Letter from the Editor

1. 

I had little to do with boundby #005, having been out of the country with my partner for the long duration of its coming together. It came as no surprise that the team continued as normal, and though I missed the edition, it did not miss me. This reality doesn’t bother me; in truth it was both expected and genuinely promising to see that the magazine could neither be carried nor fumbled by any one set of hands. But my short period of absence did call to light the proverbial ‘slack’ that we are all both picking up and prone to dropping; the many slacks we’re mis/managing at any one time; the constant calculating of how much our busy lives can handle; how many concurrent absences might kill the cause; and whether to keep trying when I find myself perpetually drawn to the search for lower and lower stakes, less responsibility. 

2. 

Sensing we were now at the part of the trip where your whole person faces home, in one of the waiting areas of one of Fukuoka airport’s departure gates, I got an email to say a small, well-regarded journal wanted to publish a long poem-essay I had been sitting on for a little over a year. Because I’d held onto the piece for so long, or because I now had something to look forward to when I returned home, I was struck, more than anything, by the relief that both it and I were deemed good enough. That the experiment of the poem had, at best, registered, and, at least, not been heavy-handed enough to distract from any other affecting qualities. I would also be pleased to see the poem, by virtue of being on the same website, alongside work from a few poets I greatly admired. Even if ‘alongside’ in this context required a fair bit of scrolling. Then after a long summer of delays, unread emails, follow-ups, and finally a less embellished, more straightforward request for a confirmed publication date (or otherwise for a confirmation of the editor’s change of heart, so I might begin to submit the piece elsewhere), the whole thing quickly and apologetically fell through. It means nothing more than to say a part of me had let these words go; they had stopped being mine upon acceptance, and suddenly I had them all back; they were mine again, to either keep or otherwise confirm my change of heart. It was a disproportionately painful anti-climax, maybe because of the more personal nature of the poem, but likely nobody's fault. Alone, the whole thing is hardly enough to register as an event in its own right, rather a hair’s-width misalignment compounding with what, at the time, had felt like hundreds more. 

3. 

I picked up Lila Matsumoto’s new collection Talk a Blue Streak at a book fair at London’s ICA. I have been moving the book around my bedroom for the last few weeks. First to my desk, then my bookshelf, then to the floor next to bed, unsure whether I am subconsciously modelling, staging this beautifully made object (working out where it looks best), or whether I am keeping it at arm’s length, waiting for the moment I finally needed it. With how little I have been writing myself, I almost can’t bear to look at such a mass of poems, and am even more terrified to open to the first page, suspecting it’ll taunt me, knowing it might just save me. 

4. 

Last month, I started a new job working at a secondary school in West London. The role is unconventional, at times a stopgap, at times a more permanent answer to a real need for targeted enrichment for kids in an underprivileged postcode. One hat I wear is that of a facilitator for a compulsory, ungraded sixth form class called “Academic Research”, for which the first term of sessions is dubbed “Debate and Oracy”. These lessons are part-improvised, part-instructional attempts to improve their public speaking, reasoning and logic, with a self-indulgent pinch of philosophical edification to theoretically ground what I’m sure feels like a strange, inconsequential way to spend one afternoon every week. Aside from my students’ brilliance, and of course their humour (this being the most apparent tell that they understand each other and the world far beyond their age), it has become obvious just how arbitrary and contagious ‘the vibe’ of any one class can be. How contrasting these vibes can be for the same group just one week apart. The speed at which disinterest and shared lethargy can break and give way to involvement, and, in what can become heated debates, with which tension and competition so swiftly synthesise into camaraderie. I feel old trying to keep up with the change, the insecurity and fragility of any one group dynamic, of any one moment even. At some point in the transition to adulthood I lost my ability to snap out of any one thing, to follow the swarm. I am far more likely to drift and ease and merge between states than let myself fall and, to the opposite extent, be launched. I have become exceedingly aware, in class, of all of the ways the room slips out of my control, clinging to the instances in which I can hold or tame or redirect the weather, half-conscious of the fact that even these moments of things-going-to-plan might not be because of anything I have done, but instead little gifts ‘the vibe’ offers up for my sanity, little illusions with which I can identify; it’s going to be okay, I don’t need to keep up, not if I can keep them right here.   

5. 

We settled on “overflow” as this edition’s spotlight category just before a prolonged period of drought in the UK. Poetry is one domain where abundance doesn’t cheapen the lot. I’ve always wanted more, even when slightly scared to have it all. When having so much might remind me of just how prolific I fail to be. Drought, as we have all borne witness, is its own kind of spill, consequences of past decisions. It is only when a certain fear abates, and I open a book, and the force of a thousand voices come at me like darts: references, half remembrances, transcripts of people and conversation, allusions to other texts. Only then I understand again what I have forgotten countless times: that the name on the cover is only ever one of these references, that I ought not believe in geniuses and my not being one, that all of our contributions to this act of moving language around are always pending, completion and incompletion as bereft a concept as failure and success, the value of this collective message too often overattributed and misplaced, the actual pleasure of reading and feeling read too easily overlooked. When my own writing fails me, or worse, becomes painfully familiar, I am carried by the strange, unfamiliar poems that pass through boundby’s inbox every week. These poems do not wait for me to be ready; they were set in motion thousands of years ago and just so happen to be here while I am too. If I close my eyes and unthink hard enough, I can almost feel myself as their author, writing and erasing in a single motion, the same hand that scribes every line then smudging them as it follows through; I cannot read back, only forward. And in having no words of my own, whatever this means, I am free to be the reader I always wanted to be, untouched by the guilt that I ought to be in charge, disillusioned of the idea that reading was somehow writing’s passive opposite. 

6. 

To credit these incommensurable events to the power of “the social” doesn’t do their mystery justice. I am one to think that our relations to one another don’t materialise out of thin air. I am one to think we tend to do a good job of describing the way in which we are connected, and what the sources of these points of connection are. But how do we account for sociality’s random intuition? That which sees us surrender to our groups, processes, arrangements, their aggregate energies, emotions, ‘vibes’, all unspoken. How can it be that we all take so much time out, that we all grind to near halts, without any loss of momentum to the wholes of which we are supposedly contingent parts? And what for the very real communicative power of anti-communication? The knowing (across oceans, borders, dead space, without transmission or signal) to pick up the slack. The trust that the same be done for us. What for not-writing’s deluge of language? For not-speaking’s special kind of scream?