WELCOME TO HYMN FOR THE LIVING POET III
Dearest Readers,
Verse of April began when I moved to Paris, when I had no money, very little community in my new city, and a kind of broken heart about poetry. I started this project with a wish to dissuade my depression, because a part of me knew well that art was my fount, that poetry was where my ostracizing self-expression had gone to chance survival. Yet, I had lost my tether to the story, the very big and the very personal one. In a rather selfish way, I created Verse of April to re-exhilarate myself, to connect with those who believed in poetry, who really believed it (in all of its glorious amorphousness) had sustaining or restorative power.
Through meeting you — contributors and lectors — and your unique attachments to certain lines and inflections of poems dreamed by poets out into the reality of our literary universe, I have been enlivened, in both my private and civic life. And I thank you for letting me read you, in this way, first, before I could then turn your testimonies outwards, onto this little corner of the Internet. I will never forget this trust, this too a spring.
I recount all of this because this year, in particular, has asked me to remember an old lesson — that my art and your art and the art of the people we most care about in this world is hard at work, is absolutely at work every day, even and maybe most rigorously in our desolation. And so, I want to lay a little token here: my love, we need you — every word, every note, every thrum you must make to shake up this darkness.
I am honored, then, this year to present Hymn for the Living Poet, Volume III, a collection of poems that indeed affirms how much a poet (of great recognition, of local fame, or overlooked by Internet algorithm) is at work, is daily shaking up the darkness. Please join me in celebrating Lénaïg Cariou, Richard Dailey, Margaret DeRitter, Raye Hendrix, Kelly Jones, Andrew Ketcham, Özge Lena, Erin Little, Rhiannon McGavin, Tory V. Pearman, Nupur Shah, Spencer Silverthorne, Anouk Smies, and Nikki Ummel, and read on to find tributes to Chad Bennett, Leila Chatti, Eduardo C. Corral, Annelyse Gelman, Joy Harjo, Sandra Moussempès, Stevie Nicks, Kelli Russell Agodon, Kristin Sanders, Ibrahim Selman, Diane Seuss, Jason Stoneking, Rebecca Tamás, and Snehal Vadher.
Thank you,
Carrie Chappell
Editor-in-Chief