Forces of Endurance

Letter from Co-Editor Caroline Langston

“Apocalypse” certainly seems like an appropriate word for the world we’re living in this summer. Yesterday, the heat in Phoenix crested to 118 degrees, but an entire swathe of the southern United States has been remarkably oppressive for weeks. Floods have cratered asphalt roads in placid Vermont. And the gun violence rates in major U.S. cities continue to ascend—if, thank God, not quite to 1970s levels.

Now, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now is one of my all-time favorite films, and “apocalypse” used to be the kind of word you could bring up in conversation and sound intellectual, but which nobody really took all that seriously.

Not anymore. During the last couple of years I’ve noticed increasing citations of the word in the cultural press—and not just from conservatives, either. All of these citations have taken pains to emphasize that the word “apocalypse” is not merely a synonym for “the end of the world,” but is technically defined as a kind of unveiling.

This edition of Vita Poetica seems to take both definitions of the word—the popular and the technical—in equal measure. The selections herein are indeed preoccupied with the kinds of themes that suffuse our news, both climate catastrophe and the threats, whether real or imagined, of political violence. They also explore vividly what is revealed about the hearts and minds portrayed in them. 

Emily Ver Steeg’s haunting short story “Shelter,” for example, tracks a group of young boys fascinated with the survivalist preparations of their classmate’s father, a local fundamentalist doctor named Reason Jones. He’s determined to survive the end of the world, but the real question of the story concerns the enduring effect of those preparations on the boys—and in particular, on the doctor’s son, Reason Jr.

In Jack Stewart’s poem “Acyanoblepsia”--”the inability to see the color blue,” we are told—the sybaritic retirees who have fled to Miami, shirking the more traditional forms of religious asceticism for a kind of eternal youth,  uncomfortably find out that being witness to a changing climate is its own kind of crucifixion. 

And whatever their stance toward religion, they generally all also consider the metaphysical dimensions of these emergent times. If I had to trace a throughline through all the works of this edition, it would be the theme of endurance, of the individual’s moral reflection on how to move through these apocalyptic times. Phillip Aijian’s poem “Jurisdiction” examines the seeming weakness of the concept of “justice” as demonstrated in Pierre-Paul Prud’hon’s post-French Revolutionary painting, Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime. 

But neither are they overly theoretical or humorless, either. 

I’m open to god but I don’t like capitalizing
on god. I mean I’ll open the door
to the Jehovah’s Witnesses but I won’t
let them dominate the conversation

notes the old-time freethinker narrator of Paul Hostovsky’s poem, “Open.” The narrator manages to be, at the same time, obnoxious, funny, and forbearing, both with his unwanted Jehovah’s Witness callers—and with himself. 

There’s still also the question of how do we endure, both physically and meta-physically. One of our Contemplative Practice features for this edition, Rebecca Vickery’s “A Blessing for Your Breath,” can provide a map to both be in your body and at the same time, transcend it. 

Navigating disaster is, in the end, an opportunity to find hidden strength, and as-yet unrevealed joys. 

You’ll see that everywhere in this edition. Enjoy; selah.