"I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms"
----Wallace Stevens
"Thirteen Ways of Looking at Blackbird"
A little madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the
King,
But God be with the Clown,
Who ponders this tremendous
scene—
This whole experiment of
green,
As if it were his own!
--Emily
Dickenson
Editor's Foreword
If you have ever listened to the symphonies of Anton Bruckner, you know that they are long. Once in Indianapolis I sat through one with something like forty movements (I was there to see the guitar-playing Romero family who came on afterwards). I will have to admit, the length was a little hard to endure.
Apparently this aversion was not merely from my modernist inability to sit still. The program notes recited an anecdote in which a visitor to the city of Vienna in the 1800’s complained to a local citizen about the interminable nature of Bruckner’s compositions. “But in Vienna,” the local citizen replied, “we like music.”
This issue of Lucid Rhythms
has more poems than either of the two previous issues—forty-two by my
count. I wondered at first if
this might be too many, but then I had to echo the sentiment of the
unnamed dweller in
You will find poems by a range of poets. Some names, like Rhina Espaillat, Len Krisak, Anna Evans, and Jared Carter, will be familiar to many who enjoy reading contemporary formalist poetry. Other contributors with whom I was not familiar turned out, when I saw their biography notes, to be highly accomplished poets with admirable publications, numerous awards, Pushcart Nominations . . . which demonstrated to me how little I know about the enterprise of contemporary poetry. We have poems by medical doctors, attorneys, teachers, painters, and nurses. People from all backgrounds and phases of life write poems, and we have the privilege of printing a few of them in the pages of this publication.
The subject matter is diffuse. Some poems deal with the season. We know that April is when the sweet showers fall and pierce the drought of March; but we also know that “April is the cruelest month.” Tennyson notes how Spring is the time “when a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.” Robert Frost prayed, in “Prayer for Spring,”
Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.
Some of the poems in this issue approach the things that go along with Spring: warmth, love, new life, the end of winter. But other works talk about rituals, literary works, and seasons other than Spring. Rhina Espaillat remembers vinyl disks and some of the singers who went along with the era when they were common; Melanie Houle tells us some items the tourist bureaus in Hawaii don’t let you in on; Zachary Chartkoff (a fellow dweller here in Grand Rapids, Michigan) writes sonnets about the dead, Kafka, and whale hunting.
I hope you enjoy reading this collection of poetry as much as I enjoyed reviewing the different poems and assembling them for this issue. If Spring is a realization of possibility, a lot of potential enjoyment and enlightenment can be found in these pages.
David W. Landrum, Editor
www.lucidrhythyms.com
© 2008 David Landrum