Welcome to Hymn for the Living Poet, Volume V
Dear Readers,
It has been in exchange with visual artist and musician Baptiste de Chabaneix that I have gained better access to my own project. The last eight years of our collaboration on Verse of April is of course glaring proof of this, but it is more than just the publications, the volumes, trailers, and graphics. While the punctuation of this digital anthology is annual, the conversation is long, loop-holed, frizzy, cursed, and often, when perspective permits, astounding, in its lust for being. On top of that, Verse of April is now touched by years of emotional and intellectual research, each of us stepping out from our fraught origin stories to venture into the precarious space of deinstitutionalizing world view, decolonializing the regard, and giving space to alternative realities, of electing, of all choices, the toil of being an artist.
From an early time, Baptiste understood how much I was desperate to crack open my sensation of poetry’s vacuum, especially of what the United States had branded for me as Poetry, a solipsistic genre hell-bent on its own image, the kind of vision I was trying to undo in my personal practice and hoped to god was going to undo itself in exchange with other artists, especially outside of the MFA machine. Isn’t it funny, how some people can restore us to ourselves? How they can, despite our years of effort, with one perceptive comment, redeem us in our own pursuits? I’d like to thank Baptiste for doing that for me in this collaboration, for allowing me atonement through the poetry of his regard, through the literal and figurative animation of this collection. I had wanted poetry to bust out of its straight-jacket, perhaps the one I’d given it, and Baptiste showed me — with an innocence, humor, and seriousness I could not protest — that it was already off.
This year, on our 10th anniversary, he brings us the idea of the flame, from his own years-long research into the works of Gaston Bachelard. His approach is musical and visual, always harkening us to the reality of impressionism, the validity of perception, or perhaps most of all, as he once said, “l’intégrité de la bêtise,” – as I heard it, contextually, “the honesty of our blunders.” Our blunders, here, being the stuff of us – us being artists, artists being trying-people, trying-people being imperfect, and imperfection being really real, as the only defense against the militarization of our expression under current technocratic, fascist regimes willfully disenfranchising us from our own humanity.
Volume V, in every piece, brings us a flicker of that, of the tryingness of poetry, of the generosity of minds helping others see themselves in their own pursuits, often shared unbeknownst. There is no posturing here, not from a single contributor. The love, respect, and absolute necessity of encountering the living poet honored is felt. I felt it in reading them, and I know you will too. This vulnerability towards art, for me, has become what homage is all about, a way of thanking someone, in like gesture, for them redeeming you, whether they saw your face or not. The humanity present in the original poem is that they didn’t have to, and the humanity present in the homage is that you can’t help yourself but utter praise.
I hope you’ll spend some time with these digital pages, where you’ll meet homages from sterling-elizabeth arcadia, Lillian Davies, Barbara E. Hunt, Alison Grace Koehler, nat raum, Jason Stoneking, Isabella Streffen, Nikki Ummel, and Aras Zeug who utter praise to Sommer Browning, Sarah Clark, Richard Dailey, Barry Dempster, Erika Gill, Liliane Giraudon, Maira Kalman, Donika Kelly, Don McKay, Joni Mitchell, James O’Leary, Bleah Patterson, Ryan Ruby, and Diane Seuss.
Thank you to Baptiste de Chabaneix, my living poet, for the reminder of the “chandelle” in this 10th year of Verse of April and final volume of Hymn for the Living Poet. Thank you to all of you for sharing your work, for being poets in these times. Thank you to the readers and supporters of this project, some of whom are contributors also. Your lifeblood has been precious to me. I am honored to have been conversing with you over the years. I hope you enjoy Volume V.
Yours in the tryingness of poetry,
Carrie Chappell
Editor-in-Chief
Paris, April 2025