NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind   
that certain bounds hold against chaos,

that is a place of first permission,   
everlasting omen of what is.

—Robert Duncan

 
A meadow is a beginning, the clearing that enables its visitors to contemplate the relationship between the people who chance upon it and the thick unkempt grasses surrounding them, the lupine and the bumblebee, the forest and its absence, the city and a silence. A meadow is an open field, a pause in the traffic of time, causing the walker to stop for a moment, to take in the sudden changes in the light and the breeze and the noise. Does one think differently in the heart of a meadow than one does winding a path through the woods or at a crowded intersection or at a desk in a room?

At the end of the last century, I had just turned in for the night in an Iowa City apartment when a friend of mine appeared at the door, agitated because he had just read somewhere that topsoil in the state was eroding at an unprecedented pace. There was, he told me, virtually no uncultivated wilderness left in all of Iowa outside of special designated areas. “It is no longer possible to be away from other people,” he said, “when what I truly want is to feel lost, to experience nothing other than empty, untilled space around me, and you can’t do that anymore, at least not in Iowa.” My friend was in search of a meadow, a clearing that would serve as a kind of affirmation about the primacy and constancy of nature. He asked me to come out and join him “in the act of getting lost,” so we spent part of that night in his pickup truck passing various cornfields, me arbitrarily telling him to turn left or right onto an unlit narrow lane or darkened road, to get as far away as we thought possible from the towns and the highway. We had been driving for a long time when we came upon a grassy hill and my friend turned off his headlights. “Wow,” he said, “it’s totally pitch black. We might even see some stars, if we’re lucky.” We got out of the car, awed by the night’s dark and the seeming stillness. “I have no idea where we are,” my friend said. “I think we did it,” I agreed, “and there’s no manmade light at all, except for that one little glow in the distance.” I pointed to what looked like a far-off house. “Wait, there’s another one,” he said, “and look, one more.” In total, we counted fourteen lights, however faint. “Let’s drive a little to the left,” I said, “I think it’s darker there.” But I was wrong. A little to the left was actually an on-ramp to I-80, which unfussily, in under an hour, deposited us back into town. And yet the moment we stood on the grass in the darkness, thinking we had escaped, was magical. Wherever I go, I carry it with me.

Around the same time, I first read Robert Duncan’s “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow.” In Duncan’s poem, the meadow is a kind of mystical enclosure free from the interference of the everyday, a mind-made dreamscape, the space of the imagination, and also nature itself, a private pasture (at once literal and mental) where an individual can graze and merely be—if one is lucky enough to be granted access. According to Peter O’Leary in his essay on the poem on the Poetry Foundation website,

In The H.D. Book, Duncan’s unfinished prose magnum opus, …the poet relates a recurrent dream he had as a boy, in which he comes upon an expansive field where children are dancing in a ring. Before long, the grasses mysteriously and ominously bend in Duncan’s direction, indicating to him that he is “It.”

Duncan’s meadow is of course also the poem itself, at once unsettling and elusive and far from the madding crowd, a divination of the present as opposed to the future, an “everlasting omen of what is.” Yet it is tempting to take the first line literally—while the poem compares the meadow to “a scene made-up by the mind,” the meadow is also the memory of a real meadow, like Wordsworth’s daffodils in “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” which he can always return to in his thoughts to stave off despair and solitude. The meadow Duncan’s speaker gets to return to is the ability of memory to capture and stop time, the permanent safety and beauty afforded by the recollection of “the grass blowing / east against the source of the sun / in an hour before the sun’s going down.”

While editing this issue, we kept considering the simultaneous fragility and power of the open field, the purity of nature and the purity of the imagination, environment and memory. As a consequence, much of the poetry and prose in our new issue offers meadows of nature and nature of thought, literal meadows and figurative ones for us to wander into, clearings with flowers and refuges from noise, everlasting omens of what is.

 
Michael Dumanis, with Katrina Turner
Bennington, VT, and Brooklyn, NY, over Zoom
Winter 2021-22