With Love to Literary Journals
Literary journals across the country and the world are doing the daily work of keeping poetry alive, available, and in the public consciousness. I am so grateful for the editors, publishers, readers, and poets who put in long (usually volunteer!) hours to take poems and create beautiful creations of art.
Last year, I had the honor of being published in the final volume (Volume 35) of the Briar Cliff Review, a literary journal published out of Briar Cliff University in Sioux City, near where I was raised. For thirty-six years, this magazine kept its mission to encourage beginning and mid-career writers, growing from an in-house publication to a stunning national/international publication. When the college dissolved its creative writing department last year, the Briar Cliff Review was one of the casualties.
Northwest Iowa, where Briar Cliff is located, is a deeply conservative part of the country. A Christian college in Sioux Center (about 45 minutes from Sioux City) is the site where Donald Trump claimed, to a cheering a crowd during his previous run for president, that he could step onto 5th Avenue and shoot anyone he wanted. This is not an area of the country that celebrates diversity—political or religious, race, gender expression—you name it. In 2021, a man checked out the four LGBTQ positive books from my hometown, Orange City library and burned them publicly.
I can’t help but grieve the loss of a literary journal in this portion of the country. A place that treasured and promoted literary and visual art—where writers from all over the country and world could bring their work and ideas and selves. A haven like this is an act of resistance against systems of domination, censorship and control.
The poem that was published in last year’s Briar Cliff Review is actually one that I wrote about the tension of living in a climate (both a physical climate and a political climate) that was threatening to life, growth, and art. At the time, this poem was a way to explore the grief I felt about loved ones having painfully different beliefs than my own during a divisive political season. The flowers continue to bloom in a harsh climate, even as the weather turns to winter. I was struck by the openness of the flowers, and the title “repentance” came from the state of being they maintain—a gentle willingness to change, to adapt, to die, to grow.
I wasn’t feeling very hopeful about my world—the public or the personal one—at that point in time, and was surprised when my poem ended hopefully, with the idea that roots “remember the pitch/that turns everything to song.” The poem is maintaining that a stance of repentance is more powerful than the forces that oppose it.
But, thank God, unlike a politician or a reverend, a poem does not have to preach, it gets to just exist, like a flower. “Poetry makes nothing happen” poet W.H. Auden once famously said, differentiating a poem’s language from political language. In a culture where we are constantly pressured to make something happen or capitalize on our labor, it is revolutionary to make nothing happen. Poetry is the happening itself. Poetry is the paradox of living in a world of great suffering and joy. Poetry is a form that helps observe reality and thus helps us bear our experience.
And so, if poems are flowers, all the little literary journals are a system of fine roots, connecting, nourishing and sustaining culture through harsh and kind seasons, doing the immensely important work of reminding us of each other.
