VERSO / volume 7 — October editorial
Dear—
As we head into the final months of packages of our pandemic-adapted VERSO /, the question of whether or not we’ll go back to a live form soon is growing more emphatic, at least in my imagination. The longing to assemble our bodies around poetry and art, to be bodies together in space, to share a glance over a glass of wine—it makes me wonder, what sensations has the pandemic most pronounced?
I asked a masseuse the other day what bodies felt like when she started her practice up again. She seemed relieved at my question, as though the thought had occurred to her but she had not yet had a place to put it. She said that she saw a lot of single moms at first, and almost all of them broke down. She said people were really tense, and many disconnected from their own nerve endings. She said it was hard to know where to put all the grief she was working out. She said our bodies are like warehouses of care—or of its lack.
As I’ve tried to come back into my body after this year, my body which has changed with age, illness, climbing, two pregnancies, and a subsequent dysmorphia, I find myself arriving at poems or works of art in deeply different ways than when my body was young and more or less unmarked. Maybe this is why I’ve thought about longing throughout the pandemic, why a lot of my poetry over the last year has taken on a more corporeal, even carnal, vocabulary. And maybe this is why I love the physicality of both of this month’s contributions. Alex’s collage Pa semper lo mi baila (I will dance forever) certainly has a tactile register. In the context of this past year,
I read this ode to elders and loved ones, in verse and portraiture, as a response to longing in the act of its assembly. Almost everyone here is smiling. Everyone looks sure of themselves on the Earth (note the atmosphere-lit moon at the back). The speaker of the affirmation-poem is, too, asserting their own surety. And importantly, doing it through dance.
In designing Radna’s chapbook, I wanted to give the poems, both in their original Dutch and new English form, a tactility that we’ve otherwise become used to between the pages of books. Also a tactility in the motion of their translation from one language to the next, not just because the linguistic passage itself is its own kind of body, but also because the poems seem, at least to me, to be set at a pitch to reach the receptors of our central nervous system—a synesthesia between seeing the words on the page and discerning, on our skin, the lap of the water at our rocky sides. The balance of the high-rise. The coat over our shoulders.
I wish you this kind of assembly. This kind of care. I hope to see you soon.
With love,