I remember vividly Fanny Howe reading Bernadette Mayer’s “The Way To Keep Going In Antarctica,” at Mayer’s memorial at the Project in May 2024. Mayer’s poem famously asks for strength, and tests whether it’ll come. The poem searches for resolve in a moment that appears, to the speaker, bereft of resources except for herself—a point where she seems to herself to stand alone. There’s a photo of Howe mid-reading; in the background, out of focus, my then-colleague Laura Henriksen and I are both standing entranced, hand over heart.

I think about Mayer’s “Antarctica” all the time, at a period where each of us has to draw on strength we didn’t know we had, and scan around us for the resources we didn’t realize were at hand. Strength, strength and courage: words we’re getting differently acquainted with, living through this stage of hell. And now that we’re honoring the memory of Fanny Howe, I find strength in her words, too: “If I were not ill … I would, I swear, volunteer to be sailing to Byzantium with Rachel [Corey] and Gaza’s children … entering the second century.”

It’s been another terrifying, grief-filled year for humanity, and the horizons of hope that we do in fact have are with each other. A million people just made Zohran’s victory possible, and if we stick the landing on winning his agenda, that’ll be the result of our strategic, disciplined effort, too.

You’re maybe reading this issue of the Newsletter at the Marathon, or just before, when we’ll welcome in another year with our characteristic radiance, our sick-in-the-head jokes, our feral energy, our understanding of the world and our fierce sense of how to make it otherwise. This issue is slammed with material for that project. What are you gonna do with it?