A Confession: Introduction

When Russell Banks and I agreed that our theme was to be
Borderlands, we chose it partly for its open-endedness. Literally and figuratively, borderlands strike us as places where powerful forces come into contact with one another, where sparks fly. Specifically, it's the politics of that point of collision that we're interested in. Whatever else it does, all good art grapples with some tension, some conflict or argument, and our theme not only steered us straight into the fray, but also allowed for plenty of range. Theme, after all, does not define subject, or style, or attitude.

Before I began reading submissions for the issue, I decided to make some rough notes in order to articulate to myself exactly what it was I was looking for. Of the many poems that satisfied the thematic requirement, there would be far too many "good" ones to include. So how could I narrow my criteria in a way that would allow me to make a final selection based on some clear principle, some defined standard? What, in short, did I think were the most important qualities a poem should have?

I surprised myself when I made those notes, partly because it was easier than I'd anticipated to put into words my current critical beliefs/biases, and partly because I realized that they were much narrower, much sharper, than those I'd held only a few years ago. Poems that would have seduced me five years ago now didn't interest me much. Poems I'd have glanced at and passed over then now held my attention. I believe that because, if we are ambitious, we must evolve as writers, we must also evolve as readers. The poems in this issue are therefore a reflection of my own evolution as a writer and reader. A future fossil record, as it were, because I hope that five years from now that evolution will have continued, and what I'll want from poems will be something even clearer, more demanding.

Aesthetic distinctions always rest partly on personal under-structure. Let me admit that, and then dodge it. I don't wish to speculate here on matters of the self, but rather on the forms the self invents to understand and describe the essential nature of its interaction with the world and with art. It's not possible, though, to completely excise the presence of the personal, since it's clearly interlocked with any possible definition of critical taste. Therefore I want to give a sort of catalogue that describes the current state of my editorial soul, invoking the personal only when it seems unavoidable.

Five years ago, I believed that poems that were formally rough (I'd have said "sloppy") were unfinished poems. I wanted poems to have frictionless surfaces, or at least elegant, musically intentional frictions. Beauty in language, including purely decorative beauty, both musical and imagistic, seemed to almost justify itself, and could hold my attention. I wanted the poet to have been everywhere before me, cleaning and arranging, so that nothing seemed accidental or unconscious. Though I admired many poets whose work was generally acknowledged to be "political," the personal poem seemed to have more potential effectiveness and power than the overtly political one, which might verge on proselytizing, which made me uncomfortable. Lyric poems attracted me more than narrative ones, which seemed literal-minded and plodding most of the time, encumbered and shrunken by their stories. Structurally, a poem could successfully rest on a single delicate moment. Though I believed there was such a thing as truth and
that poems should be truthful, I allowed for a lot of relativity. Truth appeared to exist on a sliding scale, depending on whose truth it was. In short, the perfect poem was a machine which could replicate the grief, beauty, and fascination of the individual poet's world, and contain it. It kept the tiger safely caged, so a reader could get close enough to smell it, be moved and even enlightened by it, without feeling the fear that is a kind of pain. Pain was okay, but I wanted it to be the pleasurable kind, the pang, the twinge, the clean surge of nostalgia, the moment of pure grief that's cathartic, the kind that passes quickly and leaves peace or exhilaration in its wake. Medicated pain.

The greatest grief of
my life, at least so far, has been the death of nature as humankind has always known it. I was born in 1950, the year that TV first became widely available, the year in which the first of hundreds of new pesticides, herbicides, and preservatives burst into the food chain. Science was going to save the world from disease and drudgery. We'd won the Big War. There seemed to be no boundaries, not even space.

It's taken me the greater part of my adult life to confront the depth of my response to what has happened to the world -- I mean nature, the world on which human life depends. I've done most of that work, emotional and intellectual, only in the last five years, though it's chafed at my consciousness since childhood. It's changed me, not the least as a writer and as a reader. It stripped away much of what I once admired or was entertained by in poems, incinerated it. It also burned away things that were obscuring poems I hadn't been able to appreciate before. It obliterated my patience for certain kinds of poems, and gave me new patience for other kinds.

