The intro to the issue by this issue's guest editor Stephen Dunn:

GETTING A POEM HOME: SOME NOTES ABOUT CHOREOGRAPHY
AND THE SOUL

One of the prerogatives of a guest editor is--in the guise of writing an introduction--to address a few pet concerns, then disappear as fast as possible and let his choices do the rest of his speaking for him. So here goes. Paul Valery famously likened poetry to dancing, prose to walking. I suspect that about each he was half right. Nevertheless, as poets--as I hope is evidenced by the poems in this issue of Nightsun--we need to think like choreographers. We must intuit, will, pace, digress, suppress, vary, and arrange--all of which requires a sense of evolving design, and, finally, a form that best serves what ultimately we've found ourselves to be doing.

I imagine the poets in this issue happily struggling with such matters. Their poems, predominantly written in what we loosely call free verse, are dances that must also have been in search of an authenticating music, and thus slowed down, sped up, in the manner of those great trade-offs between a poet's intentions, discoveries, and the textural and sonic demands of the language already in the poem. And this compositional fun was further complicated by the likely fact that their dances were taking place on an open road, a road we can presume was often crooked, with various small paths intersecting it, all full of psychic debris. As they moved forward, they were carrying the baggage of a life lived and of a book-life, the entire history of their reading. So much must have wanted to get into the poem!

Suppression of unruly impulses civilizes a poem, allows its various parts to better cohabit. At best, such suppression--by eliminating the false freedoms of indulgence and solipsism--makes freedom more possible. At worst, it leads to a kind of benignity, the poem so civilized that we'd like to mess up its hair, take it for a joy ride. It is the imagination's task to accommodate unruly impulses, to eventually make them feel inevitable. Poems should shimmer with a necessity, or otherwise be "holidays of the mind"--romps for the serious, trips to worlds that resemble ours.

In the presence of a good poem we remember/ discover the soul has an appetite, and that appetite is for emotional veracity and for the unsayable. The general condition of my soul, I'm willing to admit, is stoic hunger, stoic loneliness. I'm really only aware of it and its condition when I'm jolted by something surprising or beautiful. Only then do I know what I've been missing. Paul Eluard said, "There is another world, and it is in this one." The very best poems startle us into consideration of that world, and in so doing prick the soul into wakefulness.

In reading for this issue, I will not claim that my soul was always so activated, but the poems I've chosen did engender in me an uncommon alertness. No doubt before these poems reached me they had been arranged and rearranged, worried into a final shape. I was privy only to their virtues, which is what an editor hopes for. If a poem's ending is the home which contains its journey, and a true home is never easily arrived at, I am once again grateful for the dance, the artful walk, and the many other ways in which such difficulty is concealed.

--Stephen Dunn