Someone once wrote that originality and insight are like twin lamps fastened above the gate to a walled and fabled city where the lucky ones live; while most of us will labor in the mud and muck of daily life, trying to get closer to the wedge of lemony radiance they shed, open-mouthed at such brightness that holds fast through darkest winter and outshines any lunar or solar glow. What are the odds we'll get there, if the roads are either lashed by flood, overgrown with brambles, barricaded with wire or crusted over with ice? The going is painful and slow; any speed gained is downhill and breakneck— a word dating back to the 1870s, when men trying those novelty penny-farthing bicycles lost their balance, flew through the air and landed face down on the cobblestones. What are the odds anyone teetering on a single giant wheel could look dignified, wielding an instrument designed to dig or move dirt or coal, sand or snow, clad in last year's Halloween costume? Bleat a tune through torches, carry on as if this were the most natural thing in the world. Laugh or cry or point out absurdity and spectacle—but remember, the only difference between the comic and tragic is which side of the gallery erupts in cheers, and which with ridicule.
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (Poetry Foundation web page, author webpage ) was recently appointed Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (2020-2022). She is Co-Winner of the 2019 Crab Orchard Open Competition in Poetry for Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Southern Illinois University Press, September 2020). She is the winner of the 2015 Resurgence Prize (UK), the world’s first major award for ecopoetry, selected by former UK poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion, Alice Oswald, and Jo Shapcott. She is the author of What is Left of Wings, I Ask (2018 Center for the Book Arts Letterpress Chapbook Prize, selected by former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey); Bright as Mirrors Left in the Grass (Kudzu House Press eChapbook selection for Spring 2015), Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (Utah State University Press, 2014 May Swenson Prize), Night Willow (Phoenicia Publishing, 2014), The Saints of Streets (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2013), Juan Luna’s Revolver (2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize, University of Notre Dame Press), and nine other books. She is a member of the core faculty of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University which she directed from 2009-2015; she also teaches classes at The Muse Writers’ Center in Norfolk. In 2018, she was the inaugural Glasgow Distinguished Writer in Residence at Washington and Lee University. When she isn’t writing, reading, or teaching, she cooks with her family, knits, hand-binds books, and listens to tango music.