THE ORCHARDS POETRY JOURNAL — WINTER 2024
The Orchards Poetry Journal winter 2024 issue is out. The Orchards is published by Kelsay Books, publisher of one of my favorite American poets, Mary Makofske (No Angels), and many others. For poetry lovers, the electronic version is accessible and free at the web link above. Hard copies of the book can be purchased directly at Kelsay Books or at Amazon. I am happy to have one of my more surrealist poems published in this issue. The poem Passage was originally inspired by a thought experiment I performed with numerous friends and family. I conducted the experiment many times over the course of several months. Here it is: Focus your mind for a moment and conjure up a great thinker—just hold it there for a few moments. Then, name the thinker you see in your mind’s eye. If you don’t have a name but only an image, describe the image. Done? Was it Plato, Aristotle, Einstein, Spinoza? How many of you saw a woman? If you did (be honest), you will be the first person involved in this experiment to arrive at that image. And why not G.E.M. Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Martha Nussbaum, Rebecca Goldstein? Each of us can answer this question on our own, sure enough. The poem was also inspired by Sundowner, an L.S. Asekoff poem that ventures into the realm of the mind at the point of death. That exquisite poem explores an outbound journey and a return. But what if the journey was, in fact, one way? And what if the journey was taken by a rigorous thinker, a skeptic, one who considered the journey itself a path of inquiry. Would she be fearless? What might she find? Where do reality and imagination eclipse each other? This is where poetry fits in, since we must make an imaginative leap. I invite you to read the poem on page 64, as well as the many other fine poems in this issue. Good reading!