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Issue V Unthemed
Issue V Unthemed
INTRODUCED BY EDITOR-IN-CHIEF MARIANNE JANACK
Over the course of the last year and a half, we have received over 500 submissions, and of those well over 100 were submitted to our general or unthemed category. The pieces we’ve chosen for publication do not necessarily share a common theme, though there might be, in Wittgensteinian family resemblance style, some shared elements. There is, for instance, the fact that two of our contributors go by the initial initials ‘J.T.’ or that we have many more poems than usual. I suppose the one common theme here is that all of these contributors waited a long time to hear from us.
Variety is the spice of life, someone said at some point. And if that’s so, then we definitely have spice in this issue: a fabulist story, poetry, speculative fiction. We have pieces by new writers as well as authors with a significant list of publications; from writers who are also musicians; visual artists who are also writers; and professors who are poets. We have pieces that dwell on traditional philosophical paradoxes and pieces that address the philosophical themes of daily life.
Will Anderson’s poem “Elegy for Entropy” imagines and visualizes scenes in which time and causation are reversed, as the narrator rewinds sequences of events and shows us how chance operates in our lives. “Ship Burial” takes us from the narrator’s childhood to Norse burials and finally to the coast of Florida, where the water refuses human offerings. In the connection between the universal and the personal, Anderson says, we find philosophical themes that inform our lives, and these poems aim to illuminate those connections.
Mitchell Atkinson’s story “Foreverland” is about art, technology, and the possibility of living, if not forever, then at least for much longer than the normal human span. The story poses a question to the reader: what is it that we want when we want to avoid death?
Peter Bethanis’s poem “The Sophist Enslaved by Convention” begins with a reference to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The opening is an image of a refusal and a commitment: a refusal to look back, but also a commitment to patience and an act of faith that may be foolish. Maybe, though, it is not. At the end we have moved from this grand image to that of a pebble—the challenges presented to one’s sense of what one’s life might be, and how one might be carried along by chance as well as volition.
“Poetry and the Author’s Death,” a poem by Patrick Sylvain, addresses the famous pronouncement by Roland Barthes that the death of the author is necessary for birth of the reader. Sylvain offers a meditation on what it is to create, what a poem is, and how different forms of death may become intertwined in the act of creation.
J.T. Townley’s story “Me and Mr. Chatters” begins with the report of the narrator: her husband has taken a vow of silence, which poses a number of problems. A talking cat (a therapy cat), who speaks with a British accent but also speaks French, turns up at the house to help. Fortune cookies, silence, and questions about communication organize this entertaining story of relationships broken and formed.
J.T. Whitehead’s prose poem starts with a statement that seems to be both true and false: “I am good and I am bad.” We think of these as opposites in one sense, but in another—as we think about events or people—we can see that things and people can be both. “I am the chicken and the egg’/ And I always come last.” What came first, the chicken or the egg? The philosopher, one of my metaphysics professors said, is the person who takes that question seriously. Whitehead’s poem might be read as a way of “unasking” that question. And yet the tone of the poem, with its repetition of the phrase ‘I am’ seems stentorian, as if spoken by a god.
As we all deal with the changes to our lives that the pandemic of spring and summer 2020 has required, it is a pleasure to be able to read stories and poems that can speak of other things and help us see things anew.