Editor’s Note, October 2024

October is my favorite month for all the predictable reasons: weeks of mini candies, little goblins and ghosts toddling with their plastic jack-o’-lanterns, yellow and red leaves starting to drop from the elms, and weekend screenings of the old-style scary movies like Häxan and Nosferatu while snuggled against the fall chill. All that spooky ceremony leading up to the big day: Halloween, when for one night anyone can dress up as whatever they want to be with a store-bought—or as it was for us when I was a kid, homemade—mask.

The holiday itself has offered both abandon and uncertainty from its beginning. The Gaels recognized the evening of October 31 as Samhain, the night when the boundaries between life and death are blurred. Their belief is revisited in one of Lindsay Turner’s poems in this issue, “Halloween,” when she asks, “The land of the dead, they say, is closer./But what if my lot lies with the living?” Poets are at their finest talking about the dead in metaphors and questions because both suggest some mystery lies just out of sight.

Halloween also happens to be the birthday of John Keats, a poet for whom death and its requisite metaphors (in his poems, anyway) were more common than the nightingales or autumns he’s remembered for. Many of us use the day to daydream different selves and eat the candy we’re supposed to be giving to the tiny Ninja Turtles and Ariels trick-or-treating at our doors. Especially us poets, who have no choice but to mask up most days to survive in a world that can be antagonistic to sensitivity. Some of our poet masks are DuBoisian, some N95, even more of the Future variety. All are vital for subsistence and survival, though my favorite poetry version is any mask that slips or is raised—even momentarily, like the blinds on a morning window—and we get a glimpse of uncontrolled brightness. Mask on. Fuck it, mask off, as the song goes.

This issue is full of brightly sensitive poets, like Latif Askia Ba and Molly Peacock, whose poems reflect on everyday magic and loss. We also have the honor of sharing a folio of new poems by one of the most intuitively unmasked poets of our time: 2024 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize recipient Li-Young Lee. I shared my affection for Lee’s work in the December 2023 editor’s note, so to avoid repeating myself I’m going to quote from Ocean Vuong’s exquisite introduction to the folio, in which he describes Lee as a poet who is “always insisting on how elusive, malleable, and unknowable the self truly is.”

What a wonderful description of both Lee’s poetry and Halloween. While most poets’ masks are meant to obscure and protect, Lee’s mask (if he has one at all) is part of the unknowable, made from the poems themselves. His work situates itself  between the poet and the reader, serving as amplifier, charmer, and transformer. His poetry reveals our possibilities any day of the year.