Acceptance: Offcourse #57

Visit Offcourse

See three of my poems, including the conformity-crushing "Sims," in the latest issue of this hidden gem of a journal, run by the brilliant Editors Ricardo and isabel N/nirenberg. They are humble, modest in terms of presentation--and yet the words, the amazing words! Here you will find the quintessence of the poetic craft, the marrow of the ancient art, the soul-bared revelations of those who grip phrases as if seizing onto the horns of dangerous beasts. There is nothing here but Truth and Beauty as these instantiate in the full spectrum of mud-spackled, air-kneaded, water-drunk, fire-strummed emotions. There is Justice here, as Truth and Beauty meld into such when the heart is free and rides with the Muse in abandon. Ah, this is the most overlooked yet special site on the web, perhaps! I don't know what else to say.

Look, the other day I found this epigraph in a volume of the collected works of Neruda--and it calls out to me as I think of Offcourse, and what these two editors have done. I end with this. Nothing else could say what needs to be said, from my metaphysical throat, right now:

And I tell you that you should open yourselves to hearing an authentic poet, of the kind whose bodily senses were shaped in a world that is not our own and that few people are able to perceive. A poet closer to death than to philosophy, closer to pain than to intelligence, closer to blood than to ink.

--Federico Garcia Lorca

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