Jordan Meiller’s poem, “About the Obvious,” is similarly observational, but Meiller’s witness is internal he tracks his own motion of mind. Who can he thank except for his faithful shadow? Where does gratitude go when it is unexpressed? “I turned and turned / and saw only my shadow.” Dzukogi’s speaker is suspicious of this advice because he is alone in every direction.
“I heard on the news / to thank someone, today,” he writes. In his short poem, “Isolation,” one of his three pieces in Issue 5, Saddiq Dzukogi also discusses how we look to the media for guidance when we’re cut off from our routines and communities. And noticing takes on particular importance in the moment these poems embody, a moment in which each of us is recalibrating our relationship with home, family, and interiority.
The “single bee,” the “rising hum,” “the whole risky world on show.” You want me to notice, Facebook? Check out this “holy dread.”Īll of the poets in Issue 5 demonstrate a dedication to noticing deeply –– to engaging with self and world even as self and world change. It menaces and sparks, shimmering from a distance.” The poem converts Facebook’s banal advice into a kind of noticing that is anything but sentimental. There is also transformational irony, as in Rebecca Aronson’s poem, “Notice One Thing Every Day (FB advice on living through pandemic),” one of five of her poems in this issue: “I notice first / a swarm of bees.
PANOPLY SOCIAL NETWORK TV
There is deep anxiety, such as that which Christian Gullette reflects in his poem, “Insomnia,” one of two of his pieces published in Issue 5: “I wish I could wake my husband for sex / instead of scrolling on my phone, / Americans arguing online / if poetry helps or hurts.” Gullette brilliantly elicits the mood of quarantine, numbness shoved up against fear, all things holding the same charge (or lack thereof), from dog to breath to cum to TV to –– well, to poetry. These poems each boast their own flowers, splayed and defiant and vibrant and dying in the mid-summer heat, but inside the earth, their roots are tangled. Each poem provides one glimpse into a world amid a pandemic, but we’re so proud to present them in conjunction with one another. Issue 5 of Guesthouse offers myriad answers by way of our thirty-two exceptional contributors, each responding to the current moment with intuition and consciousness as well as a deep, intentional commitment to craft. May rolled into June, and June into July, and as we curated this special edition issue from an expansive number of impressive and generous submissions, the question at the core of our editorial practices took on new depth, breadth, and complexity: What place does poetry have in this universe at this very minute? And we were looking inward –– at mind, body, fear, and habit –– as refuge from the outer world, which is rife with new dangers. We were looking outward –– at each other, at nature, at systemic paradigms –– as refuge from their inner worlds, both literally and figuratively. Poets tasked with triangulating our writing practice with new responsibilities, shifting priorities, and revived anger. Universally, we saw poets recalibrating our inner and outer lives, our bodies and environs, and our relationships with ourselves and others.
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