Judge's Comments

     Our country is at war. Why are we reading poems and stories? Why are we writing poems and stories?

     The work in this issue attests to the very basic impulse to feel alive. I was moved by the evident desire, in these pieces, to respond to our broken country, our broken-down world, to search for words that might describe how terribly, radiantly complex this world is. So often in our lives we must struggle to feel something in the absence of complete understanding. Isn't it the purest form of honesty to be exact in our language about what we strain and frequently fail to see? And isn't it true that to feel anything honestly and precisely, we must clear away the commonplaces and clichés, the very pressures of routine and habit that threaten to wear away the language we use, to wear away our lives? When we engage with language in a meaningful way, we revitalize ourselves; we keep ourselves from feeling numb; we keep alive our capacity to respond. Like the author of "Winter Walk" who, with a deeply perceptive eye, registers, on a cold late-night stroll through the neighborhood, a world turned faintly strange. Among the glass suspensions of snow and night-clouds, she senses that even her own face is changed. Or like the author of "Down Winding Roads," in her sustained and beautiful account of accompanying her father on veterinary calls, who offers us a glimpse into the mysteries of a teenager growing independent, feeling the depths open up within the outline of who she is. These writers show us what it means to be instructed by the world; they point to a world within the world we live in, one that is full of shifting depths and strangenesses. I have not answered the opening question. But it seems evident that as human beings and as Americans in the year 2005, we have lost sight of who we are, what we stand for, and how to be attentive to and responsible for each other-evident, then, that we must altogether rethink and re-feel what it means to respond. "This is," writes Wallace Stevens in his poem "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,"

                              the intensest rendezvous.
                         It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
                         Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

                         Within a single thing, a single shawl
                         Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a
                              warmth,
                         A light, a power, the miraculous influence.
                                                                                          -Joanna Klink

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