14 May 2025
We’re back and rested from the AWP whirlwind. About AWP what can I say? It tickles me to think the provenance for AWP is Walt Whitman’s barbaric yawp. In the final section of “Song of Myself,” Whitman declaims “I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, / I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” Perhaps he would have enjoyed the festivities too.
Although I have yet to find the actual count for the 2025 conference in Los Angeles, AWP said they expected over twelve thousand attendees in anticipation of the big dance. When a friend of mine who has never attended asked me how it was, I said, after a dumb second to gather my thoughts, “it was more exhausting than fun; it was more good [sic] than exhausting,” one of those sentences that simply felt right in the articulating. But I should stress that it was extremely fun. It was great to meet GR writers and readers again or for the first time. A poet from an issue about a handful of years ago swung by, and we had a delightful chat about her recent visit to Taiwan. A writer from an upcoming issue stopped while another from a couple years ago meandered over, and the three of us chatted stationary while the flow of literature enthusiasts flowed around us, like rocks in a babbling stream. I was able to get a drink with a writer just weeks before an agent emailed me asking to be in touch after reading her debut publication in GR. And we’re seeing ever more familiar names on our shipping labels and in our submission queue. If ever you find yourself at an AWP—or any other conference, fair, or event that we’re at, for that matter—please do stop by, introduce yourself, and stay if you can. Each of us here loves meeting each and all of y’all IRL.
But what is literary community, after all? I ask, repeating a question put to us during a campus visit for the recent search for our next poetry and book review editor. This candidate had spoken well and forcefully about fostering connections with writers and caring for networks of literary folks, particularly across generational lines. But when pressed to speak directly to GR’s commitment to “building communities on and off the page,” this candidate paused, then said, “I actually don’t know what literary community is; what is it?” a surprising response that felt all the more profound given this candidate’s years of being an upright literary citizen. My response at that moment started with an enthusiastically agitated impulse to talk about our bureaucratic identity. It has been a curveball finding my career in the libraries, GR’s home at the University of Georgia. Before getting this job, I was blinkered to a future in an English, Literature, and/or Asian American department, when I was single-minded in my pursuit for a tenure track job. Even when applying to the job, I didn’t acknowledge the difference until I walked through the door into the Main Library for my interview. But, with time I realized what’s singular about the Libraries: it is the only department on campus that is space and service oriented. What would it mean to embrace that institutional identity, to consider a journal less a compendium of literary texts, and more a space for and service to readers and writers? I admitted to the candidate and the crowd there that I too don’t have the right words to describe a pointed response to this question, at least yet, but I have been working it out with everyone at GR (you too, writer and reader). It is a collective and practical experiment.
The paradox lies in the virtual nature of reading, that literature is, as nineteenth-century essayist William Hazlitt puts it, “a pure creation of the mind.” (I found this when I recently re-read his essay on the pleasure of hating; it’s so good.) A few weeks ago, my three-year-old, Rhys, asked her six-year-old brother, Drury, by way of a question to me: “Why does Drury read every day?” Drury, who found his love for reading sometime this past year, said, “There are no sounds.” No sounds? What youthful Wordsworthian brilliance in an age continually lit up by auras from screens, everywhere, all the time (lest I’m playing the cliché of braggart Dad). “There are no sounds,” he replied, “no one’s laughing, no talking; it’s alone time.” Even now Drury can say that the deliciously hermetic experience of reading is at the heart of the matter. I don’t find him special for that. We spend afternoons at the public library almost every week.
So “literary community,” then, it seems to me, is essentially an antinomial phrase. Perhaps one way into it is through theological philosopher Jean-Luc Marion’s concept of “negative certainty,” an elaboration of Immanuel Kant’s “negative magnitudes.” As the French philosopher glosses the German one: Kant parses out “logical opposition” from “real opposition,” by which the contradiction in the former results in something not thinkable, but the contradiction in the latter results in “something (cogitabile)” [italics in the original]. Marion’s example for the first is motion and rest. “No body can be, at the same time and in the same respect, in motion and at rest.” But, if the contradiction were attraction and repulsion, a body could be experiencing both, and it would be doing so invisibly. (Is that what was happening to me at AWP? I jest.) “Thus, even if nothing is seen or known as an object, two forces in a sense perfectly invisible confront each other at a heightened degree of reality . . . the negative itself can give rise to certainty.” The gambit is that the investment here, at GR, into the weird phrase “literary community” pays off in a certain sense of heightened reality, a place where numerous people—corporeally present and not—commune over and through the act of literary communication: sharing words with a deliberately multitudinous set of meanings. As another French theorist, Jacques Rancière, states: “Literature teaches us, in short, to do what the lexicographer is not allowed to do: to choose our misunderstandings well” (tr. Julie Rose), words written in 2003, which seem all too prescient now, in our current media landscape.
