And Miles to Go

There's nothing like a familiar Robert Frost line to bring out an enthusiastic deluge of submissions. This spring, there were many wonderful poems submitted to In Posse Review, so making final selections for this all poetry issue was particularly difficult.

Actually, though I edit for three publications—In Posse, Pedestal, & Spillway—in many ways IPR is the most difficult for me. Why? Because I have to fall in love with two poems by each poet or one long poem that does not lose momentum or focus between its beginning and its end. A challenge for the editor, but a chance for a poet to show the depth of his/her work.

Then there's the matter of how a theme shapes an issue. This issue, you will see,  carries out the theme (though broadly interpreted) with poems about trains, birds, Fado, climbing cables of the Golden Gate Bridge, the past remembered, future imagined, about the gradual disintegration of self, about art and music, about turning a failed mousse into Potage au Chocolat. But it is mostly about the miles and years we each travel, trying to make sense of lives well-lived or (sometimes) squandered and thrown off course. 

As I usually do when I put an issue together, the poets are not listed alphabetically.  Consider In Posse as an online anthology, a selection of poems where the work of one poet leads in some semi-logical way to the poetry of the next. If you choose to read by skipping around randomly, that's fine. But you might try reading from the beginning, and see if you like following the quirky narrative of In Posse #29.

As writers, we try to focus on the process not the product. When we live, in the best of all possible worlds, the experience should be about the journey not the destination. So you will, I hope, come along for this journey, stopping here and there along the way to contemplate, to admire, or to quibble.  But, above all, to be present for the many miles you still have to go. And, as for us at IPR, we have, as always, promises to keep. . . .

                Susan Terris, Poetry Editor In Posse Review

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