1yulSVC

About This Issue: Poetry
Out of this multiplicity of voices from across the country and cutting
at diagonals across poetic traditions grew a harmonious whole that
filled our pages. It’s not the content of the poems that unites this group
of work—we travel from the Donner Party’s demise to the checkout line
at Wal-Mart (some might see a few similarities here, I grant) to Santorini.
Instead, what binds these poems so snugly together is the poets’ sharp
intellects. Here are poems, anchored in first-rate craftsmanship, that display
not mere curiosity and descriptive prowess, but that truly comment,
with cogent but lyrical logic, on the state of our shared world. The work
collected here demonstrates that poetry, at its best, does not only reflect
our social mores, but also offers us a place to engage them, to question
them, and to ask ourselves what sort of a world we have made for ourselves
and for one another. The poems before you aren’t ones about which
the worn-out critic can wring his hands over poetry’s relevance to contemporary
life; these are poems and voices that unquestionably matter.
Perhaps what excites me most about the poetry in TLR’s inaugural
volume is the breadth of the poets’ visions. These writers demonstrate
a keen awareness of the arts as a creative conversation, not as an isolated
practice. The poets represented here engage with much more than
their own thoughts and experiences of the world; they explore music and
the visual arts, they converse with poets who came before them, and they
respond to received forms while adapting them to contemporary sensibilities.
Instead of focusing solely on the personal and the private, the poets
in TLR have both the finesse and the knowledge to allow their poems
a life off the page—a life in conversation with culture. In short, the
work you’re about to enjoy represents, to me, just what is right with American
poetry.
–KD
VIII