Editorial

A Letter from Co-Editor Caroline Langston

For six years, every edition of Vita Poetica has bitten off and tasted the range of human perspective and experience, the deep terroir and diversity of truths. We’ve generally struck a tone that is both genial and hopeful. 

Not this time. 

The most striking top notes you’ll encounter in this issue are grim ones. There’s plenty of judgment, death, and graves. 

Matthew E. Henry’s poem  “waking to nightmares,” for example, is a full-on jeremiad worthy of what Christians will call “the Old Testament,” a judgment on a society of decadent materialism, in which the putative bottom only leads to something worse:

not until feeling can’t be felt, but until there is a new feeling, a new
desire to be sated. we seek stranger sins—more startling obscenities—
to stimulate senses gone soft. we become like the prophets of Baal.

Take, as well,  the beginning images of Louis Bourgeois’ short story “Percy in Dust,” spoken by its laconic (but oracular) narrator:

There were these bones I played with alongside a barren ditch. They were armadillo bones and these bones gave me much pleasure in an abstract way that I cannot fully explain because I am incapable of saying what I mean when I want to. I know that alongside this barren ditch grew trees that made shade, of that I am certain.

Bourgeois’ narrator takes us into an unrelenting, desiccated landscape, where he is a witness of his life and his misfit country colleagues, who are allied in their contempt for the city-dwelling “teachers” and insipid authorities. (And analogizers just might be able to read a bit of commentary on our contemporary scene here.) Amid this desolate landscape, our narrator holds forth prophetically about his friends within and the oppressors without—in cadences that echo (just to name a few) the Hebrew Scriptures, Faulkner, and maybe even Miguel de Unamuno. In this world, there are ironies, and pleasures, but the truth is nonetheless stark. 

Look closer into our other selections, though, and that initial portrait becomes more complex: 

There are also graves in Alison Lock’s essay  “Carnac Dawn,” the circular dolmen that she encounters while cycling to observe the monumental menhirs in northwestern France. And here the circular graves play into the circularity of time, and the enduring capacity of the human, despite death. 

Artist Rajni Louise plays with similar themes in her selection “Fountain of Light”: “My work is inspired by the infinite replication of life, patterns found in nature, and their mimicry in digital technologies,” she notes in her artist statement, and that diversity is rendered in a riot of shape and color. 

Richard Chess’s poem “Field of Vision” offers a path forward in which it is only through immanence that transcendence can be perceived, can even be. At the beginning he charges:

To get here, forget the prayers you’ve learned.
Abandon the story of heaven.
Here there is no need to believe in anything
beyond land and water—water, land, and sky.

And yet–even if “all” is encompassed within that space, there’s still the portent of mystery beyond. 

You just have to go through. Take a look at Hilary Sallick’s poem “Inexorable” for some notions of how it is done. And there are so many more illustrations of the times and moments for doing so, in all our selections.

For as Dante’s cosmology reminds us, it’s through the bottom of the Inferno that we proceed through the Purgatory and into Paradise. All of it together comprises a World.