Editor’s Note
I have latetly been re-reading a biography of one of my favorite photographers, the Park Avenue princess Diane Arbus. Arbus trafficked in so-called “freaks”—nudists, dwarves and giants, bodies sleeved in tattoos. She would take the D train to Coney Island to photograph people in the tenements, and as she asked them to pose, this class of people so far removed from her privileged background, she was both terrified and elated. Art became an escape from her shyness. I think she might have carried her 35mm as both sword and divining rod. Both what led her to connect with strangers, and the lens she could hide behind. And because of her and her subjects’ mutual vulnerability, the portraits hover eerily between voyeurism and intimacy. I project this onto Arbus because it’s how I’ve come to feel about editing this journal. Poictesme has given me a reason to reach out to writers and artists, several of whom have become close friends. It has helped me overcome some of the shyness and careerism I had first coming to college. And like any passion (or mild obsession), this journal has become part of my persona. I feel the same when I’m writing at my best. When I’m carrying a poem or story in mind, I become that much more sensitive to the images and language patterns around me, that much more inquisitive and self-reflective. But mediated. It’s strange—how much easier it becomes to articulate something about yourself from behind the strictures of form and meter, or a character’s persona, or a brush or camera lens. The work in this anthology runs the gamut, but this remains consistent: it’s self- searching. From behind a consciousness of language, these writers put themselves on the page. The writers featured here don’t take language for granted. They are quick to experiment and able to polish. They play within inherited forms like noir and epistle, and they make these forms their own. They inhabit characters and situations far outside of personal experience, and they do so with sympathy and nuance. They examine their own experiences without sacrificing form for catharsis. Take Matt Franklin’s revision of an 18th century adventure story. Or Erin Gerety’s masterful use of second-person. Or Danny Caporaletti’s measured precision.