Introduction

What is the meaning of a "little" magazine in the life of poetry in American culture today? Is it a forum for the inquisitive reader to see what is being written, what kinds of thoughts and forms of thought are occupying the minds and hearts of writers both established and unknown? Is it a place for those writers to put their work forward first to the doorkeeping editors, then to readers -- a kind of gladiatorial testing ground, perhaps? Is it, as the deconstructionists might propose, a locus for the prevailing cultural tendencies of mind and style to impose themselves further, or, as the experimentalist avant-garde might propose, a place where the marginal can find a small space in which to be heard, to wedge a clearing amid established patterns of speech and of being?

These are real questions, even interesting ones, but they are also tired ones. I will confess that when opening the envelopes of poems sent on to me by the unfailingly gracious staff of
Ploughshares, I did not consider my activity as guest editor a chance to impose or explore any theory of art and culture. I did not consider the role of the words I read in regard to the culture at large. I did not consider the role of "poetry," or whether or not it "matters." I did not consider -- though I did notice -- the way certain themes and types of poems recurred from submission to submission. What I considered was the poems: the words on the page, and the effect they had on my heart and mind and body as I let them enter my being. And what I hoped for, each time I turned to a fresh page, was nothing less than to find myself moved and transformed.

Make no mistake: I consider such a moment of transformation a radical event. Radical in both senses of the word -- an extraordinary poem requires of its reader a fundamental revolution in being, and also returns the reader to some deep root of being which has been present in us from the start. It may be that both senses are necessary for our survival: we live so much of the time in a state of estrangement from ourselves. Estranged from the possibility of a real knowledge of our own experience, estranged from our own hearts, we wander the hours and years in a kind of day-blindness, lost in the alleyways of an expected life. It is easier, certainly, to navigate a life we believe is predictable, is knowable, is known. And the costs? Bearable -- until some event forces us to realize it has all been a dream, a falseness, and we must recover the ability to see not what we wish to see, but what is: a wholly surprising world.

A good poem offers always some entrance into and reminder of the fact that genuine experience is unexpected. A good poem shocks us awake, one way or another -- through its beauty, its insight, its music, it shakes or seduces the reader out of the common gaze and into a genuine looking. It breaks the sleepwalking habit in our eyes, in our ears, in our mouths, and sets us adrift in a small raft under a vast night-sky of stars. We feel ourselves moving, too, above a vast, cold-streaming current carrying inner-lit sea creatures, tangles of kelp strands, fishes. Thus we learn the deep clefts of the mid-ocean land-rifts; thus the wave-blanketed mountains rise up before us as islands, a new habitation for heart and mind.

We depart the known ease in order to arrive somewhere other than where we were. We travel by poem, as by any other means, in order to see for ourselves more than was seen.

The record of those travels matters -- one person's word -- wakened knowledge becomes another's. We seed poems into magazines, into books, onto the Internet, over the radio, whether to be met by two million people or two hundred, because we are beings who learn from one another how to become our full selves. The pages of
Ploughshares, filled year by year with new poems and new stories chosen by new selectors, matter to me immensely because on any of them I may meet the few words that will suddenly cast me into a widened humanness, a widened knowledge and range of being.

This encounter of words and reader occurs in privacy, in silence; if any of these pages becomes such a moment of liberation for any of its readers, it is unlikely that I or the words' author will ever hear of it. Yet I have utter confidence that the sum of such moments is one of the essential ways that both individuals and cultures move forward -- into awakening; into first the recognition of and then responsibility for our kinship with others; into agreement that this life in all its harshness and beauty is one we want not merely to get through blindly, but make our own. And so we say of a good poem, of a good story, "powerful."

Recently, Czeslaw Milosz mentioned to me his theory that Walt Whitman was responsible for the First World War. "You see," he said, "by the end of the nineteenth century, Whitman began to be widely translated, and all the young revolutionaries of Europe read eagerly and took to heart this new cry for democratic being . . ." Then there is the letter I once received from a woman who had read
The Ink Dark Moon: "I heard in those ancient poems what was missing from my life, and ended my marriage." I remember, too, my own return from a period of prolonged depression, a dark hibernation of being; after months of not reading anything, I found one voice I could tolerate -- Rilke's. Slowly, surely, his intimate, inward murmuring guided me back to the terrifying shoals of aliveness.

I offer this powerful and dangerous thing into your hands, a "little" magazine. It has been a pleasure to be part of its coming into existence.