Hello fellow woodland critters! Welcome in beaver newbies and welcome back beaver aficionados to the dam! We hope you are finding peace and community in this sociopolitical turmoil hellscape. Free Palestine. Fuck ICE. Fuck AI.
We received a couple AI-generated pieces and it sent me into a spiral. It’s mind-boggling that people think feeding a robot four words and minorly sprucing up the product is what it takes to be a bona fide artist or writer. True creators are mindfully tethered to the toil, trial n’ error, and tribulations of composition; pining for and scrupulously unearthing the perfect expression to align with their internal sentiments. Yusef Komunyakaa poeticizes the poet’s role as “a magpie collecting every scrap / of song.” To be fully present and absorb every crumb of the world around you. To become an omnipresent sponge of the intricacies of nature and humanity. To echo the heart-thrum sonics and buried meanings of sacred things that can’t speak.
I constantly think about Yusef as a paragon of what it means to be a poet. I’ll never forget my professor Marcus Wicker at the University of Memphis telling us that Yusef still revises his published pieces from decades ago, and it seemingly inspired him to do the same with blankets of poems on corkboards in his office, adorned in lyrics he’s inspired by, edits, and ideas. This, to me, is so gorgeously unapologetically human, and the bedrock of true poets. I think about this level of persevering revision at least once a week…for sure my roman empire. A major core motive of it all is chasing this closeness to self, and the undying want for your public-sphere-perceived soul and expressions to parallel with your nearly inexplicable inner beliefs, and maybe even connect to others carrying the same hidden brain treasure.
What I’m trying to spit out is that we can’t connect to ourselves and the world if we aren’t our own data center rigorously guzzling the water of the world around us, and possessing a heightened awareness and desire to articulate the snow melt, drought, or flooding inside ourselves.
So with this aquifer of human appreciation recharging inside of me, despite the sociopolitical demons and collective-conscious-depression sucking me dry, I read through this issue’s submissions like a truffle pig, searching for potent truffle-like expressions from others that made me feel less alone. Ya’ll made me feel like I was one of those cozy monkeys in a hot spring of hive mind. Emotionally connecting to the expressions of people half my age, double my age, across oceans, experiencing different microcosms of life, is the marrow that continually revitalizes my beaver bones and invigorates me to never stop doing this dam thing.
Throughout this issue, writers use flora and fauna as vessels of metaphor to analyze and embody their view of themselves, their loved ones, and the world swimming in the anthropocene. Whether it’s acknowledging your self-growth and simultaneous emptiness next to a fuschia bougainvillea, witnessing the death of a bird with your child that’s already an empath vegetarian, meditating and fixating on the horse hoof in your imprisoned grandpa’s pocket, pondering how much your offspring will treasure your inherited rabbit’s foot, feeling insignificant as fish when you’re thinking whale-sized thoughts, or becoming a seahorse, everyone in this issue is looking inwards, to nature, or to loved ones to make sense of the world crumbling around them and inside of them, in hopes to learn from the ashes, rebuild optimism or outlooks, and heal.
I don’t want to explicitly harp too much on the pieces though, it’s like writing a speech for a forest. I’d rather let the network of trees do all the talking. Enough of my soapbox yapping. Please sit in a pocket of sun with a fresh pot of coffee, your poetry-loving friends, and your favorite album blaring, and sift through this gorgeous silt of expression from around the world.
Be kind to others, and don’t lose your love for the world.
All my beaver love,
Haley Winans
Beaver Magazine 