EDITORIAL

Rather than rant about Subjectivity or whatever, gentle readers, or pay homage to the post-Williams, post-O'Hara real world-specific poetics to which I gravitate, I hope I can let this issue of La Petite Zine speak for itself. It is, for all intents and purposes, a double issue -- one half put together before September 11, another culled after that horrible day. 'I don't need to put out WTC-specific writing,' I told myself, as September dragged on. There will be plenty of bandwagon-jumping journals, most not even from New York, to put out the professorial, Auden-wannabe essays.

But then I remembered what I had just preached out loud and quoted at a reading in early September -- insufferable me! It is a rather famous section from Charles Baudelaire's essay "The Painter of Modern Life." He's speaking here, in the fourth section, about a painter whom he admires.

Be very sure that this man, such I have depicted him -- this solitary, gifted [man] with an active imagination, ceaselessly journeying across the great human desert -- has an aim loftier than that of a mere flâneur, an aim more general, something other than the fugitive pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for that quality which you must allow me to call 'modernity'; for I know of no better word to express the idea I have in mind. He makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history, to distill the eternal from the transitory. Casting an eye over our exhibitions of modern pictures, we are struck by a general tendency among artists to dress all their subjects in the garments of the past. ... By 'modernity' I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable. ... This transitory, fugitive element, whose metamorphoses are so rapid, must on no account be despised or dispensed with. By neglecting it, you cannot fail to tumble into the abyss of an abstract and indeterminate beauty.

When my wife and I wandered outside the lower Brooklyn apartment we had refurbished all summer for our domestic peace, we saw one, then two buildings on fire. Minutes later, we heard outside and then saw on TV two great gray tumbles. An hour later, those dust-covered office workers you saw on TV walked by our front door. It's only now setting in, and only now am I truly realizing Baudelaire's admiration for that unnamed painter from 1863 as a challenge for writers in 2001. For if we, especially as poets, choose to remain or retreat into that abyss of beauty, or ignore the eternal in our own daily lives, we will continue to write the same pronoun-ed, period-dressed poetry, then we are all surely doomed, poet and non-poet alike.

The good news is that some of us have chosen to engage in the 'transitory, fugitive elements' around us. Many of those writers are here in LPZ. Bob Holman probably had this mini-play in his pocket for a while; I never asked him, but it sure has relevance today. Griffin Hansbury had these love songs to the city he loves so much before September, but simply appreciating the meditation on Damien Hirst at the Brooklyn Museum of Art never seemed more wonderfully transitory and beautiful. From Gregory Pardlo's DJ exegesis to Chris Stroffolino's poem-essay, Derek Webster's take on the same, to Matthew Zapruder's poem-as-opera, the poetry here is not in period dress, not by a long shot. It's ready for the right here and now. And that's no aesthetic fetish any more. We cannot despise the modern world; these days, it's downright necessary to love it and embrace it, to put it into words.

La Petite Zine