From the Editor

Dear Reader,

It’s a brilliant late afternoon in January, and Bracken is shifting from one state of being to another—from the scatter of collected pieces that seemed to call to us in our search, to the formed arrangement—this shape, this bloom, that is our new issue.

It impresses me how the sense of transformation runs through this gathering of poetry and visual art. On the most obvious level, there is much breakage, decay, and dying going on in these works. But what seems to be captured, what’s coming across, is the sense of changing states, from one form to another, rather than a sense of ending.

We suffer loss—a loved one grows ill and too soon is no longer embodied as we are. Mary Beth Hines, in “Flying, Falling,” writes of “the summer my husband / crashed to the floor clasping / his still-smoking pipe, his chest, my wrist.” Paulann Petersen, in “Wake,” regards the cremated “bones of my mother, bones of my father.” Martha Silano, in “What Isn’t Broken,” speaks of her mother “those final days when all she had was her garden….”

And there’s more—not only these human deaths, but other transformations. Tina Blade, in “Spawning Season,” addresses the salmon: “When you finally arrive, what you are / pours from you….” Lorrie Ness, in “Felling the Sycamore,” must participate in a tree’s demise “because the trunk was hollowed by carpenter ants….” Kurt Luchs, in “Dead Snapping Turtle,” tells of moving the killed creature from the breakdown lane to “the grass beyond the gravel, / a makeshift graveyard gift / from a distant human cousin / hurrying home.”

Among the artworks displayed here there is also this pronounced theme. The images provided by Àsìkò are profoundly integrative of different worlds that are difficult to cross between. Michael Gannon shows us built form giving way to time’s forces, returning to the greater flow. Jeremy Siedt offers up the beauty of corrosion itself. Jeanne Simmons conveys to us (in a way that resonates with Àsìkò’s work) the sense of a fluid shifting between human and non-human natural forms.

We at Bracken had no conscious agenda in mind as we selected work for Issue X—no agenda, that is, other than to gather work that relates human nature to nature. So it strikes me now that what we find ourselves offering makes prominent this changing of form, the crossing between states of being, and especially that crossing we call dying, back into the world that gives rise to new forms.

In Werner Herzog’s 2010 film Cave of Forgotten Dreams, an archeologist involved with the 20,000-year-old Chauvet Pont-d’Arc Cave in southern France speaks of the consciousness of Palaeolithic people, emphasizing their sense of fluidity. Transformations, between body and spirit, between human and animal, between the imagined and the real…all were implicitly part of their world.

I imagine that as our civilization has become more materialistic and individualistic, we’re less open to such fluidity, and it’s in the arts that we have opportunity to rediscover and reclaim it. Perhaps we’re all calling to ourselves, through the poems and images we make, to return to this consciousness!

I recently visited my son who lives in Taiwan. On the flight home, I woke to a predawn sky in the window, and clicked the accompanying image with my phone. Looking at it, I see cloud and sea, two forms of water, in a vast and infinitely complex mutual exchange of states. If not for this miracle in our planet’s range of surface temperatures, we would not be here. And I think of another poem we’re offering, Risa Denenberg’s “Still Life with Moving Parts,” in which she intones “The human body made of seawater.” She goes on to cite “How I fall and rise to fall and rise again. / The diastole of my heart and of the sea.”

As I’ve written this letter to you, dear reader, the sky has darkened, transformed from day to night. I must go on to other things now. I hope you’ll find comfort and encouragement in these works—in this feeling of ongoingness through all the transformations, subtle and profound, that lie ahead.

Thank you for being with us!

Jed