Coming to the contents of this issue, all of this reminds me of prayer’s age-old proximity to poetry. When I reached G. C. Waldrep’s “On the Aging of Angels” in the submission queue, I knew I had to have it. Firstly, it invokes one of my favorite ars poeticas, George Herbert’s “Prayer (I),” which had been out of my sight for all too long. Waldrep’s poem is masterful in its poetics and bracing in its spirituality as it wrestles with Herbert from ages hence, from our time. Waldrep gives us a counterpoint—at times harmonic, at times dissonant—to Herbert’s propulsive line of figuration, providing us with a poem as dramatic with its development of thought and as muscular with its rhetorical faith as “Prayer (I)” is. And, returning to this poem after the above, I have much to still learn from the way Waldrep wrangles a poem that lands on prayer as “something understood” to fashion one himself that describes the idiosyncratic temporality of a lyric poem as “the chronic / now once lost, regained.”
Our feature on Asher Hartman’s Blessed with Switch gives us a way to think of art’s time-warping powers through another genre, through other means. Hartman is a playwright and artist who founded the Los Angeles–based Gawdafful National Theater. The play had its U.S. debut at the University of California, Irvine’s The Art of Performance series and its French debut at the Centre Pompidou’s Live Live. Post-performance Future.Method/e. Critic Martin Harries provides an introduction that focuses on what Blessed with Switch can teach us about theater’s singular ability to think through the plurality of subjectivity. In this issue we also have an excerpt from Ainur Karim’s trilogy of novels, as translated by Slava Faybysh, which is a coming-of-age tale about a girl in a rapidly modernizing Kazakhstan. Sakinah Hofler shares another story about girlhood, one about female familial ties in a Black Muslim household. Sam McPhee publishes an essay that focuses on strangers who become unforgettable, and thus eerie, as they persist in our memory. Please read Ian Litwin’s essay on one of my heroes, William Wells Brown; he has taught me how to love this author. And we are lucky to have an excerpt of Anam, the novel by Vietnamese-Australian writer André Dao, which has its American publication this very season, courtesy of Kaya Press.
From around the office:
• Please welcome our new poetry and book review editor, Noah Baldino. He is a poet and editor from Illinois, whose work can be found in American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Knox College Creative Writing Program and the Purdue University MFA, he has received support from Poetry Foundation, Bread Loaf, the University of Arizona Poetry Center, and the Stadler Center at Bucknell University. A former reader for Poetry, he joins The Georgia Review from Maine, where he had been teaching. His first day will be 15 August. We are very excited to have him join the staff.
• We will be at the Athens Art Book Fair on 21 June and the Decatur Book Fair on 4 October. We will also be hosting a poetry festival on campus with our friends the Willson Center 4–5 November, which will feature Michael Collier, Vievee Francis, Edward Hirsch, Garrett Hongo, and Robin Coste Lewis. Come say hi if you can make it to any of these Georgia happenings. And we will be at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Again, come say hi if you’re around.
• Also—visit our shop. This season’s hats are in. They’re baby blue. We’ve already sold a lot of our limited run at AWP and the New Orleans Poetry Festival, so get them before they’re gone. We’ve sold out of our olive hats and have only a couple of our butter ones left. And don’t forget our artist patch by Yaron Michael Hakim; the limited edition, autographed chapbooks by Maxine Kumin, Rita Dove, and Philip Levine; or the broadsides of poems by Clarence Major and Pearl Cleage written in honor of John Lewis. We also have new tote bags.
Waldrep’s “the chronic / now once lost, regained” gestures toward John Milton, of course, and his two-part epic. The phenomenal act of reading is the most proximate kind of experience I personally have had to prelapsarian Paradise. That paradise is utterly precarious, and perhaps not for this world, Milton teaches us. But, with reading, we can return, time and again, poem after poem, book after book, issue after issue. Thank you for reading, and if you are a Georgia Review reader, thanks for returning.
G.M.
