squircle line press

“During most of our lives, we simply ignore the gaps in sense,

but poetry can use language in a way that brings them to our

attention. And once they’ve come to our attention, we start to

notice that new things, new kinds of sense, accrete in them.

These points of breakdown, these gaps, are not found just by

art – they’re also found by violence and war, by love, wonder,

and fear – by any experience that takes us to the unique. But

I think the arts are particularly able to mold new accretions

in constructive ways.”

~ Cole Swensen

This excerpt from Swenson’s artist statement appears in Lyric Postmodernisms, a beautiful anthology of contemporary poetry. In here are solid works constantly pushing against the limits of language. What happens when the lyric and narrative refuse closed definitions, and collide headlong into each other? What happens to unity and verisimilitude, and the logic of truth and metaphor? What structural moves does your poem make to create such a drift, where textuality constantly engages and disengages itself, allowing a series of cracks and clefts that continue into larger, wider fissures? Send us your poems, the ones you feel depict this sense of planar shift and displacement. Wow us with their undecidedness, the kind of cheeky resistance that dares defy closure and naming.