൪uartet
Quartet is an online poetry journal highlighting the work of women fifty and over. Launched in 2021, the journal is published three times a year and features 21 poems and artist statements. The artist statements that accompany each poem have been a hit with both readers and contributors, as they offer personal insights into each writer’s journey, favorite authors, or background on the poem published in Quartet. Poems in our Editor’s Choice section are eligible for the Editor’s Choice Poetry Prize.
As coeditor of the journal, I am called on from time to time to provide an editor’s note to accompany issues. Like artist statements, these notes (below) give me the opportunity to ruminate on poetry and the writing life. I hope you enjoy them.
Visit www.quartetjournal.com for our latest issue, archives and submission guidelines.
൪uartet — Fall Issue 2024 Volume 4 Issue 3
Today I pulled the 2024 solar eclipse glasses I got free from the library out of the backseat pocket of my car. I’ll be 89 the next time a full eclipse occurs and if I’m still here, these specs won’t be.
They’re the pair I dropped and lost in a driving rain (between the library and my car) which the librarian wouldn’t replace, and which I retrieved only after a car drove over them as I made my last dash to the car. I like to recycle, but I couldn’t have someone use these glasses in twenty years, their last sight the sun unfiltered through the tread of a Volvo.
What to lose, what to keep—isn’t that the preoccupation we have as people growing older and as poets? If we’re around long enough, our loved ones and friends will die before us. We can’t control that inevitability, but we can hold onto memories and to objects that hold meaning for us. I have kept my mother’s watch, but not her silver coffee service.
In poetry, such decisions are often less clear-cut. What we bury or animate, state or infer, affirm or negate are all influenced not just by our word choice and placement, but by line breaks, punctuation, alliteration, metaphor, simile or other devices that in successive drafts may be safe or face the ax. What we choose makes or breaks a poem.
“In Praise of Spiderlings and Motherhood,” Grabel employs repetition to weave an ode that celebrates creation’s hard work.
The short lines in Harrod’s “The Dull Edge of Husbandry,” enliven a couple’s disconnect and amplify the humor of her wordplay.
In “Visiting My Dad,” Hexum uses four stanzas, each end-stopped and alternating between five and six lines, to create a soothing pattern to a situation both quotidian and quietly fraught with change.
What intention and precision. Sylvia Plath called poetry “a tyrannical discipline.” In this issue, our contributors reflect their grit through diligence and craft, the emotions they convey, the issues they unmask.
—Jane C. Miller
൪uartet — Fall Issue 2023 Volume 3 Issue 3
When I looked into the bowl on my kitchen counter the other day, there was a banana in its birthday suit with a few age spots, but beside it, the shock of a jalapeno pepper, wrinkled and soft. A metaphor for my husband and me? A disconcerting thought. I banished the pepper to the fridge as if that could stall decay, a kitchen cryonics I peered at for a few days, then threw away.
There’s always a bit of what we fear in what we see, but looked at another way, that green pepper still carried the seeds of heat in its decline. We poets have at our disposal such power in that turn; what’s inside—wishes, longing, regret, rage, enriching the whole. This is especially true for those of us who have lived more years than we have left.
For Stanley Kunitz …the crickets trilling / underfoot as if about / to burst from their crusty shells enact the joy and wonder we feel that will outlast us (“Touch Me”).
But we are here now. And here it is again, Rosmarie Waldrop declares, the craving for happiness that night induces (“Aging”).
Morning also renews. For Czeslaw Milosz: I felt a door opening in me and I entered / the clarity of early morning (“Late Ripeness”).
Whatever the hours, we take what they give and hold on. For Kevin Carey, those are:
the markers of a life,
the small worthwhile pieces
that rattle around in my pockets
waiting to be set somewhere in stone.
(“Set in Stone”)
In this issue of Quartet, our contributors share their “worthwhile pieces,” poems that surprise and enrich us.
—Jane C. Miller
What I’m reading now: The Blood of San Gennaro by Scott Harney, The Body Wars by Jan Beatty, Bloodwarm by Taylor Byas.
൪uartet—Summer Issue 2022 Vol. 2 Issue 3
If you write poetry, you know accidental photography. The point at which a poem decides it is something other than what you thought it would be. The way a camera cuts off half the head of an uncle or in the blur of speed, misses a vista for a bush instead. Surprise after you drop your phone in your purse. Only later hear the scrunching of your feet and muffled chatter on a dark screen because you forgot to turn the video off.
Inside each drop of rain / fish swim. (“RAIN IN SIENNA,”Liliana Ursu )
The unexpected animates. Especially when you are a tourist in your own life. For all the planning that scripts our activities, it is mistakes or chance encounters that make an experience memorable. If, as Simone Weil said, “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer,” then the letting go is amen. And who doesn’t want to believe discovery is still possible?
the whole village gave chase, / a streetful of black-clad galloping animals. (“At the Village Fair,” Wang Xiaoni)
Once on a Lisbon tram, an old man with days’ old stubble, his look intent and kind, traced my jawline with his hand. Next stop he was gone. I was in a new place, open to experience, a re-birth
in his catch and release. I was not close looking, but he was. Our job as writers is to show up, suspend judgment and receive. As W.S. Merwin wrote in “Relics,” Before I knew words for it… / I stood at the corner and listened”. Our words and our senses are waiting. Let them surprise us.
—Jane C. Miller
What I'm reading:
Goldsmith Market, Liliana Ursu; Something Crosses My Mind, Wang Xiaoni; The Meadow, James Galvin
൪uartet — Fall 2021 Volume 1 Issue 4
Poets can make a home anywhere. Look inside. When I do, Robert Hayden’s father warms the room where Emily Dickinson ghosts the air like breath, my body the train station where Courtney Kampa leaves a mother screaming, her child kidnapped. Who hasn’t stood with Jane Kenyon at dusk?
As readers, we are all introverts, an audience of one crowded with the desires and actions others express. In doing so, we also internalize the obsessions and history writers draw from. Theodore Roethke’s family operated a florist’s greenhouse in Saginaw, Michigan. Charles Baxter saw Roethke’s love of nature as its by-product: “...in much of his manic, exuberant poetry, he seemed to incorporate that greenhouse within himself, inside his own body.”
Basho carried wonder within him. In a haibun translated by Franz Wright, Basho wrote: “Wherever I travel, wherever I happen to find myself, I am not from there.” How much of that feeling enthralls us, the ability to see with the eyes of a stranger the places we inhabit.
Poets that make the known new stay with us. In her poem "Elegy in an Orchard," Danusha Laméris writes of poet Larry Levis: “Even his absence / is a kind of beauty. Let me be a guardian / of such absence, make a small altar of it / in the center of my chest.” Whether poems soothe or challenge us, they expand our view beyond ourselves and open for us a window into wider understanding that can influence our lives and work.
The poems we choose for ൪uartet are ones we cannot shake, the select that resonate, that confound, uplift. I am grateful for their company. We hope they find a home in you too.
—Jane C. Miller
What I’m reading:
frank: sonnets by Diane Seuss and POSTCOLONIAL LOVE POEM by Natalie Diaz.
