And lateness. I want to talk about the poems in our new issue, the Fall/Winter 2011 Common Ground Review, but I’ll circle back to that. As our local patron saint of poetry, Emily Dickinson, wrote, “tell all the truth, but tell it slant—/success in circuit lies.”
Here is my circuitous path to our latest production: the process of selecting poems; getting them into a publishable format, along with the new masthead, table of contents, and contributors’ biographies; marking up our gorgeous cover with words and ISBN# in exactly the right places; putting them into PDFs to send to the printer; reviewing the proof copy; waiting for and then sending out the issue—it has been an amazing series of experiences, and at the end of it, I look at Lorna Ritz’s autumnal cover knowing there are really good poems inside and, to cap them off, Annie Dawid’s thought-provoking essay on poverty, basic needs and assumptions (all connected by teeth). After all the work, the issue is here (more Winter than Fall, my apologies for the delay) and this is an Occasion.
I happen to like occasional poems: they contain an urgency and an urge to write which that day (or moment, or reason) has called up in the author, despite—I am sure—the author’s need to do other things, like laundry; I like that a specific and personal occasion for writing emerges out of the day everyone shares.
In this Fall/Winter issue (13.2), we have a number of wonderful occasional poems, some based on holidays (like Martha Christina’s “Memorial Day. A Brief Remembrance,” Robert Cooperman’s “As My Brother Held His Son,” and Joyce Meyer’s eclectic “American Thanksgiving”—I wish we’d been able to get the issue out in time for everyone to read it at their Thanksgiving table. Dudley Laufman’s occasional poem, “Ice Storm,” seemed prescient when our own Halloween blizzard knocked out our power for a week. Richard Merelman, Christopher Nye and Jay Rubin use the occasions of journeys—in St. Petersburg (and we get a phone call from St. Petersburg in Dustin Junkert’s “Friend”), through Tuscany, and across California). And there are many more, all occasions for celebration.
