First, admit that it’s hopeless. You can’t capture the world around you and set it down on paper. All you can do is record your experience of losing the world moment by moment. The best poems go beyond the images they present to convey the sense of loss that is an inevitable part of any poetic rendering. The moment you stop to write it down, it’s gone. There are a few wonderful forays into loss in some of the poems in this issue of PJ. Sharon Singer’s “riddle”, for example : “It doesn’t matter if I say/we’re out of carrots, or/the wind sure is brutal, or/they don’t know why his kidneys have failed.” David A. Groulx’s poem, “The Good White God” captures loss by tossing out images that don’t quite gel in any traditional sense: “From a carcass/she hammers her head/against the wheel/in the glowing/she blows out smoke/sucking fire.” Groulx’s sharp, surreal images are, in effect, lost to each other. In contrast to the poetry, the prose pieces in PJ don’t manage to capture anything, except maybe regret on the part of the authors at never having managed to become enough a part of anything to actually experience a sense of loss. Wanda Hurren rewarms that stale experience of watching the people on a bus: “two women sitting beside me start to visit: Do you notice perfume? No, I sure don’t. they tell each other where they live. One of the women is holding something on her lap…” Hurren has someone get up and pull the cord to stop the bus. She has a woman ask the man beside her if he is wearing long underwear. Meanwhile, the narrator sits and observes, like God watching his creations. Larry LaForet tells the story of a guy who goes to the Promise Land, takes a look around, watches his world crumble and then winds up in the loony bin. magie dominic rambles on about her life at the Caffe Cino in the 1960s, as though she could actually reconstruct that time. Attention Prairie Journal writers: get up out of your seat on the bus and live a little… Then come back and tell me what you’ve lost. (KS)
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