Even as 196 days have passed since October 7th, 2023, there has been and cannot be no easy resumption of daily life, even as readers or writers who are likely to be far from the geographic reach of ongoing genocide in Palestine. And should you find that is not your reality, whether through imminent danger, or threat to your family or loved ones, it is my own dearest hope that the sweetness of daily life is restored, and further—guaranteed—to you and yours, safe, liberated, and free.

I could not begin to suggest that I have an ethical answer for how to live with such knowledge of such an extremity of violence that is taking place, in this moment or the next, in my capacity as an ordinary person, writer, and editor. But I do know that there can be no movement through daily life, especially one within the complicit parameters of the U.S., unshadowed by genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and in refugee camps, international military strikes, and for many, near-unbearable daily tension and uncertainty. In such a context, nothing short of the heroic suspends us from this state of permanent disgrace—though we must yet do what we can when and where that is possible. Especially if you are online, you will have by now come across many resources and points of access to help, act, educate, participate, or sustain yourself, or to witness genuinely inspiring action, like what’s being undertaken by the Columbia student movement and other student groups and their advocates acting now in solidarity. Perhaps one truth is that writing, from the protest sign to the book, should it remain intact or legible, holds these moments through and into recorded history, creating a lineage of record for contemplative or physical return, like many poets and thinkers, from Etel Adnan, Edward Said, Aimé Césaire, to m.s. RedCherries, with her upcoming first collection of poetry, among so many others, show. And while an editor’s note to an issue of a literary journal supplies a register both of that issue’s contents and by extension, the literary world and next, the world at large from which it’s all drawn, even as I try to make clear my moral feeling, there’s something undoubtedly insular about that. To write from within this state of tension is neither neutral or bad, nor is it good, but one must at the very least speak from this nexus plainly. Travis Sharp, writing from the context of exploitation of the white working class of the U.S. South and its often attendant moral contortions, speaks alongside Lorine Niedecker as he negotiates this circumstance in poetry:

“no layoff

    from this”

      history

Nora Treatbaby and Rosie Stockton’s collaborative poem included in Issue (7) reminds me in tone of the opening exchange between the centaur Ixion and the nymph Nephele in Straub-Huillet’s film From the Clouds to the Resistance (1979), or, if these two poets appeared in one of these legendary Marxist film directors’ collaboratively made, discursively committed durations of exchange. What strikes me about both Treatbaby and Stockton’s poem and their note on process that accompanies it is that both allow for collaborative writing, or work, to be freed from the yoke of utopic expectation, even as their writing revels in the erotics of mutuality. Collaboration, whether in writing or in the politics of daily life, any moment of interchange, is necessarily an unevenly weighted transom, sensitive and shifting. I read this as a practice for the everyday negotiation of politics between people as much as I understand it as the activated literary interrelation between writers in the present and writers from the past to the present; writers and readers, readers and writers. Translation is one such dyadic variation of this exchange, each end an open source. I’m truly excited by the expansive, strident work in translation that appears in this issue from Claudina Domingo, translated by Ryan Greene (you’ll never read parenthetic possibility in the same way again), Lív Maria Róadóttir Jæger, translated by Brad Harmon, and Gunnar Wærness, in excellent review by Sean F. Munro, and whose poetics statement has been translated by Munro in collaboration with his mother.

Some essays in Issue (7) go long, often reporting from history, the archive’s patient glittering, beginning with Kazim Ali’s critical attendance to Lucille Clifton’s deep relationship with the spiritual in her work, how each facet of it—church community, channeling, scripture, negotiation, identification, vision—informed her development of a Black mythopoetics, a hermeneutic praxis for living with and in history. Karla Kelsey’s prose engagement with Mina Loy is also remarkable: she found a whole unpublished novel waiting in Loy’s archive, and her prose excerpt “1931” imagines the compressions and expansions of its circumstance and how Loy must have moved within it. Amidst these it brings me such delight to present the first (of hopefully many) essays that passed through Annulet’s Critical Circle last July: George Clutterbuck’s essay, a chronicling of archival encounter, and an introduction to the development of an extraordinarily emotionally sensitive reading and interpretive awareness, as well as an attentive close reading of Anna Mendelssohn and everything her voice held and holds in her poem, “A Crash.” Interestingly, both Karla Kelsey and George Clutterbuck mention the work of feminist scholar of modernism Sara Crangle. The literary archive moves laterally as much as it does in depth as we encounter, teach, guide and are guided. Lately, the question of the literary history of the present, particularly of poetry, has been part of a number of conversations brought my way, perhaps because of the passings of Lyn Hejinian and Marjorie Perloff, perhaps in acknowledgment that we don’t do it enough. Brandan Griffin’s sprawling activation of a poetics that took form in 2010—Gauss PDF and Troll Thread, along with other poets in that orbit, through these sites are descendant from other U.S. American poetry movements, post-Language, post-Conceptualism—begins that historical and theoretical work of seeing from where we’ve most recently emerged, and how. Griffin gives us an opening to consider another, independent poetic strain which lives online as ambient, artificial ecologies, in a materialist approximation of sentience: what he calls ambient constructivism, proposing a new theory of what he calls cosmopoetics.  Jonathan Gharraie chronicles as much as queries the corresponding recent channel of understanding and historicizing of fiction and its production through those riding the crest of that particular wave—Timothy Bewes, Dan Sinykin, and Anna Kornbluh—as he considers himself writing both about and within that circumstance.

