Volume 108, Number 3/4
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This is the night mail crossing the Border,Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor, The shop at the corner, the girl next door. —W.H. Auden Cover Caption: Ozark children at the RFD box, Missouri, 1940. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC. |
Editors’ Page
Today’s mail arrives: a 21st-century jumble of local real-estate notices, solicitations, bills, catalogues, and advertising flyers. If we’re lucky, there’s a postcard or a letter in the mix, a few lines of script in a familiar hand, and maybe a magazine. Even in the digital age, the letter exerts a mysterious pull—and the journal (Poet Lore, perhaps) issues its own clear invitation.
But for the young girls on our cover, walking to the mailbox was a serious rural ritual, the day’s post a lifeline linking farm routes and cities, family and friends. For those without telephones or the resources to travel, a letter’s voice had transformative power, speaking from another place, another time—making it vivid, there and then.
What kind of lifeline does poetry offer, what kind of “news”? Dickinson’s “letter[s] to the world” still astonish and instruct us; and Whitman’s headlong dispatches continue to unfold as if his American moment were our own. Conjuring the heft of sensory experience, their words bring news from the human interior and deliver it safely across any distance.
This issue opens with an introduction by U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey (whose early work appeared in Poet Lore – Vol. 91, No. 2) to Tarfia Faizullah’s poems on identity, desire, and personal agency. Other poets in these pages send missives from war zones (Bill Glose’s “Gathering Intelligence”), classrooms (Ted Lardner’s “Assignment”), jails (Joseph Bathanti’s “Huntersville Prison”), and pilgrimage sites (Jane Medved’s “Leaving a Note at the Western Wall”)—from the precincts of poverty (M. Nzadi Keita’s “102.”), nightmare (Lucinda Roy’s “A Mind Full of Winter”), and longing (Bruce Lowry’s “Love Song for Anna May Wong”).
Like a letter arriving just in time, Mitchell Untch’s dizzying epistolary poem, “Dear Betty Blythe Francis,” reclaims an ardent friendship after nearly half a century. In closing, it resurrects a season, enacting the dual urgencies of memory and insight: “…October, // the maple’s red hands, spring rain signing the grass, and the two of us still alive in this world….” Still alive—a claim that might describe the stubborn force of poetry itself.
Poets Introducing Poets
Tarfia Faizullah Introduction by U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey
Echo
Stockpiling for the Hereafter
What I Want is Simple
The Anatomy of Prayer
Tell me where it hurts
Fair & Lovely
Poetry
David Wagoner
Ahead of Time
David Wagoner
Amounting to Something
Gary Fincke
Mythology
Anne Dyer
Stuart In a Classroom is a Body
Liza Katz
Artist’s Model
Chelsea Wagenaar
Valentine
Ted Lardner
Stella Blue
Bruce Lowry
Love Song for Anna May Wong
Mark Rubin
I’m in the Phone Book
Matthew J. Spireng
Driftwood
Mitchell Untch
Dear Betty Blythe Francis
Phillip Sterling
Forecast
Anne Sheldon
Shots of Garrett County
Anne Sheldon
Dream Sequence
Marilynn Talal
The Samurai’s Wife
Mary Crow
Blind Spots
Laurie Zimmerman
Refrain
Ann Gerike
Missing
Sally Bliumis-Dunn
Portrait of a Reader
Shane Seely
The Frozen Pond
Alison Prine
Resemblance
Kate Peper
View from the Jungfraujoch Railway Café
Lucinda Roy
A Mind Full of Winter
Mary Parham
Caged Animals
Joseph Bathanti
Huntersville Prison
Joseph Bathanti
This Mad Heart
Joseph Bathanti
Certainty
Naton Leslie
Watching Wild Kingdom
Gary Fincke
The Wide Astonishment of Air
June Rockefeller
The Smokehouse
Katherine Robinson
Turkey Vultures
Jane Medved
Leaving a Note at the Western Wall
Jonathan H. Scott
Home from Damascus
Frannie Lindsay
Prayer of a Prodigal During Holy Week
Frannie Lindsay
Old Dog Suckling
Bill Glose
Gathering Intelligence
Ted Lardner
Assignment
Javier Zamora
14 May, 1980: Hundreds Float
Richard Jones
The Chair
Richard Jones
The Call
Richard Jones
Gardener
Alex McRae
Killarney Fern
Stuart Friebert
Some Sun on Cloud Tops
R.T. Smith
Winter Tying
R.T. Smith
Samaritan
John Balaban
Remembering Elling Eide
Sid Gold
Play
Julie E. Bloemeke
Darkroom
Kathleen Winter
Eclipse
Deirdre Callanan
Something Else
Anya Silver
At the Station
Rob Sulewski
Guest
Carrie Addington
Harvesting
Ariana Nadia Nash
The Night We Came to the Forest
Carol V. Davis
Nothing Left to Do
June Rockefeller
Open Closets Are Sad
J.T. Ledbetter
Last Light on the Marsh
Ellen Devlin
So Far to Gather in My Hair
Brianna Noll
At the Mercury Fountain, Barcelona
Travis Mossotti
Foreclosure
M. Nzadi
Keita 102.
Mark Lilley
The Check
Mark Lilley
The Choice
Rick Mulkey
Cheese
Carina Yun
Through the Stockton Street Tunnel
Robert J. Levy
Shopping Without a List
Mary Ann Larkin
We Live in Longing
Brian Simoneau
City Champs Celebrate Unlikely Win in Back of Coach’s Pickup
Jason Gebhardt
Equanimity (A Poem in the Form of the State of Georgia)
Ken Poyner
Demographics
Lee Rossi
After-Image
Rob Sulewski
Late Lunch
Caitlin Cowan
Vanishing Act
Steven Ratiner
Horizontal Tower
Jaydn DeWald
Triptych for Morgan, Bird, and Brown
Essays & Reviews
Jaydn Dewald
“In Praise of Constraints: Inciting the Unexpected”
Marci Vogel reviews Alight by Fady Joudah
Zara Raab reviews Year of Reversible Loss by Norma Farber
Debra Wierenga reviews Mark the Music by Merrill Leffler