Editorial

If you held it in your paw would it reek of a steady curdling? Could you use it to score fresh vinyl or would its blade seek out and accentuate the old blunted grooves? Is it slick with linseed oil? If you stumbled on it in its natural habitat would its snout be rooting in the leaf litter? Rooting for what and how desperately?

We didn’t set out to ask questions like these when we began this project. But the closer we came to agreeing on the poems to include in our first issue, the more we noticed the emergence of a grainy common ground, a conceptive and rooted vitality, that transmitted and mutated poetry’s genetic code with each line. Taken together then, these poems are germ, ferment, and mulch, warm with a latent and malty potential for life and growth. But they are also definite threads in themselves, strata, filigrees, blood vessels in x-ray lit with iodine, channelling and redirecting our apprehension of the world and the ideas implacably propagating within it. Like Colin Herd’s ‘pony cat’, tangentially branching its way into a cogent fluency, they prompt a kind of unstoppable bifurcation of thought, inviting the reader to shirk the good, clean, easy routes toward closure. Sometimes, like Mike Farren’s whalebone in ‘The whalebone, dreaming,’ they prefer not to move at all so that the mythical, the climatic, the imaginary all come buffeting through on ‘the salt-roughened towel of the wind.’

It’s this type of graininess, an organic, wilful agitation of experience that defines these poems in the fankle of poetry worth thinking about: they testify to poetry’s ability to incite, provoke, and encourage.

Patrick Romero McCafferty & Christian Lemay