Poetry Launch

We want poetry to be a big part of this.

Louise Glück, the current editor of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, has said that Jay Hopler's book is "filled with tardy recognitions and insights. Always we sense, beneath the surface of even the most raucous poems, impending crisis: the terrifying onset of that life long held at a distance."

We want more people to experience this—people who've never sat in a poetry workshop or thought to purchase the latest issue of Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, or the newest Yale Younger Poets book.

One of Hopler's most haunting lines, from the poem That Light One Finds in Baby Pictures, reads: "Being born is a shame— / But it's not so bad, as journeys go. It's not the worst one / We will ever have to make . . ."

Who hasn't felt these things at some point? Who can't identify with these sentiments?

I for one, would like to know.

Maybe it's the short form or the easily chunk-able and digestible bits that made poetry seem a natural fit for this platform. I'm curious to see how far this carries and how far the discussion it generates will continue. At heart, it's nothing new—just another means of publication, a different kind of cover for the same kind of content; but I think this project does have the potential to help rekindle something special—a truly broad discussion of poetry, which has been been missing from the national discourse for quite some time.