No pandemics will keep us down. Many more will be on the horizon. If you have doubts about our future, banish them. Be inspired. Be comforted. Read on.
Bill Henderson, Introduction
In my pre-read post, a space I typically use to help change gears and root myself in the upcoming work I’ve chosen to do, I mentioned that there were fewer entries in this year’s Pushcart; in particular, fewer nonfiction pieces. I was nonetheless surprised to see, when I counted posts and compared to prior years, that this year’s volume had the fewest entries – despite having included more poems than in the last two years. I’m not sure those statistics mean anything, but I include them because I noticed. Noticing often precedes, and is essential for, understanding, after all.
The themes that jumped out at me this year were: the battle between cynicism and sincerity; grief and its many forms of expression; and relationships. These are not unique categories, particularly that last one, but I was interested in how they interwove, combining in different ways in different stories. The volume closed with a meditation on the flow of water, a nice way to envision all the writing and reading continuing on after the book is closed.
I enjoyed many of the pieces in this book, but I’ll give a special shout-out to a few.
“Upright at Thyatira” by Darrell Kinsey became something like last year’s “The Last Voyage of the Alice B. Toklas” in that it built itself around an element I’m interested in, and also had a message that touched me.
Karen Bender’s “The Shame Exchange” had me jumping up and down, it’s such a good idea; if only it could be instantiated in real life.
I’m a little nervous about giving Nicklaus Rupert’s “Aunt Job” a shout-out, because it’s kind of perverted; but it’s also constructed well enough to handle it and earns its humor. And, more than that, it’s an incredibly brave story for a magazine to publish, and for Pushcart to include.
The poems I included were wonderful:
“The Book of Fly” by John Phillip Johnson enticed me to buy his chapbook of the same title, a graphic poetry collection (graphic in the sense of illustrated, not obscene; I’m still of the generation that feels such a distinction is necessary).
David Wohjahn’s “Fifty-Eight Percent…” is a wonderfully constructed emotional powerhouse on the Holocaust. Yes, pretty much anything about the Holocaust is going to be emotional, but this was a master class in how to build.
Leila Chatti’s “The Rules” and Matthew Olzmann’s “Blake Griffin Dunks Over a Car” both dealt with the theme of cynicism vs sincerity in very concrete ways, and waved off all the workshoppers who dismiss sentimentality simply because it’s not cool. These poems show how to express that gooey center of us all without venturing into Hallmark Card territory.
It was strange to be reading stories and poems written in 2019. So much is different now, more than we could have anticipated. That’s the risk, I suppose, of writing with too much attention to the moment; the moment might pass, another moment might take priority. A lot of writers on my Twitter feed were advising each other to keep away from pandemic stories over the past year, primarily because there were so many of them and they weren’t fully fleshed-out pieces.
The other issue is that the impact of the moment isn’t yet fully known. Grief, of course, and isolation, but there may be a larger picture that becomes evident only years down the line. What of the kids who missed out on proms and graduations? That may seem trivial, but in the life of a teenager, the trivial often takes on huge importance. What of scaled-down weddings, of lonely funerals (so many lonely funerals), of connections via churches and community events that were sacrificed? Of course, there have been worse disruptions in routine; anyone who’s read anything set in the World War II years (or who has relatives who lived in that time – my in-laws had quite a story) can tell you that. The weeks of 9/11 took their toll. But the past year has been confusing for a lot of us, and we won’t be reading about that for several years to come.
Yet writing of this volume managed to capture the moment. Some of that was judicious editing: opening the volume with a story of a woman preparing for a variety of catastrophes, while ending up blindsided by the one she didn’t see coming, was a great choice. The conflict between irony and sincerity mirrored our split between defiance and prudence, while still highlighting how easy it is to be hard and cold and not let anything really touch us, and how much is lost that way. And of course grief, with all its different manifestations, is a constant human theme.
I was quite distracted in this past month so I may have overlooked some later pieces that would have grabbed me had I been more attentive. Life is like that sometimes. We miss a stretch of scenery because there’s someone tailgating us and we need to pay attention to the road. I’m hoping my grip on the steering wheel will loosen over the next few weeks, but for now, it’s enough to just keep going.
Next year, in a better state of mind. Next year, wherever.
A Just Recompense 