Editor’s Note, November 2024

Poetry is mostly like other arts: work and more work, curiosity and contemplation, studying and more studying. But one of the things that differentiates the art of poetry is that poems always start with a question while hoping to find an answer. Sometimes the questions are explicit in the poems, either directly asked or obliquely responded to by the speaker. Other times, the questions come in the contrails of some larger epiphanies after the first draft. E.E Cummings once said, “Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.” Gorgeous, and despite (or because of) its Cummings syntax, his quote speaks to the gravity of curiosity. Our lives should be lived in interrogatives rather than imperatives. It’s more magnanimous to move through the world with wonder than with unearned certainty. Certainty is for football coaches and mathematicians, not poets.

The issue you are reading is full of questions about our hearts, about our forms, about processes and loss and reclamation. It begins with Jane Hirshfield’s reflection, “My life asks me a question.//I suggest a better question,” and extends to Harryette Mullen’s poem “Inclement Weather,” which acknowledges, “All hands on the console, fueling the inferno, every burning question turning up the temperature.” In between, poets linger beneath a canopy of inquisitiveness, hoping to make our world—with its capacity for great beauty but also for unmitigated violence and destruction—make some kind of sense. I hope the poems we’ve curated here reflect the kind of astonishment that will inspire you.

I also hope you’ll find light and power in a folio of the mighty poet and musician Jayne Cortez’s words. The poems offered here are curated from her first three books, which we selected from her forthcoming collected poems, Firespitter, to be published next year by Nightboat Books. Her work feels especially prescient right now as we near the end of a complicated and volatile year.

I’m wrapping this up with a quote from the philosopher-poet Bruce Lee, who was credited with saying, “A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer.” I’m not sure if I’ve ever given a wise answer to anything, but I know I’ve asked a lot of foolish questions shaped into couplets and tercets. Most of them stayed scribbles in notebooks or wound up as inscriptions in cards, in hopes they might, in some way, illuminate what I didn’t quite have the words for at the time. That’s what all poems—even those that never become strong enough to leave the notebook—are capable of doing. They encourage us to ask the complicated questions, both of ourselves and those around us. They expect us to embrace all of our foolish wisdoms.