Editor's Notes

Greetings Dear Readers,

People often ask me what makes a good poem. I can’t speak for anyone else’s aesthetics, but these are the elements that make a poem stand out for me:

• uniqueness: no one else but you should be able to write the poems you write;
• specificity: you go into specific and concrete details rather than general univsalities;
• embodied writing: you write through your body, paying attention to the senses;
• muscular and precise diction: you hone the meaning of a word and its connotations and the vocabulary you use has purpose;
• economy: nothing in a poem is wasted. Even it’s punctuation and line breaks;
• in media res: I like poems that start in the middle rather than follow chronological or other rhetorical order;
• no epiphanies or big finish: I like poems that don’t really end. I like poems that don’t tell me what to think;
• strong point of view: I am not fond of omniscience for poetry. Give me a distinct and limited voice. I prefer unreliable narrators and uncertainty over didacticism and preaching;
• figurative language: metaphors I haven’t thought of before but make sense on both a literal and figurative level.

This is what tends to excite me when I’m reading a poem. The poems in this month’s issue offer some of these elements through Thomas’ metaphors for danger and unpredictability, Robertson’s embodied and muscular language, Jordan and Li’s vivid and specific descriptions. I hope you enjoy the issue.

Thanks to our selection committee this month:

Dan Boland
Maya Chorney
Sarah Kabamba
Andrew Lafleche
Margo Lapierre
Stephanie Mason
Colin Quin
Jade Riordan
Marjorie Silverman
JC Sulzenko
Kuna Zero

Don’t forget we are always open for submissions. Please read the guidelines on the site and send your poems. Every month we publish a new issue with fresh and unique poems.

If you have comments, suggestions, clarifications, musings and strong conversations over strong coffee to offer, please contact me at amanda@bywords.ca.

Amanda Earl
Managing Editor

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