Editor’s Note

Ashley Renselaer, Founder & Editor-in-Chief

Dear Readers, 

Summer is here and the school year is ending – on a note of devastation and grief.  At the tail end of a global pandemic, we Americans open our eyes to the reality of a gun violence endemic that is increasingly defining our culture, our reality, our very beings. The hollow notion of “thoughts and prayers” is extinguished by the sounds of bullets, the death of children, and the hopeless debate over how to stop this never-ending American suffering.  One is compelled to wonder, what is it about a gun that is such a defining feature of the American identity and what could possibly sway us from its all-consuming destructive power? In his poem “The Opposites Game”, the revered poet Brendan Constantine gives us the answer; asking his students to find antonyms to Emily Dickinson’s verse “My life had stood a loaded gun”, the poem pivots on what could be the opposite of a gun: “Flower, says one. No, Book, says another. That’s stupid, / cries a third, the opposite of a gun is a pillow. Or maybe / a hug, but not a book… It's a diamond, it's a dance, the opposite of a gun is a museum in France. It's the moon, it's a mirror, it's the sound of a bell and the hearer”. As the opposites flow in within the poem, we see the world in all its possibilities, its intricacies, its wholeness; all of our understandings and perceptions consisting of the ungun. As the speaker of the poem later states, “the opposite of a gun is where it’s pointed”, directing our attention to recognize the beauty and the wonder in our world and ponder what threatens it all.

As writers and poets, we speak of the infinite possibilities of life; of what inverts the gun into the essence of our human existence; of the antidote to the bullet; of the heart; of the mind; of life. In our realm of images, metaphors, emotions, and truths, language is our companion to shed light on the ungun, and to make our way through the tragedies, to mourn, to enrage, to revolt, and to evolve; in the wise words of Mikal Wix in Words & Whispers’s Issue 8,  we have “the will to choose any course to contemplate our providence of wit”. In “What Are Years”, Broeck Wahl Blumberg’s striking poem, the personal becomes political and universal: “Can our memory be that short? / A flash of lies across our screens displaces real maps, / displaces people holding suitcases who dodge real bombs, / displaces our own  history even as we live it”. Or consider the striking emotional power of Natasha Bredle’s poem “Holy”, as it lingers with us long after we’ve read it: “remember when / i set foot on the earth yesterday? / i thought i would write myself into a story / to sooth another child to sleep // now i find myself begging at the feet of your pages / please / evaporate ink droplets / form a soft rain around me / like lullaby / like golden / or / so above beautiful no mortal can define it”.  Elsewhere in the issue, Mary Paulson’s Poem “Tilt” reckons with the existential balance of self, of things: “I’m on an axis: tilt, / whirl, I’m on a reel. I’ve / the sensation of time moving / too far away, too / fast. If a dream is a doorway”. And very special to this issue is Dick Altman’s remarkable poem, “The Poet Forgets”, where he reminds us of the enduring and defining power of poetry: “I gift you these sleight-of-hand words   materialized of air thin and fragile   Inhale forgetfulness’ fragrance    Draw it in deeply  as if from petals of forgiveness”.

Brendan Constantine’s “The Opposites Game” ends with an electrifying and chilling note: “Don’t write that on the board, they say. Just say poem. / Your death will sit through many empty poems”.  And it is in these words that we can feel the absolute helplessness and the despair – and yet every minute new language is created; new poems and prose that will let the emptiness – the silence – speak.

Humbly,

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