Additional information
by Danielle Jones (Editor in Chief)
Congratulations to all of the New Hampshire undergraduate and
graduate-level poets whose work is included in this year's anthology.
At UNH, we often have students in introductory poetry classes read
this anthology along with other classic and contemporary poets, so in
addition to congratulations, let me say something even more important:
thank you.
Thank you for knowing that the world needs poetry today. It needs new
ways of looking at old problems when the old rehearsed and received
stances and assumptions no longer seem to work. It needs your feeling,
your humor, your wit, and your sense of adventure. It needs the synthesis
of metaphor and simile. It needs the compressed meaning that images
convey, but only when they are run through the unique miracle of the
individual who lives and feels and remembers things in jumbled ways.
Virginia Wolf says that the world never asks for poems, but this anthology
shows that the world needs your poetry, just as the world needs more free
people of consciousness and compassion and its unlikely twin, humor,
needs their fresh eyes, needs their open ears, their impulse to build, to
make from a spirit of play, alertness, and discipline.
We also need poetry because poetry helps us remember. The techniques
and arcana of poetry, rhythm, rhyme, even the pauses, the caesuras, the
punctuation, and the withheld punctuation are all in the service of the
entertainment of memory. When we remember a poem, we remember to
feel, to live with our senses. We remember the rawness of feeling and the
relief and pleasure of play. And the voices of poets, being companionable,
being good company, remind us we are not alone. These are all reasons
for gratitude. Once again, thank you, poets and readers. And all readers
of poems become poets when they read. Thank you.
David Blair, M.F.A.
Lecturer of Poetry
Department of English, MFA Writing Program
The University of New Hampshire
