Editor’s Note
Dear Readers,
There’s a 1994 storybook classic by Peggy Rathmann titled Good Night Gorilla about a zookeeper who unwittingly brings home a trail of zoo animals back to his bedroom. It’s only after the lights are turned out, everyone tucked in bed, that the zookeeper’s wife suspects something is amiss. Her eyes blink open in the pitch dark. Turn the page, and the volta is apparent: the eyes of the zookeeper’s wife are wide as could be, eyebrows raised, her mouth agape as she beholds the gorilla nestled beside her and a giraffe, elephant, lion, mouse, and armadillo all cozied up at the foot of the bed surrounding her. It’s the very page that widens my baby’s eyes and forms a big “O” with her mouth, stopping her cold in her tracks.
It’s a wonder to me what images my daughter gravitates towards. Even amid the jumble of books gifted to her by loving aunties, grandparents and friends, she quickly winnows through the ones that feature generic AI-generated illustrations with interchangeable place names and is instead drawn to the books that are alive with image and narrative-rich. If my fifteen-month-old toddler intuitively grasps the volta moment where everything changes, it makes me hopeful. Watching her astonishment renews my faith in the power of words and images wrought and wrangled by the writers, visual artists, and editors who continue to commit to the craft in a landscape threatened by the regulatory vacuum surrounding LLMs and AI.
In her poem, “What Data Wants”, Rae Armantrout writes:
“Data wants to flow,” he says,
and we’re used to things like that:
urine, time,
lava.
The artists featured in this fifty-eight issue of The Adroit Journal allow themselves to be troubled by the word. To not just stop at the sameness and uninterrupted flow of calcified images and habituated poetic metaphors, but lock horns with what is unresolved. To struggle towards an intimacy of detail.
Fabienne Rink’s translation of Simone Lappert’s “Reverberation” tunes our ear to the lower octaves of what underlies the cabaret of waking life: “soundlessness combs the eardrum out, / enshevels the clamor of the years, makes you all ear / and aware. the silence, a phonograph needle, moves along memories, / replays once more what was. no getting up now, / just blinking and breathing and staying quiet, / waiting for the hidden track of this discomfort.”
The hidden track and image of the phonograph needle reminds me of what poet Kaveh Akbar calls the record scratch that writers commit to the page; the poet’s ‘O’, the stutter, the typographical chiasmus. The stutter becomes audible to me in Kaley Hutter’s poem, “Dodge,” written in the wake of August 2017 when white supremacists marched through the main veins of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville wielding tiki torches: “I can watch the / crash I watch now I read. On / how it happened it / happened. The flowers the / flowers.” Or in Michelle Phương Hồ’s poem, “Vilomah”: “that flickering / within the womb’s / dim orb / There is no outward sign for / They are trying to understand what happened”. Both Hồ and Hutter pinpoint the moment of breaking on the page, the insufficiency of language. Dark moments in personal and shared history that aren’t meant to make sense, despite AI’s training to smooth and iron out hidden complacencies for the sake of efficiency.
In his essay on the power of image and photography as a mode of language, Youssef Rakha writes: “Unlike animals, we experience, express, and try to satisfy our needs using language, but language being what it is, words and concepts are never precise or consensual enough, never “quite right.” That is why, according to Lacan himself, “Desire has no chance of being satisfied.” ”
It’s this very gap between language and desire that art steps in. Where artists toil in obscurity towards naming desire, even if they know it to be a futile endeavor: “Every day, I try to paint my life. / Like the horses, she lurches, cannon cleft, / limbs gone unshapely underneath the palette knife. / I’m a poor artist of what’s real. I’ll sketch it / all wrong, this myth—how, like a frame, I stretch it,” KT Herr writes in “The horses”. Meanwhile, in Martyn Crucefix’s translation of “The Anchor Jar” by Lutz Seiler, the writer reflects on “The desire for a substance-like state of language”, which he struggles for through voices of doubt, blockage and stagnance until reaching “a moment of change, a reorientation in my own writing.”
As I read through the unflinching work in this fifty-eighth issue of The Adroit Journal, I’m grateful to the artists and writers who continue to commit their gnawing doubt, failed tries, and process of creating to the page. I’m thankful to poets like Kira Tucker who press further after asking “Why the personal turn here? / What in this painting makes me see myself / those summers ago, working at a slave estate”. And for writers like Chiwenite Onyekwelu who insist on listening closely for how “the loud hush of our unrung lives” continues to ring through all our bodies: “I want you to want the stubbornness / only a bell can wield.”
Wherever you find yourself deep in the dog days of summer, whether outpacing the wildfires as in Brendan Bowles’ “Yosemite Forever” or braving the trip back home to look upon your life from “the top stair of my childhood” like Matthew Gellman, I hope you find inspiration from the artists of this issue who resist the flow of efficiency in favor of the languid process of thinking, creating. That you might be stopped cold in your tracks when you meet your own moment of surprise, eyes wide, mouth shaped like an “O”, to wholly encounter “Whatsoever that changes you, the trees, and water in winter”.
Till next time,
Susan Moon
Senior Art Editor
Susan Moon is a Korean-American poet, essayist, and cultural researcher. She has written for publications like Southeast Review, Cream City Review, and Honey Literary. She is based in Savannah, Georgia, where she lives with her daughter and husband.
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