Editor’s Notes | Nótaí na nEagarthóirí

Abstract

Editor’s Notes | Nótaí na nEagarthóirí David Gardiner wallace stevens famously wrote that “the imperfect is our paradise.” Stevens always investigates the human condition or, as he calls it in the title of the poem from which this quote comes, “our climate.” I have thought of this quote often as we hear about our eventual global return to the “new normal.” Many slaughterings of the English language from the past two years will be worth forgetting. “Socially isolating” as a good thing is just one of those casualties. Last year I spoke with another poet who laughingly said she had been “socially isolating for years” and wondered what the big deal was. We are already moving away from some of these terms. Perhaps they are so bad because on some level we knew we needed to invent terms we could quickly forget, or at least laugh at, so as to eventually heal. This musing is not to make light of something that can never be laughed away. It is to wonder what we have learned. I have learned how important other people are to me and that we use the platforms or connectors at hand to reach others. Though no friend of Zoom or Facebook or social media in general, I have been grateful for the opportunities that New Hibernia Review has afforded through these means to work with my colleagues Judy Gilats and Shannon Pennefeather. I think I am correct in saying that we have all been grateful for the chance to act as sort of scholarly ham radio operators, staying in touch with friends, scholars, and colleagues. Yet, the new normal may actually be a useful moment in that we may all learn that there is no normal. As human beings our differences, foibles, quirks, and connections build our society. As we embrace the imperfect, we might also embrace a new relationship to our worlds as we learn from the global and local successes, and mistakes, of the pandemic. Of course, I have no position from [End Page 5] which to learnedly speak upon this. For all any of us know, we may transmogrify back into global tribalism. But, as Jake Barnes says in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (banned in Ireland in 1953), “it would be pretty to think” that we won’t. I noted previously that working on the twenty-fifth anniversary issue of New Hibernia Review was a particular joy because doing so involved entering into a dialogue of a welcoming and insightful tradition. I hope the journal has another twenty-five years defined by welcome and insight. That would be as “normal” as we get around here. As I began work on the anniversary issue in spring 2020, I undertook the fool’s errand of attempting to select the “best” or “most characteristic” articles from a hundred issues within the preceding volumes. I thought the thousand-plus pages I originally selected might be cut down categorically rather than thematically. It was a fool’s errand, but even a fool’s errand is a walk somewhere. As a fallen-away Edmund Spenser critic, I have been subjected to the writings of Northrop Frye. Frye is one of those authors who is simply terrifying in his erudition. He can chart all of literature from the Bible through the Renaissance. Like Joseph Campbell, he repeatedly inspires a shake of the head, a full forehead rub, and the thoughts, “how does he know that? I’ll never know that.” But certain thoughts can shape our own thinking. My fool’s errand led to me learning something about the journal’s history and its future, as represented in this, the first original issue of its twenty-sixth year of publication. Thanks to Frye and too much “social isolation,” I sat in the archives in the Center for Irish Studies at the University of St. Thomas and tried to chart the progression of thought represented in New Hibernia Review through various themes and then categories. (This quest was likely assisted by the fact that, on the mostly locked-down campus, I could go days without seeing another colleague with whom to procrastinate.) At first, I tried...