Featured Writer: David Thornbrugh

Introduction

A poem is a crafted thing, a made thing, and it makes sense, most of the time, that a good poem is the result of some effort, like a well-made chair, or a painting, or a delicious apple pie. There's effort involved, though, to be successful, the effort shouldn't show in the result. Like when you're watching figure skaters or ballerinas, and their leaps and spins seem effortless, when in fact they're straining every muscle of their body and concentrating like fiends. Poems are made of words, and every word has weight, texture, a sensuous quality associated with it through usage, history, habit, and context. A word occupies space, the same as does a physical object, like a dead bee, a stop sign, a mountain. Words have physicality when scratched onto a piece of paper with pen or pencil, or imprinted by typewriter keys, or computer printer mechanism. Words as they leave our mouths exist physically as vibrations in the air that enter our ears and impact against the tiny drums and triggers therein. And words have value, of course, meaning and significance assigned them through usage, convention, and context. A word is a signifier, it stands for something else not there in the space occupied by the word: mud, boy, army, truth, cloud, chicken, validity. The word is not the thing itself, though the word itself is a thing. This is the conceptual trap zealots and true believers of all stripes fall into, mistaking the word for the thing it represents. There is no imperishable truth that can be written down and referred to as an unalterable, always reliable guide. The map is not the journey. The journey is the white horse on my lawn at dawn, flanks wet from running through my dreams.