There is something revolutionary about aging, both while alive and in a posthumous state: the way skin and spirit simultaneously hold and dismiss time, upending its sequential narratives, stabilized moods, memory holes, or creased silences. We’re turning 60 this fall. The Parish Hall here at St. Mark’s, where we hold most of our events, is set to be renovated in the near future. Since 1966, every loser and lover, diva and recluse who has ever read here lives here. I’m not a spiritual person, but when a reading is about to end and the chairs need to be stacked and our feet are beginning to ache and the exhaustion of the evening slowly overtakes the nourishment of the poem—or when the two begin to contend—I do feel them: their presence in the walls, their steps on the beat-up floor. (If you want to hear about the readings that particularly marked those who stack the chairs, the beloved Poetry Project staff, the questionnaire published in this issue is unmissable.)

But it’s not enough to invoke the history stored in our material architectures: the past requires excavation. History, like art, is made in creative acts. Our summer issue offers precisely this kind of ingenious engagement with the past: Alicia Kwok revisits Fay Chiang’s largely forgotten legacy of cultural organizing in Manhattan’s Chinatown, Eric Shethar reviews Morgan Bassichis’s “seance” with the comedian Frank Maya, Mimi Tempestt takes up the question of poet Wanda Coleman’s “meanness,” Patricia Spears Jones invokes the haunting charge of Jayne Cortez’s poetics, and willow wilderness hour attends to the difficult and joyful life of writer and Bay Area icon Bambi Lake. Running the risk of generalization, I’d say that all the writers in this issue are, in some sense, lovers—lovers of those who have departed. To bring back our dead poets, revive their phenomenal and tragic lives, radically repositions us, enabling us to build the liberatory imaginaries we need to see the future.

Another force of nature in this issue: Bina Sharif, brilliantly introduced and interviewed by Bobuq Sayed. Jo Barchi, in “All I Really Want by Alanis Morissette,” takes us into a litany of desire, each longing suffused with humor, sweetness, and want.

Prefacing our fall season, this newsletter injects libidinal energy into historical memory—the spirit with which we want to celebrate our 60th anniversary. Maybe to age is precisely to keep feeding an excess that refuses to betray life through melancholic cathexis. It is with that surplus that we continue to edit, program, remember, and build a lovingly messy and wildly contradictory community of poets and friends. In fact, Anne Waldman, in her remembrance for David Henderson, reminds us in his own words that: “we got to / keep our carnival laugh.”