No, in all likelihood nothing will happen because of a poem. And as I sit here, staring out of a window I’ve been confned behind for months, I realize that what makes this notion particularly unbearable is that the impotence of the poem, as such, really stands in for my own. For all the times when the very best I could do for those I love and myself, throughout this past year, was precisely doing nothing. But a poem, unlike me, has no need to stay behind windows and walls. A poem won’t transmit viruses to those who read it, nor be touched by the violence that would beat us so eagerly back into silence. And that is why a poem, in no metaphorical sense, really gives life a way to keep happening – a mouth, as Auden says, to keep breathing. Wisława Szymborska once compared this quiet endurance to a form of autotomy – the ability to survive precisely when there’s nothing left to do except, literally, give up:

In danger, the holothurian splits itself into two:
it offers one self to be devoured by the world
and, in its second self, escapes…

We, too, know how to split ourselves
but only into the flesh and a broken whisper.
Into the flesh and poetry.

Poetry, yes. Really

Mantis 19 rehearses and amplifes the power of this affirmation from first to last page, and in this way it offers perhaps the most urgent and corroborative issue we’ve put out to date. Sara Benninga, author of this year’s cover, puts it well when she describes her desire to paint “figures and the encounter between them.” In the stark evocativeness of her own figures, it’s a desire that perfectly encapsulates the uncompromising but caring, attentive tone that resonates through the “broken whispers” of our contributors.

NEW POETRY

Our opening section leads the way with the looming question of survival, as the flapping mark of a butterfly pointedly insists: “Are you dead or alive?” (Hogan) From a smoldering vision of “night / roped in by a crew of wings” (Yencich) to the relentless batterings of the night wind, many of these new poems turn our attention to nature not for the rhetorical seductions of transcendence, but as invitations to guard the fugitive moment “we woke to a pink-sky and the late-summer // flowers… The wind cold against our cheeks.” (Khan) The world, at such invitations, comes alive with memory and what little truths it may bring back to comfort us, as when “You realized / before anyone else, the water makes / the rocks darker.” (Book) And more familiar urban scenes similarly reveal spaces where the afterglow – or the intimation – of an encounter enlivens longing with the pulse of otherness, now in a mall where twin sleeping bags “at last might be joined / double-wide to admit two / bodies in a single space,” (Amato) now in a room “sipping our gins, like dipping / our hands into mountain- / side riversmouths.” (Maolalai) Indeed, as we pace our rooms, our feelings contracted to a beat from screen to screen, there is much to cherish in the energy of words that still vindicate “the green / Of felds the mind must be / To tune a farmer’s evening theme” (Nathan) and lead us “into the pink of the she-wolf’s mouth” until our fingers are “wild and wet with want” in her fur. (Hemming)

Other poems move the opposite way, fathoming the dark sources of that energy in “windows / that open inwards,” (Fiorentino) in silence splintering off a voice that’s “ been / heavy with longing / for too long,” (Raber) or a vanishing prospect of “myself stretched / a long, gray road / I drive / again, // again.” (Ginader) Survival here can take almost any form, from the irony of “all my ugly blooming like peonies in my grandmother’s favorite vase, if my grandmother could afford a favorite vase,” (Whitehorne) to the vertigo of a mother who “felt I was dead inside her too she would wake in the middle of the night and scream for me to wake up,” (Spirito) or a yearning still coagulating for “tree barking and the tile crumbling huge into the dream and the mother i want and the pain i want.” (Tomas) From a barroom tuned to “the voice of rage and ruin, said the last drop of my Long Island” (Porawagamage) to the complicity of a bathroom mirror when “still / there is time to wipe it clean / before the boys / come in.” (Miller) There is loss, yes, numb and indelible as the faces still “Smiling, not understanding / That you would be swept away,” (Holdridge) and yet also a powerful reminder that “Something in my history keeps calling my name,” and that the wail of despair sharpens the ring of resolve. (Ezenwa-Ohaeto) We are now acquainted with exposure without precedents, isolated and besieged online, on TV, on our phones by “lyrebirds who sang their grudge” (Noah) incessantly all around us. And yet the voices that find their way in these poems never come to insinuate or persuade us, but as they listen. Never to prevail, but to help something survive.

