Reading back through this issue of Poem, I've been struck most of all by a sense, not of estrangement, but of strangeness. For a British reader, much of the material in this magazine is triumphantly unfamiliar. Of course, that's the intention of every issue of a periodical devoted, as this one is, to internationalism. But very often editing such material turns out to be a matter of finding dialogue among differences. Editing often means noticing “kinships” between thematic concerns, stories or even poetic strategies from widely different parts of the poetry world. Those kinships create a kind of dialogue, between texts and with the reader.
Such dialogues are present in this issue, too. The Moscow-based Ukrainian poet Maria Galina plays with childhood and with folk themes, as do the Georgians Diana Amphimiadi and Marina Tektumanidze, though Amphimiadi and Tektumanidze surrender to such forms more completely. The British Buddhist poet Maitreyabandhu and the Canadian George Elliott Clarke give us very contrasting myths of sea-voyages; the cruelty of individual human destinies that Clarke portrays in his uniquely baroque prosody is also excavated by C.K. Williams in the searching, striding North American lines of the poem which opens these pages.
But the most significant dialogue evident in ‘Making Self, Making Sense’ is, as our title suggests, between the writer and his or her environment. Many of the poems that follow portray the sense of an emergent self: from Amir Or's extended daybreak sequence to British debutant Andrew McMillan's sense of bodily awakening, to the unfolding sensibility explored by two leading Slovak women poets, Mila Haugova and Stanislava Repar. In the prose section, ‘The Writer in Context’, this exploration becomes explicit. The Macedonian poet and prose writer Aleksandar Prokopiev skips the light fantastic in a fictionalized account of his own youth in former Yugoslavia. The young Lebanese poet Omar Sabbagh essays writing as an old man to portray his time working at the American University in Dubai. And Maria Galina and Arkady Shtypel use their tremendous literary-scientific expertise, as well as their own cultural location, to show us something of the links between contemporary events in Ukraine and what's being written in that country. We're especially glad to learn from this piece, which we're delighted and honoured to report marks their joining Poem’s Editorial Board.
Such dialogue does much to mitigate the strangeness of new work; so why should this issue feel more unfamiliar in tone than is sometimes the case? I suspect that's because it is a volume full of writing about, and emerging from, the experience of change. Much of what's published here is written from territory that is, in one way or another, unfamiliar to its author. Most obviously, this includes writing about growing up; as well as philosophical thought experiments. There is also writing about war, which is indeed unlit and unknown territory.
The writing self and the sense it can make are involved in a dialectic whose cross-hatching fills our writing. In this issue of Poem we have tried to celebrate that fullness by making it explicit.