Linked Verse Issue 002

Editor’s Note

Linked Verse, Issue 002 breaks open on the shore of a new year. In the process of constant beginnings and endless returns, human consciousness remains the interstitial point at which madness touches reality, despite progress’s relative acceleration, stagnation, deceleration. The moon pulls tides. Light requires form to cast a shadow. At the outset, a wave is a thing and an act. Like poetry and painting, there is a principle of similarity, made and unmade by expression. The wave is a threshold between construction and deconstruction, calm and chaos, the making and unmaking of the world. Is the gesture a ‘hello’ or ‘goodbye?’ Depiction/painting, and portrayal/poetry are modulated across the sixty-plus pages of this issue.

We at Laughing Ronin Press encourage the reader to measure the degree and the nature of kinship between our timeless sisters, Painting and Poetry. Even before Horace laid down his Ars Poetica in c. 19 BC, Simonides of Keos famously uttered "Poema pictura loquens, pictura poema silens" (poetry is a speaking picture, painting a silent [mute] poetry). Poems, imaginative texts, are latent things until they are activated by a reader’s attentive exposition (interpreting, seeing). A poem is a picture that begs to be read. Waves swell and break, trees fall in forests, regardless of witness, again and again and so on… Poets and painters give time and edge to living as constant becoming.

Twenty-eight contributors flood Linked Verse, Issue 002 to form a handbook for the imitation of nature. Welcome to a new year, a new issue, a devotional gesture surfing the tidal streams of Horace’s famous analogy Ut pictura poesis, “as is painting so is poetry.”

Chelsea Rector