Rob Casper presents "jubilat" (and Sarah Gridley)

As the publisher of jubilat, I rarely edit the poems we accept. Ninety per cent of the time we take what we get, as is. In the case of the other 10%, we might ask to change a word or two, or possibly end the poem a line earlier; but no dramatic alterations. While I believe the best poems create their own terms -- terms that push our thinking in new and exciting ways -- I sometimes envy editors of fiction and nonfiction, who are expected, even encouraged, to edit the pieces that end up in the pages of their magazine.

However, once in a great while I have the opportunity to work with the author on a poem we have accepted. This was the case for Sarah Gridley's "Acousmatic," which we published in the last issue. We had published Sarah previously -- her poem "Cuckoo's Report" was featured in jubilat 3. I greatly admired that poem as well as her first collection, Weather Eye Open, which was published in the  University of  California Press New Poetry Series in 2005. After Sarah read for the Poetry Society of America's third New American Poets Festival in 2007 (in addition to publishing jubilat, I also work as Programs Director for the PSA), I asked her to send along some new work to the magazine.

Included in Sarah's batch of submissions was "Acousmatic." Before we had gotten a chance to respond, she sent along a much revised second version. It was this that sparked my interest -- it seemed like it was moving in the right direction formally and rhetorically. And I also found it as powerful as it was mysterious, like acousmatic sound itself: the notion of hearing something without knowing its cause. Sarah sent in a third version while we were looking at the second, and I didn't like it as much. After discussions with my editors, I wrote her back asking her to consider returning to the earlier version. She sent along another draft in response and told me the poem had been difficult for her to edit because it dealt with the experience of witnessing friends bury their child. The questions that preoccupied her in the poem were "how parents can survive such losses, how friends can help only so far, how no 'higher power' feels accountable or responsive to me, how beauty, turned a fraction on its axis, feels vicious."

This note made me realize anew how poems help us contend with the most confusing experiences, and how privileged I was to be able to publish such essentially human work. I was also grateful to Sarah for being so collaborative in the revision process. "Acousmatic" went through one more revision, and the result still makes me marvel at how a poem can be so philosophically, psychically, and imaginatively engaging.

-- Rob Casper

ACOUSMATIC

not a concept, much less a faith—
not quiet

but coming forward from the dust, a white mare
partially bone, primarily fast in the higher field

and was the sound of snow dissolving, glass being blown
from lips of beginners

where by love I mean a failing,
copious and opaque, heart without a practical power

most feeling the gives of undone
fountain and basin, the water

penned in, the tension to ring where the water
turns down, where the beads are cracking

our sun’s white code
in the courtyard foreign beyond the window

plurally into something else
when I live on the look of muteness, where I lived on the look

of happiness
rose that was quanta—

I ask after cost—after gouge of grass
and sky, after cause

that hides its cause
in unsustainable shapes of pain

in tempos habituating grass
redbud trees in arriving and splitting

accost, accost, come closer to my ribs
not only the understanding

has a language
be it wind in rings of meanest direction

or deepest remove when bluest in surface
by memory I mean

a skin: a cover for the underworlds
that we might try to breathe

or hear in wind a single
soothing thing

or hear of wind a kindred displacement
in our skins to the added

subtractions we live in, sun over sand, the coppered hem-
wetness, sun in tons of bells, in apples cut open

for eating
yes now I am listening to your fallible sounds

pity for the you
that is stranded, pity for the you

who dazed or faceless
where now I am hearing a mechanical click

to see I had no beautiful shelter
the motioning colors of the trees, the edgewise

pit before beginning
to take up

listening as something harder, to take up
walking as something longer

attach me, walking, attach me

--  Sarah Gridley