Introduction THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

Abstract

With this issue, The Midwest Quarterly introduces A Year of Poetry, a series of four poetry-only issues to be published through summer 2014. Poetry has always been vital to the mission of MQ, a forum where both beginning and well-known poets have found a home for their work. While often highlighting poets of Kansas and the Midwestern United States, MQ has regularly published authors of national and international stature, including highly-regarded figures such as William Stafford, Charles Bukowski, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ted Kooser, Diane Glancy, and Jared Carter. Given its long history of publishing the best contemporary poetry, it's with great excitement that The Midwest Quarterly celebrates this legacy by publishing a full year of issues devoted entirely to poetry. It is truly a great honor for me to serve as Guest Poetry Editor for these issues. Each issue will focus on a pair of related but contrasting themes: in this case, The Living and The Dead. Some poems relate directly to the themes, while others have a looser connection that is intuitive and associative rather than rational and well-defined. Offering a pair of themes in each issue will allow readers to observe how a wide range of poets investigate these apparent dichotomies, sometimes by engaging with one theme or the other, sometimes by exploring both simultaneously, and in some cases implicitly questioning the validity of such concrete categories. Reading the poems selected for this issue, I'm struck both by the diversity of voices and by the sense of congruence that emerges within that diversity. I'm especially pleased by the geographic range represented in this issue, which includes the work of poets from as nearby as Pittsburg, Kansas (home of MQ), from elsewhere in the Midwest, from throughout the United States, and from as far away as Italy and Dubai. This volume contains poems from dozens of writers mostly unfamiliar with one another's work, but I have routinely been startled by how clearly they speak to one another, echoing one another much like a musical theme and variations. They illustrate the wide variety of expression in contemporary poetry while also revealing the commonality of human experience. Poetry of life and death of course goes back to ancient times. Death is everywhere in the Iliad, as when the vengeful Greek hero Achilles slaughters so many Trojans that the river Scamander runs red with blood. Perhaps the most touching moment in Homer's epic, however, comes when the Trojan prince Hector, preparing for battle and ultimately heading toward his own death, says goodbye to his wife Andromache and infant son Astyanax. While Andromache pleads with her husband to avoid battle, the child cries, frightened by his father's battle helmet. Amused by their son's unwarranted fear, the parents laugh, while Hector removes his helmet and affectionately lifts the child into the air. Amidst the clamor of war and the legions of bloody dead, it is brief affirmation of life in one of its small, gentle moments. Astyanax himself will be killed, thrown from the walls of Troy by the conquering Greeks, but in this scene the interaction between father and son is a celebration of the living, a moment of fear and tenderness, as well as laughter. The life force of a child mingles with the shadow of death that hangs over his warrior father: As he said this, Hektor held out his arms to take his baby. But the child squirmed round on the nurse's bosom and began to wail, terrified by his father's great war helm-- the flashing bronze, the crest with horsehair plume tossed like a living thing at every nod. His father began laughing, and his mother laughed as well. Then from his handsome head Hektor lifted off his helm and bent to place it, bright with sunlight, on the ground. When be had kissed his child and swung him high to dandle him, he said this prayer: O Zeus and all immortals, may this child, my son, become like me a prince among the Trojans. …