Or Does It Explode?

A Letter from Co-Editor Caroline Langston

Just about the only thing I can remember now from Mr. Sam Lee’s 4th-grade science class at Bettie Woolfolk Elementary was the day we read about the concept of surface tension — the physical property that water filled to the brim in a glass can, for a while, hold itself tight, almost as though a skin is stretched over its top. One additional draught poured, however, the skin breaks, and the top of the glass is overflowing. 

That’s the feeling that so many works in this volume of Vita Poetica evince: there’s a governing narrative or structure drawn from myth, history – and often a formal grace – and yet, at the same time, they burst from within, with an energy that explodes that very story, form, or perspective.

These are not mere “reframings.” Rather, these variations often wrest the perspectives from what we – and even their protagonists – expect, and often vigorously, betraying the force from within. 

Linda Laderman’s poem “How you go on about the other woman,” for example, reimagines the voice of Eve, addressing Adam, from the standpoint of Eve’s anger: at Adam’s longing for the lost Lilith, at the the world she’s found herself in, a vigorous wrestling with the immobility she feels in the postlapsarian world. Lilith is the yardstick by which Eve measures herself.

 . . . Talk about finding your voice. I could use
an iota of her confidence. I’m mired in the muck,
as if your rib is still stuck to me. . . 

Furthermore, Eve’s anger, and the power she envisions encapsulated in Lilith, is underscored by the staccato motion of the verses themselves – as though the lines are popping from the page. 

Or take Fran Markover’s “Uncle Julius Gifts Me with Awe,” in which the awe bestowed literally shines forth through the uncle’s unexpected davening:

                                                 . . . Sometimes, Julius jumped from his seat,
flailed his arms as if he could shoo away light, heat, ashes from the candles.

I’d find refuge behind wings of the biggest armchair or scoot under the table.
God must be a dancer, too, a dancer who wrapped a white cloth with fringes

like a curtain around his shoulders. . . 

Not that all the selections here show a similar tone or energy. But they do have their narrative twists, their pointed surprises. Jan Wiezorek’s poem “The Chapel Matron” posits a traveler in search of an airport’s Reflection Chapel, and the chapel the narrator finds, the “Matron” who conducts him there, and the divine that’s found are all poignant, unexpected. 

Joyce H. Munro’s nonfiction exploration “Water,” meanwhile, dives deeply – and with formal clarity – into a personal history of the Titanic disaster that is unlike anything you’ve ever read before. And in another instance of changed or altered perspectives, Corey Flintoff’s story “Beulah Land” offers an imagined voice from the Jim Crow South that is almost never heard. In reading, we are forced to stand close to a white South Carolina matron’s dawning, then choked, moral reflection. But while we cannot excuse the truth she ultimately shirks, we come to understand her in full. The wrenching of perspective here is in us. 

That’s the goal of all art, isn’t it? And may it be with all of us as we embark on this new season, bursting with our own impatience, waiting – like Langston Hughes’ narrator from whom I stole this title line – for dreams and justice to rain down.