Welcome to Hymn for the Living Poet
Dear Readers,
It is my honor to present Hymn for the Living Poet, a very special edition of Verse of April dedicated to poets of our time, in pieces made by artists of our time.
In the following pages, you will discover poems and art dedicated to those who write among us, to those who breathe in our same present. You will find works honoring poets we admire from afar, our paragons, who mark our bookshelves and screens with their carats of light, and you will encounter pieces celebrating the poets we meet in our daily lives, who sit with us through darkness and remind us of the sliver of moon seen best from our doorstep.
This anthology was envisioned during one of the strangest present tenses any of us has ever known and was imagined as a project that would commemorate the promise a poet writing today makes to their time. And yet, when I was selecting the pieces featured in Hymn for the Living Poet, I was touched by a strange sensation of timelessness: the act of reading this work, for living poets by living artists, thwarted a sense of the heaviness of living. Going through these pieces, I no longer felt “the present,” chained to it or charmed by it, as a bound of time, as a thematic of happenings, but found myself instead imbued with a fathomless energy, the iridescence of influence, that which happens when one person’s act on a surface flashes light on the table of our own universe.
Certainly, this collection is still very much for the living poets. My revelation seemed simply to remind me that making art in the face of this time is an act with a longer schema, a more expansive architecture than the interstices of now. That said, I am so glad to realize, too and again, that the poets we need to read, that the poets who are impacting today and our future are right there, rooting through the now and offering us a living poetry that is here—.
Please read on to discover it, with Sarah Ghazal Ali, Sara Elkamel, S. Fey, Patrycja Humienik, Rodger Kamenetz, Bayan Kiwan, Alison Grace Koehler, Maya Lowy, Andrea Panzeca, Dia Roth, Kristin Sanders, Andy Young, and Nina Zivancevic, as they respond in thanks, intrigue, and awe to the living poetry of Etel Adnan, Gabrielle Bates, Olivier Baez Bendorf, Marianne Boruch, Leila Chatti, Sara Elkamel, Ross Gay, Sabine Huynh, Bill Lavender, Gretchen Marquette, Laura Mullen, Tommy Pico, Gaia Rajan, Kit Robinson, Stephanette Vander, and Ivana Vujic.
With you in the now and onward,
Carrie Chappell
Editor-in-Chief