After urgency by Rusty Morrison

How to draw the constantly shifting selves together

around an object of scrutiny and let this simply be

the way that it’s raining again outside, so lightly,

hardly more than fog, so that I leave behind my

umbrella, open the door, then decide to just stand

at the very edge of the front porch, neither

immersed in nor protected from the suffusion

in the air of nearly imperceptible rainfall.

I wrote about this quiet little poem last month, how I was trying to draw my “constantly shifting selves together” to gear up for the literary saturation that was the AWP conference.  I promised to return to it, and so here we are.

Every time I reread this poem, I feel it  under my skin like the damp air of a “nearly imperceptible rainfall”, which is exactly what makes it is so, so successful.  And by successful I don’t mean that it won awards (it did) or that it was printed in a famous journal (it was.)  I mean that it knows what it’s doing and it does it well.

Myriad gorgeous poems come across my desk by way of my Minerva Rising Submittable account. Every time I open a new submission I am reminded again how much I love my job, how grateful I am for the work and the opportunity to open each little gift of poetry that you beautiful women lay into my hands.  Lucky lucky me.  Your work is sometimes raw, sometimes buffed, always heartfelt and, in its own ways, heart-stopping.  And I wish I could engage with each and every one of you to talk to you about what works in your poetry, and what maybe, at times, doesn’t.

I’ve recently resolved some e-mail issues that have been plaguing my account for almost a year.  Living in a formerly eastern bloc country has its challenges!  If you have tried to contact me at the emilyatminervarisingdotcom email address and have not gotten a response, please accept my sincere apologies.  The account seems to be working now, and I hope to be in touch with more of you to engage in deeply rewarding and enriching conversation about your poetry.

We’re a small staff at Minerva Rising, and we too have to work at “drawing our constantly shifting selves together”.   The way we all totally love, respect, and honor each other and our commitment to our magazine, you’d think we were in a five-way, bi-continental polygamous marriage.  AWP is our annual wedding anniversary.  We drink champagne and throw back tequila shots and whatever&tonics like we’re at the reception year after year, all over again.  And at the end of the day, we pay our own bar tabs.

And we fête our writers.  We toast them like the radiant bride in white.  We love on them and stroke them, carry their veil, link to their bio’s and their current projects on our website long after we’ve printed their words.  WE PAY THEM like we’re stuffing money in their purse.  Not a lot of money.  Maybe just enough to buy a couple of cappucinos and a new pen.  Enough to let them know WE LOVE THEM EVEN MORE THAN WE LOVE OURSELVES.  Here at Minerva Rising, poetry and prose, flash fiction and photography, essay and short story and memoir and cnf have real value.

In the day to day work of publishing our journal, reality or “shifting selves” occasionally get in the way – time zones, bills that need to be paid, day jobs we have to succumb to in order to pay those bills.  Family first.  That electric thing called LIFE.  The strike of tragedy, loss of loved ones.  Once in a coon’s age, haters try to toss a little hate our way.  But whadderugonna do.  Haters gonna hate.  Reality bites.    We still work to bring  your words to light.  We still love, respect, and honor each other and our commitment to our magazine and to our community.  We still lift a glass.  We are “neither immersed in nor protected from the suffusion.”  We just do what we do.

Lucky, lucky us.

I really love the sense of identity in “After urgency”.  I am so proud to be a part of a larger corps of women with a similar singularity of mission.  See if you can capture this same sense of purpose in your own writing today.  Set your intention in your writing, and let your poem, story or article decide what it’s doing.  Only you can be the one to usher it to the same level of success Morrison achieves.  I wish you the best of luck.

photo St. John of Nepomuk, Charles Bridge, Prague.  photo credit blog.goeuro.co.uk