Editor's Foreword  

This summer was hectic, and lot of the hecticity was related to poetry. The West Chester Poetry Conference in West Chester, Pennsylvania, kicked things off—four days in which Mark Strand’s iconic statement, “I am eating poetry,” is applicable in every way. After that round of top-level listening and learning, I left for a four-week National Endowment for the Humanities Seminar in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

The seminar dealt with Homer and his readers. We studied not the primary texts, Iliad and Odyssey, but what commentators had said about them over the millennia. Lots of varying opinions, positive and negative, about Homer, have circulated through the years since those epics were written down, and the “Homeric question”—was Homer a real individual and how were the Iliad and Odyssey transmitted to us?—has been much debated, and still is.  What intrigued me, however, was what is to me the bigger Homeric question:  why, after three thousand years, and given their obscurity, length, and foreignness to the modern mind, are these two long poetical works still popular?  Why do people still read them?  Why are they considered foundational to the literature of Western society?

Answering such a momentous question is risky, but I would venture to say, after years of teaching Homer in World Literature classes, and after the readings of the seminar, that the perpetual popularity of the tale about the wrath of Achilles and the tale about the wandering of Odysseus has something to do with their primal content.  The Iliad and The Odyssey deal with those emotions and states of minds that are basic to human nature:  love, death, struggle, human choice;  they vividly represent the emotional states that demarcate human character:  courage, anger, longing, grief.

And they illustrate ethical choices.  Achilles realizes that grief and the love that is the source of grief—for a companion in his case, for a son in Priam’s case—transcend political considerations.  He sits and eats with his enemy, whose capture would have meant the end of the war, and they share their pain as human beings rather than members of warring factions.  Odysseus makes his thematic statement to the King of Phiakia:

Where shall a man find sweetness to surpass
his own house and his parents?
he shall not, though he find a house of gold.

Odysseus turns down an offer of godhood in order to return to Penelope and to his rocky little kingdom of Ithaca.  Some things, it seems, are more valuable than immortality.

After that came a two-week trip to England to read a scholarly paper on Robert Herrick, poet of “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may” fame, and then return to the United States to move my office and take up a new job teaching at Grand Valley State University in Allegan, Michigan.

So it was quite a summer!

And it was quite a summer for submissions.  This issue of Lucid Rhythms is full of poems in a variety of styles and dealing with a range of subjects.  This issue boasts some political poems.  I am wary of the mix of poetry and politics, which often degenerates into partisan invective, but “Veteran’s Widow” by Peter Austin and “Castaway” by Robert Griffin touch on the ethical and human notes of politics, which is what I think a good political poem should do.  I have included some longer poems in this issue.  There are humorous pieces by Timothy Murphy and Brian Dion—just so things don’t get too serious—and lots of marvelous poems by a variety of poets from the academic and professional worlds.  Suchoon Mo’s “A Song for My Funeral” was particularly poignant to me, having recently supplied some information on a friend of mine who was killed in Vietnam back in the sixties.  Meredith Bergmann’s “Born Free” and E. Shaun Russell’s “Diabolus In Musica” were my favorites in this round of submissions.  Yet there are many more—something, I hope, for every taste. 

As summer ends and as we move into the cooler times of autumn, enjoy this poetic excursion.