“The poem is always incomplete,” Mahmoud Darwish writes, “the butterflies make it whole.” The poem lives in the world. It reaches beyond itself. It reaches beyond the page to touch objects, inspect lives, handle joys and tragedies, turning them this way and that until it finds them shadowed in mystery. The poem looks beyond itself and sees afresh our mundane habits, finds the crisis of the headline in its true scope. And as the poem reaches for the world, the world reaches for the poem. The reader comes to the page and picks up the poem. The reader discovers some bliss or wildness or rapture or ache, finishes the page, and returns to the world. The poem is porous. It is a site of transit, made whole by what arrives and what departs.
The crises of the world are stark. This issue arrives a month into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The pandemic wears on. Climate change maintains its damage and deepening threat. The words of this issue lets the world arrive. Whether the news of our time is spoken of directly or indirectly, the poem, like any part of our lives, is born out of the interconnectedness of our existence—an enmeshment that brings not only the news but the tenderness, bliss, and reverie of being infused in this totality.
The poets selected for this issue are the finalists for Interim’s annual book contest. Reading for the contest, Claudia Keelan and I have consistently been stunned by the submissions that arrive and how the final manuscripts speak to one another. This issue of our finalists serves as a record of that conversation we witness.
We are pleased to announce two manuscripts will be published from that annual contest. Mark Irwin's Joyful Orphan will be the next book in Interim’s Test Site Poetry Series. It is a book that defamiliarizes our lived experience, changing it into the beauty it always was. Matthew Moore is the winner of the Betsy Joiner Flanagan Award in Poetry for Jeanne d'Antietam, a book of poetry that encounters and transforms the often cruel revelation of American history.
-Andrew S. Nicholson