The Labor in Between
Letter from Co-Editor Caroline Langston
You are holding in your hands the second-ever print edition of Vita Poetica.
It’s a particular joy for us to be presenting a compilation of artistic works in—as it were—“hard copy,” because the production of a gorgeous, embodied physical object would seem foundational to Vita Poetica’s ethos as a real-life, working collaborative—far more than evanescent lines of text that can be erased by backspacing a cursor. It’s also a complement to Fully Human, our recent juried art show in Washington, DC, whose gorgeous reproductions and artistic statements you can see in these pages.
But a print edition also has an air of finality that can easily obscure all the myriad labors, misgivings, and second-guessings that led to its creation. Even my ruminations on how to start this editorial letter have been a process of hypothesizing and backtracking. I’d started out with a thesis that the theme of this edition was going to be “turning,” in all of its variations: the turning of fall, the turning of metanoia, and what many of us hope is a turning away from the rancor and contempt in American public life, toward a season of renewal.
I was forced, however, to admit that we are not there yet. And to go back to the drafting board.
What I found instead, in so many of this edition’s selections, was not an emphasis on dramatic, serendipitous flash, but the patient cultivation and pursuit of meaning—in media res, and around the edges.
Right off the bat, take a look at Sharon Dolin’s poem, “In the egg of night,” which shares the prospect of renewal, but amid the patient obscurity of sleep: even when one is aging and the flesh is weary, change may be hard, but is possible. The work and desire of seeking aesthetic vision is even balanced carefully amid disease and pain, as we see in Beth Walker’s poem, “Chiaroscuro (light–dark).”
The importance of labor, and the ways that aesthetic labor is harnessed to all the other kinds, is a persistent theme here. Maria Hetherton’s essay “For the Roses” highlights the often-invisible labor of rose tending that she learned from a nun mentor during a long-abandoned season in a convent. Via that central task of cultivation, and all that she learned from “Theo,” the narrator brings forward her own reflections about the work of the vowed life in monasticism and in the happy marriage she cultivated afterward. And within that ambit, the leitmotif of roses enables her to sweep in the example of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the “little flower,” who called her deliberately modest form of contemplation the “Little Way.”
Furthermore, these works do not negate the middle of the journey, the effort required to execute them into the world. What’s sometimes referenced in Christian religious circles as living in “the now and the not yet” is an active, engaged process here—perhaps most starkly in Terri Yacovelli’s painting sequence, “Thresholds.” Yacovelli’s rich, dynamic canvases illustrate ways forward of all kinds, as she notes in her artistic statement: “Thresholds, ladders, pathways, and passages serve as metaphors for movement, conveying what it means to evolve between states of the familiar and the unknown, and to navigate stability and change. . . ”
We, too, are invited into all these works, as witnesses and creative participants alike—perhaps most of all in Vita Poetica’s Contemplative Practice features. Felicia Murrell’s meditation, “Beholding Love in a Burning World,” offers multiple pathways through poetry and meditation for the reader to pursue. And Holly Porter Phillips’s “A Practice in Building Our Imaginations for Another, Better Way,” sets our own volition at the center of how we might actually achieve the full “turning” that was my initial hope for this issue.
And there is far, far more.
So take in hand! See this volume expand, a physical object that expands into the infinite. We are all here in the middle, but we may never know all the places where these pages lead.