Now, when I flip through a magazine or pull a book off the shelf in a bookstore, I'm still looking for poems that are bent on truth, but the hierarchies of that truth are far more sharply defined than they were, and much less malleable. Perhaps I'm simply old enough now to risk living outwardly with my convictions, no matter who might call me a fanatic, or worse. I believe that the planet -- what we often call "the world" -- is socially and ecologically threatened in a way that's unprecedented, and that most of us, expressly by being as conscious of it as we are, are in nearly total denial. I mean that most of us seem to feel anxiety about the hole in the ozone, the decimated rain forests, the carcinogens in our lives, etc., but we haven't really forced ourselves to fully imagine what it means beyond our immediate lives: whether or not there are syringes on the beach when we want to swim, whether we should take antioxidant supplements, or use a stronger sunscreen, or argue with the manager of the Grand Union
about irradiated food. So I look for poems that aggress that denial, that fly under its radar, slip across its borders, plant bombs in its public buildings. I'm not talking about subject matter. The poems I love now do not have to be about pollution or our ever-more-hideous warfares (especially religious ones) or racism or sexism or the fact that we can put weapons in space but can't stop a man from putting his stepson in the trash compactor. But they do have to acknowledge consciousness of those things. They can't be innocent of death, or of what life is really like for most of the world's people, or the fact that our planet's condition as a patient is -- in even the most optimistic opinion-guarded.

In terms of the task of editing, this means I now look hard at poems that carry the flags of outrage and grief, even if their surfaces are "rough." In fact, I've come to value highly some kinds of roughness because I believe they carry their cargos more honestly, in fact more precisely, by refusing to try to smooth unsmoothable edges. There are some things that cannot be said in purely beautiful language, places in a poem where we
ought to stumble, or be brought up uncomfortably short, or hear an ugly sound. I'm fascinated by the lapses arrived at in this way, the residue of revisions resulting from honest mistakes, rude epiphanies, changes of heart, self-deceit when it's confronted and appropriated. Decoration -- no matter how thrilling or gorgeous the image, how subtle, stirring, or elegant the music -- now seems gratuitous and I have little patience with it. I call it prettification, and think it's nice in yards, parks, and department store windows. I trust the instincts of the unconscious, both the poet's and my own, more than I did. I no longer feel the need to apprehend a poem completely with each separate faculty; I'm more willing to float without panic in the space between intellect and emotion, for instance. I'm not very interested in poems that explore the personal without reference to the larger world. Such poems seem self-absorbed unless they're infected by death-consciousness. There was once a time when I'd tell people
(without irony, alas) that I was an apolitical person. The best spin I can put on that now is that it was a sin of ignorance. All good poems are political poems -- they
do make something happen. The boundaries between kinds of poems seem less significant than they once did, whether a poem's a lyric, a meditation, a narrative. More interesting are impure fusions, hybrids that don't grow the way you expect. I still find the metaphor of poem-as-cage useful, but now see its point not as protecting the reader from the tiger, but in allowing him to get close enough to get clawed without getting killed. So my tolerance for poem-inflicted pain is higher than it used to be. In all of these ways, coming at something sidelong is often more frontal than coming at it head-on because the results are less predictable, more dangerous. Less controllable. More subversive of expectation. Thus, while clarity and straightforwardness of expression are still virtues, I do not so much value literalness, and this has of course changed my definition of precision. Recklessness is attractive, sometimes even crudeness, if it's used as a crowbar to pry the lid off something menacing. Less and
less am I enamored of high polish, human experience presented in forms so technically sophisticated, musically and visually seductive, and "managed" that the wilderness is no longer visible. That's why even the metrical poems I've chosen here have their dukes up, and why I've included poems that some readers will think are too much in their face. It's hard to talk about these things in the abstract, but I don't have the space to give enough examples to show the range of what I mean. The poems in this issue are my examples.

So that's a confession of my current editorial bias. It's the invisible umbrella over all the poems you're about to read. Whether quiet or rowdy, they all have a clear and direct relation to the truth, which makes them passionate, precise, gutsy, and disturbing. In spite of their griefs, angers, and despairs, they're also full of the joy that comes from loving human life with abandon. I think of them as a friendly but anarchic crowd clamoring for change -- good company in a dark age.