wetgrain
Guest Editor’s Note
When Patrick asked me to guest edit the fourth issue of Wet Grain, we were on the top floor of a museum, overlooking eaves and statuary. I came to our conversation with a deep fondness for the print poetry journal, which he established in 2020.
‘I want poems that can’t be paraphrased,’ I told Patrick early on, by which I meant work that achieves what only poems can do. I was drawn to the mysterious and wrought, to the tonic of blunt words. When I shuffled the works, I found harmonies and fruitful frictions. What conversations might they form?
This issue was forged across distance. But when Patrick and I next meet, it will be among strangers, friends, and poets on a summer’s evening, at the first of several readings that bring to life what this issue has distilled. We’re glad to welcome you to this space, here and in the world.
Sylee Gore
Editorial
It’s lucky it takes so long. Poems arrive and live with me for weeks, months, before I even introduce them to one another. Before Sylee and I even meet to discuss, I’m busy getting to know them on a one-to-one basis. Being a host is a privilege, playing host to this issue’s poems has felt especially so. Guests that don’t tire, they bring daily gifts, various and surprising.
All visitors have to move on, even if moving on just means from screen into print. In the winter I met with Isabelle Baafi to chat about magazines and their role in literary culture. She highlighted the importance of providing a regular and reliable space in which to promote work as it matures toward bookhood. Having read for this issue, I imagine that ideal magazine as a kind of hostel, where everyone bunks down together, where everyone you share a room with is also on their way, and the same routines are carried out every morning and evening for years.
Wet Grain doesn’t offer this. So far, we’ve put out four issues, one autumn and three summers. They’ve come together out of pitched, unpredictable phases of reading and effort. While contributors have put out collections and won prizes, we’ve slowly and arrhythmically put each out into the world, sure, at least, that they’re in the best possible shape they can be.
What kind of meeting place is this we’re offering then? Less pilgrim’s hostel, more impromtu round-table. A bit like the (thankfully rescued) Butcher’s Dog, whose editors gives the warmest and most articulate introductions to the poems they publish on launch night, we want to say things about the work we publish. Also like Butcher’s Dog, we publish around thirty poems an issue — saying things that do justice to even such a small number takes a long time!
So my hope for this short print-run magazine is that a shifting mantel of expression might form around the fizzing core of each poem. That the poems we share might make somebody think and articulate a thought like this one, from Gabriel Levine Brislin’s reading of ‘a lazy clairvoyant predicts her own future with her phone’s autocomplete’ by Laura Theis: ‘the forked paths of autocomplete lead back onto themselves in a monologic maze. The future talks in circles: a fragile feedback loop that quite literally takes the words right out of our mouths.’ It’s all there in the poem but isn’t it so exciting when someone finds words to talk about it like this? As Jed Munson observes in response to Agata Maszlowska’s poem ‘A Lack of Knowledge’, ‘understanding can easily lord over the understood’: hopefully, the commentary our contributors provide is where conversation about the poems begins not where it ends.
Whether we’re comfortable with the ephemeral nature of literature or strive to preserve against it, often it’s that delicacy that lends poetry its efficacy. In Maszlowska’s poem, forgetting what has been said is an organic process almost as material and awful as corporeal decomposition. Contrastingly, Caleb Leow’s ‘The Hoarders’ challenges readers to dig for their lives. Only by digging into the trash heap of language will the precious be uncovered, become distinguishable for what it is. Both these interpretations point to the work done by poetry magazines as well as by poets.
That work looks and sounds different every time I read for the magazine. We’re extremely fortunate to have two contributions in translation in this issue: three poems (including the title poem) from Lutz Seiler’s pitch & glint translated from German by Stefan Tobler, and the Mexican poet Cristina Rivera Garza’s self-translated ‘Before the War’. A bit like the commentary at the back of this issue, the work of translation that brings these poets to us gives it a new body. Each is an interpretation without which we couldn’t do any interpreting ourselves.
While there are lots of unifying themes I’d love to talk about, it doesn’t seem necessary to do more than flag them here. The representation of mothers outside of the nuclear family is significant in this issue (see Heidi Williamson’s ‘There once was a sister-lion’, Laura Varnam’s ‘Meresong’, Lubi Barre’s ‘Single’); of refrains in songs as personal talismans (Isabelle Baafi’s ‘Reader, I married him’, Samuel Tongue’s ‘fragments’, and Nur Turkmani’s ‘A Warda Song is Long Enough’); and of a kind of grammar in visual art (Imogen Reid’s ‘Print on Wove Paper’, Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese’s wonderful cover art, Alia Zapparova’s ‘With breath’, Laura Davis’s ‘Strand’).
I’m grateful to Sylee, who, in her role as guest editor, encouraged the inclusion of visual work and more international writing. If an issue is ever its editor, as some believe, this one is brightly lit and composed like one of her visual poems, so as to draw out the tactility of its contents. As always I’m so grateful to our contributors and all who sent poems for consideration. Cheers for accompanying us through the spring.
Patrick Romero McCafferty, May 2023