Editor’s Note

Ashley Renselaer, Founder & Editor-in-Chief

Dear Readers, 

In the essay The Figure a Poem Makes, Robert Frost gives us a definition on how a poem reaches its meaning: “like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the poem must ride on its own meaning”. The mercurial volatility of the image of ice dancing on heat tells us of a poem’s journey; a journey of sliding, of sizzling, of melting, of changing into meaning: all right in front of our own senses. Here, Frost communicates the unpredictability of the final meaning of a poem. And it is this unpredictability, I believe, that is at the core of reading and appreciating poetry, as the final meaning of the poem is to be found in the manner in which we, readers, understand it; we with our histories, notions, experiences, fears, and dreams. Today in a world defined by a fierce outcry against oppression, from Iran, to China, to Ukraine, more than ever, we seek to claim our own meaning. In reading poetry, we have the opportunity to observe the dance of the human mind, as it questions, releases, makes and unmakes meaning, all the while connecting us to ourselves and the world around us. Words & Whispers’s Issue 10 gives us that platform for poetic discourse and self-realization.

Ride along the journey of meaning and metaphor in Teeth by Natalli Amato: “A long time gone, the old dream comes back: full grown woman, my / teeth fall out, into my hands, that ache in my gumline. / There was a time when I slept / with a crystal under my pillow / to ward this off. / Nightmare, I called it”. Consider the power of grief, anger, and becoming in Shae Krispinksky’s Bedtime Prayers: “I once admitted to my therapist that I didn’t think of myself as human but / as blue light radiating, suffusing every nook of the cosmos. He took this / as a good sign, the dissolution of ego”. Or engage in a dialogue with Dostoyevsky in Vern Fein’s Meeting Fyodor in Heaven: “Wayward poet, heretic! / Do I mean to contend that scalawag / would be ceremoniously ushered / through the pearly gates by Peter?”. Find meaning in Charlie Brice’s fierce and beautiful poem Dodgeball: “I’d make sure to get ball-slammed immediately / so I could hide in a corner of the playground and dream about / the lovely winter storm that would be coming. Cheyenne got / them as early as September. I’d watch those huge snowflakes / land like feathers and transform the world into a crystalline / purity beyond dodge or ridicule. No two flakes were alike”. Elsewhere, let yourself be drawn into the collision of truth and untruth in Jenny Hockey’s remarkable poem As we stop-start: “and I tell her kerb stones must be straight, / tell her the lumps and bumps of roots / could trip up a man with a stick, that branches / can fall on a pram, leaves block a drain, / I tell her all the old make-believe / about why in the end they’re just trees / and praise be to her / for not believing a word”.

Frost believed that a poem must generate and facilitate its own movement; its own process of melting and propelling. I hope that our incredible collection of poem and prose in Words & Whispers’s Issue 10 will propel you to imagine and visualize new meaning and never-before-seen horizons, vistas, and landscapes.

Humbly,

Ashley Renselaer
Founder & Editor-in-Chief
Words & Whispers Literary Journal