In his remembrance of the late Gary Indiana, Tobi Haslett remembers Indiana quoting Jean Guéhenno, from Guéhenno’s diaries of life in occupied France:

“[T]he line isn’t by him, but it makes me miss him,” Haslett writes, “because it’s very, very Gary.”

I love knowing friends as very, very whoever they are. I love being very, very me, when I get to be. Poems can be tools, they can help us to be very, to know very, to hone and admit the ways we very—very open, very sharp, very dull, very full, very too much, very angry, very what we need as we need it. Poems are tools also in that they are tongs: they help us to carry the very, straight to the gob.

And poetry serves us in moments of remembering. For me, The Poetry Project has always been a place and a community that mourns so well, that holds spaces of loss and the loss of its people as times of gathering, of reflection, of celebration, of inspiration. I remember hearing Project staff emeriti Laura Henriksen and Kyle Dacuyan, talking about the way the Project grieves together, so regularly and so fully. The impact of that over the long haul. It’s not simple or easy to maintain, and we’re lucky that the Project and its people help us to have it, a practice of honoring passings, supported by the very nature of lives lived in writing. I’ve gone to so many memorial readings here. A lot of times I hadn’t encountered the work, and hadn’t met the dead, but then I left shifted in the wake of others’ remembering, and joined to this new acquaintance. “None of us knew her name but I still think of her every time I walk down this street,” Lena Pervez Afridi writes in their essay, “Taaffe Place.” I listen to a person’s friends share their work, and now the sense of them is stitched into the yard, felt in my walks to and from trains.

Power wants people to be less and less complicated, more and more manageable. Power develops a strategy for death, where it goes and doesn’t, when it matters and doesn’t. But we are incalculable, and death, like life, never ends. May life no longer be a mold, may we know death as more than just life’s stain. May our writing, our thinking, our loving, deepen our commitment to each other, in past, present, and future.

This is my last issue as a member of the Newsletter’s editorial collective, and so I write this note with a lot of gratitude: to Kay, and the many editorial collective fellows we’ve shared the task with—and a warm welcome to Kyle Carrero Lopez, whose poems grace this issue, and who will be joining the collective with Kay next issue; to the staff, for their support and collaboration; to all the contributors whom I was able to work with in these last few years; to the community and the Project, for being a beacon and a room I am jazzed to be a part of.

Dig!
mv