Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Jim Hicks SIGMUND FREUD ONCE offered an outline of the relations between poets and their dream-worlds. Unlike much of his work, his words on this subject still seem as rich and insightful as they must have appeared in December of 1907. For this issue, which celebrates our magazine's sixtieth year of publication, the psychoanalyst's observations are particularly relevant. The influence of history on the poetic imagination, Freud comments, "hovers, as it were, between three times—the three moments of time which our ideation involves." First, the imagination encounters "some current impression, some provoking occasion in the present"; from there, he notes, "it harks back to a memory of an earlier experience"; and finally,"it now creates a situation relating to the future." He concludes, "Thus past, present, and future are strung together, as it were, along the thread of the wish that runs through them." I'm fairly sure our founding editors never anticipated that their magazine would live to salute the third decade of this third millennium. I happen to have achieved the same age as our publication (a sum of years neither of my parents exceeded), and I certainly never expected to be around this long. And yet, for sixty years, the "thread of the wish" this magazine represents has never wavered: we promote social justice and equality, along with great art. We aim to provoke debate, inspire action, and expand understanding of the world around us. That's why, to celebrate our sixtieth anniversary, we decided to take Freud's words literally. We begin this issue with a "provoking occasion": major voices from two of the world's many hot spots. Looking across the globe today, one might well wonder where fires are not burning; in any case, Serhiy Zhadan's poetic dispatch from Ukraine, brought to us by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin, much like Xu Xi's reflections on Hong Kong past and present, are surely not to be missed. After that, we've put together, not simply "the memory of an earlier experience," but a full, complex series of reflections on how we engage with memory and history, even in our most traumatic moments. Over the past half century or more, groundbreaking work on this subject has been done under the aegis of Holocaust Studies, and in this issue we bring you not only contributions from Laura Levitt and James Young, two key theorists of Holocaust and Jewish Studies, but also an essay by Ghislaine Dunant, Charlotte Delbo's biographer, which [End Page 584] discusses the unique contribution of the Auschwitz survivor's writing. To conclude this section, Patricia Chu applies the work of Holocaust studies to post–World War II literature by Asian American writers, and Peter Chametzky describes the implicit redefinition of citizenship that immigrant artists are bringing to contemporary Germany. The art of Anna Schuleit Haber resonates with each of the preceding arguments, capping this section perfectly. To complete its work, Freud notes, the poetic imagination must also "create a situation relating to the future"; in planning this issue, our editors realized that if we looked only to the past, our celebration would remain incomplete. Instead we invited a cohort of favorite writers from our past decade—winners of our Halley Prize for poetry as well as the authors of some of our favorite stories—to nominate emerging writers we hadn't yet published, authors whose work they felt belonged in our pages. Our friends, old and new, responded to our call, and we quickly faced an embarrassment of riches. As a result, the bulk of this anniversary issue—some eighteen poets and five writers of prose—looks out on the future, welcoming it here and now. We end our sixtieth year, and our sixtieth volume year, by reprinting a selection of work that first appeared online in a blog series launched in November 2016. For reasons obvious to all, during that moment of political crisis, we offered space to writers who would confront the racism, xenophobia, and misogyny, the catastrophic social and environmental policies that, though the roots are surely deeper, have so thoroughly infested our public sphere during these past two years. From this series...