given to us, or fail to follow through in improving that draft, we feel less than fully alive.
My friend and I are as close as if we faced each other across a desk. While we talk, life goes on, and eventually, with luck, the page becomes a peephole. A spy hole without a door. We see through it to the world beyond. We let in anything out there. And, like all writers, we hope the exchange is reciprocal.
The view reveals the lives around us. These do not have to be biographically or realistically accurate—just imaginatively convincing and psychically right. This issue presents births, deaths and diagnoses. Children playing doctor and doctors finding veins. Accounts of waiting for a ferry, working as a ghost writer, and surviving a hurricane. Cheating the tarot. Death of the biblical Eve. Perfect pitch and the result of having such a gift.
“Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?” Thoreau’s words ring true for the give-and-take with my friend. I hope readers will have a similar exchange with the writers and poets in these pages.
