Editor-in-Chief’s Introduction

INTRODUCTION

“I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,

The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me,

The first I graft and increase upon myself,

the latter I translate into a new tongue.”

—Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

The works in this collection—although tonally, structurally, and topically diverse—all espouse a tangibly kindred and Whitmanic confluence of theme: the transformation of struggle into nourishment for the promise of liberative and capacious beauty. These pieces aspire to prove their own resilience. They seek to effuse a robust freshness of voice transmuted through the tumult of conflict, enacting a series of progressions both individual, interpersonal, and socio-cultural. Despite the ineluctable din of infernal billow murking the heart, murking the eye—for these authors, the tongue proffers its own transcendent lucence. Into a New Tongue is the burgeon of novelty—the revivification of selfhood in the process of earnest dreaming.

“Liberty” is a celebration of the verdant potency of individual will. Each author suffuses the page with their unfettered voice in accordance with the variance of their own intrinsic colouration. These pieces contain both boisterousness and unabashed tranquility. They aspire to themselves, and in doing so, conjure an effervescent appeal to you, reader, to realize your own procreative capacity—to make manifest the nascent lushness of your spirit by whatever means, and by whatever design.

“Identity” is the culmination of the explorative announcement of self. It is the grasp of discovery enacted in the very first step of expedition. The works in this section delve the interstice of transient chaos and material order to brush the vague tangibility of their own ineffable meaning.

“Mythology” seeks to trace the cultural histories that permeate our collective and individual consciousnesses. The pieces contained in this chapter weave redolent echoes of indelible memory, bursting forth immortal in the recitations of their authors reconfigured in confluent presence

“Connection” serves as the coalescence of an array of multiform narrative traditions, catalyzed through the emergence and merger of this book’s profusion of unique perspectives and experiences. This chapter is the woven fulfillment of previous chapters. It is both succession and imbrication, binding each author in a community of voice, simultaneously distilled and expanded in a covenant of futurity. It is the final promise of translation: the enactment of a kindred understanding through art, the metamorphic diffusion of beauty through culture—sacrosanct and vast.

Nick Hildenbrand

Editor-in-Chief