TRANSLATIONS

Our new translations span the enormous range of this task across time and space, from Imperial Rome to modern-day China and Indonesia. Thus Hadrian’s animula dovetails through “Pilgrim, wanderer, drifter,” even a “sweet mote” come and gone and yet, in the final analysis, always a “Soul, little vagabond rambling / my body.” (Capps) Leopardi’s lunar modulations remind us that nostalgia, after all, may really prove our closest approximation to eternity, and the most persistent of comforts “When hope is long and the path of memory / Is short, to conjure up the past, / Even the saddest things.” (Brahic) And if after a whole year of seclusion we’re bound to beware of the coils of solipsism, we’re also eased into the lifegiving embrace that a poet knows how to find there – “Someone like me, / watering the impossible / while the sun makes sweet / the oranges,” as Salgado Maranhão reflects. (Levitin) Someone, perhaps, with no better reason to write than “because I exist,” Henri Meschonnic concedes, spinning an endless interrogation of memories in the hope they at least “feel / an old desire to live / rubs its muzzle in my fngers.” (Bedetti and Boes) At the touch of such fingers things may turn weird, their revelations ominous, but to be fair we’re not all that likely to come to a poem “to explore / a beech tree forest,” in Grzegorz Wróblewski’s memorable snapshot: “We are here to hunt for trolls. / They are / getting / too close.” (Gwiazda)

We come to poems hunting for answers, which often means questions that may allow another to reach into our world, like Ma Yan’s letter to his friend Ma Hua: “It soothes me, gives me strength to reach / into the void… / Those steep mountains in the dry cold, / are they like us, calm and painless?” (Na Zhong) And we may reach and find nothing, and yet a poem still holds forth a space where “I branch out according to the light,” as Franca Mancinelli declares in mid-metamorphosis, “to open my chest wide / with the strength that comes from a seed.” (Taylor) Or it may resist such radiant impetus and confront the shadows, instead, of failure and rejection, as “within the crater” that Galeh Pramudianto so painstakingly outlines “amid / the debris / of your own undoing.” (Salmons) Loss calls out still to be heard, in fact – be it the gnawing loss that Astrid Cabral faces up to as she inquires “What daring or what fear / pushed you to the other side,” (Levitin) or the loss that the ravages of empire burned, like a brand, into the very “face” of a plant that “no longer shows up to morning / but the last flowers of a tree dying,” as Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo cries out. (Srinivas) Wherever these translations take us, in every language they lend us an ear into, we find ourselves traversing the spiritual and historical expanse of human feeling until veritably, in Gemma Gorga’s arresting phrase, “the unheard shriek / becomes unbearable to our ears.” (Dolin) And we return to our rooms, to our own words, with an invigorated sense of the miracle that’s accomplished any time anywhere, in any language, another “broken whisper” has found a way to survive.

SPECIAL SECTIONS

Three special sections round up the journey with incursions into the world out there, where poetry supposedly makes nothing happen. “2020: Protest” takes its cue from the events of this past spring and summer to interrogate the impossible coherence, as Katherine Whatley describes it, of poetic reflection, public discourse, and the spiraling “clarifcation” of our current sociopolitical crisis. At a different angle, the kaleidoscope of multilingualism brings the focus back on the poem as a site of encounter, where the “subterranean stream” of expression, as Gilad Shiram notes, nourishes a vital desire to reach beyond the limits of our own language, into that of others. Which rather fittingly leads to our concluding tribute in memory of the poet Eavan Boland, who passed away last April.

It seems an especially adequate note for Mantis 19 to close on, given Boland’s intimate knowledge of poetry’s place between life and necessity, words and loss. In “Quarantine,” in 2001, she wrote that:

And who would have guessed just how true that would ring still twenty years on, seeing how unlikely we are to come to poetry for graces now that a mouth, really, is what we urgently need – some small, but yes, also profoundly needful fact that might make it easier, as Ross Gay says, “for us to breathe.”

That, I trust, is what you will find in the following pages. Enjoy your reading.

Lorenzo Bartolucci
December 2020