Letter from the Editor

Hello, from the inarticulate future.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about crisis. Every decision ahead triggers my reptilian brain: fight, flight, or freeze. Groceries, fight. Crowded restaurants, flight. Grabbing coffee with a friend, freeze.

19th century French poet, Stéphane Mallarmé, wrote that “poetry is the language of a state of crisis.” Can we write our way through environmental collapse, systematic oppression, Covid, out of sickness and death—or at the very least record our collective despair? What would be on the other side?

Poets provide us with imagery to capture experience; experimental poets design the wreckage of our current, fractured moment. So, when deciding on a theme for issue 22 of the journal, Zoë Loos, Donovan Kūhiō Colleps, and I, over Zoom, came up with the idea to ask for the unaskable. We wanted to see the ugliest, unapproachable forms that reflected the unknown ahead. We wanted vulnerability and chaos to speak particularly to the Pacific region and the people of this place.

I was surprised at the responses to our call. Our inbox was flooded with a range of poetry, some confessional and relatable and some formally challenging and linguistically playful. Some didn’t really fit our own editorial ideas of an “inarticulate future,” which I personally defined as the “inability of pure utterance.” What does that even mean?

I suppose what we asked for was poetry that failed—not quite what Mallarmé was talking about.

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This issue is not a collection of poems that fail. Nor or they poems necessarily about crisis in content or form, but they do speak to the idea that poetry is the language of a state of being, which, as we all know, changes as rapidly as it does unexpectedly. Some of these poems grow outward or in reverse. Others inward or beyond.

Time is captured in all these ways, through “the unending field,” in Jami Macarty’s beautiful poem, “I am walking without looking”. Moya Costello’s poems are records for the everyday magic of observation as she writes about what is both common and mythological in nature. Heikki Huotari asks us to “reconsider twice white lies and double negatives” in his prose poem “Parenthesis Etcetera.” Delia Tramontina’s excerpt “ART + LIFE” exposes the darkness of cultural binaries in a tradition reminiscent of gurlesque. Lawdenmarc Decamora writes about Filipino “suburban imaginary” in his poem #taglish. Carla Crujido’s haikus about U.S. interment camps are as chilling as they are succinct. Stuart Cooke’s “Extension” captures the grief inside one long breath. M.G. Martin writes, “after the heart no can, movement continues,” in his poem, “sister in the air” which might actually be the inarticulate future I was imagining all along.

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Today, the morning air is crisp. The moon hovers, aglow, over the 6am shadow of a mountain range I can walk forever as a stranger. The sky is blue-black. By the afternoon the air will turn thick and the moon will return like a dull river rock. For now, this moment is the same as three years ago, five years ago, but tomorrow? Who knows. For now, we offer you these poems and commentary from the authors, that articulate only what poetry can.

Me ka mahalo piha,

Jaimie Gusman, Editor