I
have always, strongly, believed that poetry is the product of community and
community-based inquiries and energies.
The generous differences and inconsistencies that arise among poets as
they engage with their work might initially seem to demonstrate disagreements
of approach. But this difference is
mutually nourishing. One of the reasons
that I’ve never grown fatigued with making poems is that the medium seems, to
me, infinitely elastic; my encounters with poems by other people show me not
just what’s possible with language, but also with the human mind. Poetry (like any artform, I admit) populates
language with unexpected anatomies, ideas, inventions. If poetic practice ultimately reveals what
already exists, it does so in a way that estranges that existence into newness. And then revelation splinters and
constellates it into community.
My
editorial strategy for this issue of GUEST was to invite those poets
with whom I’ve had contact in the past few months to give me some poems. In a sense, the result reflects a very
personal history. Susanne Dyckman is my
close friend and long time collaborator.
Alice Jones has published my work through Apogee Press. I know Monica Mody and Jamie Townsend through
contact at Naropa University and met Hazel White in 2013 when I was doing a
residency in the Bay Area. Ginny
Threefoot and Kelleen Zubick came into my life through The Lighthouse in
Denver. Maw Shein Win and I—I swear
it!—went to junior high and high school together . Though I’ve never met Mia Malhotra face to
face, Monica suggested her participation in a panel on collaboration we are
planning for the New Orleans Poetry Festival.
There are many other wonderful poets in my life whom I happened not to
see during the time I was culling poems here.
But this is a celebration of the circumstantial. Community is a resource that culls from
pleasure and strength as much as happenstance and detritus. It is therefore something we need very badly
right now. I offer this small community
of poems with gratitude to the poets who, rather inadvertently, came together
to share their work.
Elizabeth
Robinson
3/3/2020
Elizabeth Robinson is the author, most
recently, of Rumor (from Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press). With Jennifer Phelps, Robinson co-edited Quo
Anima: innovation and spirituality in contemporary women’s poetry,
published by University of Akron Press in 2019. Recent work has appeared in Aurochs,
Black Sun Lit, Conjunctions, and Denver Quarterly.
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