Incident Reports

This “bonus” poem selection is from poets who were all poised to be featured poets in future issues. I have been so privileged to have such brilliant work come my way, from these and other poets in the past three years—Lisa Ortiz, Farnaz Fatemi, Naomi Shihab Nye, Danusha Laméris, Ingrid LaRiviere, and Joan Logghe, among so many others. My hope is that readers of the journal who did not read much poetry before will be inspired to make it part of their daily bread for the soul nourishment it provides in our fraught times.

In Ken Weisner’s poems about the great horned owl, he has captured something of the ancient mystery and numinosity of these magnificent beings as they came to enrapture him. In “Incident Report,” shaken by an encounter with an owl and the realization of its primordial origin, he asks (as we might hear or feel in analysis):

… How do I re-

port what I have seen? Will someone take this

down, write this up, print this out, notify the

proper authorities? My life has been taken.

In “Thomas of Monmouth,” where he discovers a kind of hagiography of life itself in owl pellets; in “Cowboy,” where the trickster owl becomes Gary Cooper for a boy and Robert Frost for the poet; and in “You Mate for Life,” where the poet “hear[s] you from my bed, like memory,” Weisner evokes the many facets of the mystery of owl as it becomes a kind of avatar of the Self, showing us the way in which messengers of the divine enter and change us.

Michael Glaser opens to us the inner world of a man struggling to connect with his son in the aftermath of divorce and the equally painful and poignant reclaiming of his own femininity in the misogynist world inherited from his father. In “Wanting It All,” a restaurant salad offering becomes a contemplation of desire and its consequences.

Carol Cellucci’s “Crossing,” in counterpoint to Glaser’s perspective as a father, depicts the bleak and desolate world of children rejecting the alienated father who is intent on “winning [them] again.” Cellucci’s poems “Anatomy of a Dream,” in which she wrestles a protean dream figure to “tell me something / I don’t already know,” and “That Place” lyrically evoke the inner world of psyche, its intimate musings and intricate reckonings.

Kaaren Kitchell’s two poems herald from a deep interior world infused with the numinosity of gods and goddesses incarnate in so-called ordinary life. In “Swan Song (An Alchemical Fairy Tale),” a night swim in the Thames brings her an encounter with a swan who prophesies, leading her as a kind of muse into the depths and back to “float on liquid mirrors, sing, fly … ”. “Eden” is her elegy for her late husband and the life they had together, remarkable for how she lovingly paints him in phrase-long stories and descriptors laced with metaphor and symbol, creating an intimate and complex portrait; and most of all, as the title implies, her transcendent realization that for all the trauma and suffering that marked his life and theirs, because of their love he was able to die “radiant, healed, grateful” in her arms, and their life together was a “paradise.” So many of us who have undergone analysis can understand how the deepest suffering, through love, is transmuted into an indescribable kind of paradise in which grief is as precious a river as any that can be found there.

It is the custom for the outgoing poetry editor to offer a poem of their own as a parting gift. The poem I have chosen was written this summer during a river rafting trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. It was inspired partly by a woman on the trip who was a nurse at the hospital that became ground zero for Covid in this country. She told me a story of being healed of her deep trauma from that experience by a trip down the river. It’s one of the few times in the last three years I have had time to write a poem of my own, but mainly I chose it because, as rivers always seem to invite themselves to be symbolic of journeys and life in general, I felt a resonance between what happened on that trip and what my experience has been, in part, and what I had hoped for it to be, at the journal, and at the institute. Also, as poets are wont to do, I stole a line from someone else, that someone in this case being Jung himself. I thought it only fitting that I should give it back to you. Enjoy.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Frances Hatfield

Frances Hatfield, Poetry Editor