Editor’s Note, May 2024

The month of May is named after the Greek goddess Maia, the eldest of the Pleiades, goddess of the field and fertility. I dozed through most mythology discussions in high school, but I remember this particular fact because I’m from Indiana. I spent part of my summers in corn fields tasseling corn for five dollars a day so I’d have money to hang out at the mall with an Orange Julius to cool my chafed hands. None of it is easy work, with or without Maia’s blessing. Those who have spent time tilling and planting know what I’m talking about.

Poets know, too. May might be named after the field goddess, but it’s a make-or-break month for growers, whatever they grow: tomatoes, sonnets, corn, persona poems. We all wait as our shoots push through the soil with the promise of renewal and growth. This might be leaning too heavily into a spring metaphor when spring actually started back in March, but renewal is one of the prevailing themes in the pages you are holding. Renewal of life, renewal of art and its modes, renewal of the self beyond the lineated world even if that renewal comes through verse.

There’s something fickle yet hopeful about the shift of the spring season, when you can’t decide how many layers to wear and the budding trees cast new kinds of shadows on our comings and goings. Human complications and triumphs abound in these pages, which feature elegant meditations on living by Catherine Barnett, Kush Thompson, and others. There’s also a brilliant excerpt from Lisa Jarnot’s newest book, about radical poetics and discovering Robert Duncan while she was living in an anarchist collective—finding the life you want even as it’s already in action.

Back in Indiana, life always felt in action (slow, but in action nonetheless) and so much of the day-to-day was simply connected to survival—for the plants and the farmers, for the people who were working toward a possibility of grace. Jeffrey Yang’s stunning translations of the Chinese poet Bei Dao take me back to that time almost as directly as the month of May does. Bei Dao’s poems affirm that renewal is simultaneously local, global, and beyond history—it happens whether we are ready for it or not. It’s inevitable, like poems, and the little revelations they seed.