I’ve always thought spring the best season for poetry—wet, dazzling, brief—something to be sipped with red wine by the light of an April moon. And in our year 2002 poetry has become livelier than ever. Although not the mainstay that it was for the spoken-word societies of the past—the Medieval England that created the Robin Hood ballads, for example—it seems there’s a new appreciation of the simple power of a well-turned line. When I started writing in the 1980’s, poetry seemed a dead end. Every poem read the same: prosy, boxy, perhaps clever but ultimately lifeless. Meter and rhyme were frowned upon as old-fashioned; the idea was to break any remaining barriers in the language in order to achieve something original. The barriers have fallen, but not the ones the poets of that era imagined. With the end of the 20th century, progressivism itself has died.

The idea that a poem or story or painting must be avant-garde in order to be art is deeply ingrained in the American psyche, and few critics and commentators have caught on to this turning of the tide in our literature. But the fact is that most young writers are, like the rest of their generation, traditionalists at heart. Growing up in a society that is increasingly spare in its custom and ceremony, they are going back to the foundations, to the great Tolstoyan questions: What to do? How to live?

The result is, I think, a poetry that is much more natural, drawn from the artist’s own background and character, without the constraint of "sounding modern". It is also much more varied, as can be seen in our Spring issue. Sandy Carlson writes of dolphins and crows with a stunningly lyrical naturalism, while Stephanie Scarborough’s pithy sonnets recall Edna St. Vincent Millay. Ian Randall Wilson creates a poetry of well-crafted surfaces, Anthony Michael Telschow writes with a sardonic intellectualism, and Shelly Reed entertains us with board games. Scott Helmes, who has been writing since the 60’s, works mostly "visual poetry", which unfortunately is difficult to reproduce in newsprint; he’s represented instead by a dark, political dialogue.

Although no contemporary poet is likely to attain the popularity of Byron or Longfellow, this new dynamic appears to be drawing the attention of the reading public, and young adults in particular, such as the poetry slam devotee in Joyce Yarrow’s story The Free Zone. Which reminds me—Whistling Shade is having a reading of it’s own, on May 23rd (see the Readings section below). Until then, enjoy the spring.
- Joel Van Valin

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