How would people respond to the word fit? Not as many sports poems as I’d thought. But hundreds of brilliant interpretations. Too many to fit in the issue. Choosing is difficult. The poems start to form a landscape. They fit together and don’t fit. I agonise about this poem or that. Both stick to me. Both won’t leave me alone. I see the shape of them on the page when I am not at my computer. I hear the sound of them when I’m washing the dishes, watching cricket on the couch, trying to sleep.
As I was reading the poems, a friend and I were exchanging emails. A word we used to describe how things were feeling in the world was ‘inflamed’. I am wary of apocalyptic thinking. Or rather, apocalyptic speaking.
Poetry inhabits that gap. To think one thing but say it differently. Not a lie, but maybe a contradiction. Not a repression, but a condensation. Is that the right word? I think I meant compression, but you could read poetry as gas becoming liquid. It might wash over you or you could bathe in it. Spritz it on your hot skin. Drink it.
I learn from the poems. About reading. About writing my own poetry. I consider the promise of a poem and whether it is met. For a promise to be met doesn’t mean it is predictable but that the poem starts an object moving and lands that object. Precision, something strange, a turn. Some poems contain a whole novel. Others are not interested in that kind of a house.
At the gym (a kind, small place where most people are older or rehabilitating from something, from life perhaps), I’m talking to a young person about plays and poetry, and they say: I HATE IT! I HATE SHAKESPEARE, THE PLAYS, THE POEMS ALL OF IT. I murmur something about curriculum and resources that teachers have (or not), and I say: there is stuff being written right now that you might love.
I’d like to introduce them to Daryl Qilin Yam, his self-deprecating treatise about artmaking and grief; to Jessica Pearson’s tender, funny poem of sex and spaghetti and desire; Essa Ranapiri’s love and death epic at a fish factory.
The poems gathered here are not well-behaved poems. They are a little raucous. They might be poems that some people look at askance. ARE you a poem, people might ask? What fits a poem? There are poems here that are resumes, found ads from the 1950s, very long poems, poems from other people’s mail and about chicken sent via mail, pictographs of how translation works. Poems at cemeteries, sex parties and flailing universities, of bitter seeds and misdiagnoses. There is a poem about a meeting horse. What is a meeting horse? Exactly! Once you have read about it you will never forget it (thank you, Megan Clayton).
I can’t provide a neat thesis for this issue. I can only use ill-fitting metaphors. I fell in love with the poems. I feel like a proud dance mom, seeing the poems gathered together, each with their fierce musculature. Their fitness. Each poem is an exercise in tension. Doing that job of holding the feeling of apocalypse. “Is poetry not an attempt to correct an error?” (91) asks Mahmoud Darwish in his book In the Presence of Absence (2011, translation by Sinan Antoon). An error of how things are assumed to be, or an error about how things are, or errors in how language is used as a propaganda tool or as violence. So many errors. The poem is the attempt, Darwish suggests, not the correction.
Does an editorial have to argue for poetry? For the poems within the issue? Moreso for the editor: excited, a little nervous. This will expose me, my taste, the places my reading went and what I wanted to share with you, the reader. It is show and tell. I found these little rocks on the beach, aren’t they cool! There were so many more, too. I grieve the poems not in this issue. I want to tell you about the ghost issue, the echo issue, how all the other poems ARE here, the chorus around and underneath what you are reading.
Punch up, they say in comedy. Poets are more likely to punch in, a type of self-punishing. Writing a poem might help keep us fit enough to be in the world, to save a life—if only our own. But this can save others too, right?
Each of the poems in this issue is a little punch to the world. Anne Carson writes in her essay ‘Gloves On!’ (LRB vol. 46 no. 16, 15 August 2024) about her Parkinson’s disease diagnosis and going to boxing classes to refire neurons: “Putting on your first glove is easy. To don the second glove you have to get help.” These poems are the hand helping us put our second glove on as we try to keep going, keep the faith in our fragility, our efforts, our fight.
Thank you Cordite Poetry Review for providing this space for the fragility and the fight and in
particular Alex Creece for being such a calm and brilliant cheerleading collaborator.