Issue (7) presents a wide and various range of annulets—the form’s momentum is picking up pace—including Josh English on the devastating ellipses in Holocaust survivor Charlotte La Serre’s “La Campe,” Andrea Quaid on Leia Penina Wilson’s wrangling of the epic via a figure that leads them, “alice notley,” to Samuel Ernest’s queer reading of the under-discussed Frank O’Hara poem “Cornkind.” Robert Johnson calls attention to the laconic, commanding vocality of Fleur Adcock, who like Anna Mendelssohn is a U.K. poet currently under-read in the U.S., in my estimation. So too does Issue (7) contain a robust presentation of reviews, also a form for which Annulet is increasingly known, that give considered—meaningful—observational and critical attention, and activated aesthetic judgment, which often takes the form of saying what it is you actually see in a text.

It has been an enlightening pleasure to work with Annulet’s inaugural Linkages Lecturer, Éireann Lorsung. Her lectures were so much more than I could have hoped for the start to the series, and so much more than an ordinary text-to-slide progression. Such a full embrace of the textual and visual, in combination with the internet’s stream, requires much preparation, and care, as well as vision. And so we are at work on developing the very best mode, beyond the parameters of mere audio or video recording, to house her two lectures, “On the line” and “When you get someplace new, learn to read the landscape like an alphabet,” in Annulet. These will hopefully appear in early summer, just in time for any potential applicants for this year’s role to engage. Please pass the word on to anyone who you believe would be interested—application or recommendation information can be found here. We’re also going to begin reading applications for the four spots open in this summer’s online workshop, Annulet’s Critical Circle, in May, and also will open our inaugural reading period for Annulet Editions on May 12th, which extends until September 15th. If you’d like, you can sign up for our newsletter, which will send timely word about all of these initiatives in no more than a two to a few emails a year. 

The poetry and prose of this issue worm, think, seep from the contemporary’s fissures and the systems that structure us, whether in the destabilizing sonic “mistranslations” of U.S. military records in Ryan Clark’s three poems, or recombine in personal loss, such as Emily Hunt’s elegiac poem “Stuart’s Sentences.” Sydney S. Kim’s “Astrology” brilliantly inhabits the microfluctuations offered by astrology’s intricate systems that so easily overlay onto daily anxiety. Michael Salu, “within jerk chicken smoke,” manages to contain an entire historical span in one sentence: “[d]irt formed into mounds, mounds poured into moulds, moulds; geometric, orderly and tessellating, from foundational blocks to the tiling of a game of experimental formulas; juggling and juxtaposing donations to purpose, spinning hope’s wheel, twisting fate as if anything else were statistically possible or even inclined, but an increase in value to geometrically moulded earth piled high, craning towards breathable air and the touch of a filtered sun against their skin.” Laynie Browne, in the first of five “antediluvian” sonnets, describes aliveness in this moment as “[a]kin to what one set of eyes offers another / Empty space where once we thought of ourselves as / Bone and ligature assemblages and necessity of touch.” Perhaps no one understands the contemporary and moves so adroitly of mind as part of it than Kai Ihns, who has four poems in this issue, or as closely as Ryan Skrabalak, who moves through experience in his “National Lube” series with intimate sensing and ranging critique, or Zoë Hitzig, whose latest poems read systemic angles’ folded futures amidst wind turbines and trash... 

Cliffs, ropes, pills, wings...
it’s not like you specified
any real alternatives.
I don’t blame you. Future
floods the manifold.
Singular is the present...

...and who is analyzing as if hovering from an atmospheric median, or Laura Jaramillo, whose concrete poems alongside verse enact a negotiation between what we see and how we move, what we run from, how we read; what we move, how we see, what we read from, how we must run.

I’ll leave the last moment of this note with Teline Trần, who in a short reflection on their inclinations and study of poetry, powerfully concludes:

We can broker folk poetry from the immaterial to a mantra, a recitation for political practice. This is not a spell.

What do we say to become?

ُ وَأَشْھَدُ أَنَّ مُحَمَّدًا رَسُولُ ٱ َّٰ . ? أَشْھَدُ أَنْ لَا إِلَٰھَ إِلَّا

“It was important he die an anarchist?” [5]

Recite these lines, from a poem by Đỗ Kh.:

“Fukkit, let’s split this grenade between us. Me, no tough shit. One needs a piece of one’s heart involved in Poetry.”

From the midst of the New Orleans Poetry Festival, in the flowered, shadowed air—

Alicia Wright
Editor