Letter from the Managing Editor
or A Birdwatcher’s Field Guide to Polyphony Lit

 

20 Anniversary Issue | Julian Riccobon

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I. The Green Jay

 

Dear Readers,

 

If you read enough poems, then you may discover, as I have, that the literary world is fascinated with all things avian.

 

For Dickinson, “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers – / That perches in the soul.” For Poe, the genus Corvus is a source of obsession; “Quoth the raven, nevermore.” Even Sylvia Plath expresses a pang of sorrow, when she reflects on these feathered muses, lamenting, “If you dissect a bird / To diagram the tongue / You’ll cut the chord / Articulating song.”

 

Birds are everywhere. They flit and soar across imagery throughout the literary canon, and so it is only fitting that Polyphony Lit’s iconic symbol of “many voices” is the green jay.

 

Sometimes, I want to preserve the mystery that Silvia Plath describes; don’t dissect the poem and “cut the chord,” but simply appreciate the poem as it appears on the page. Sometimes, though, I also want to understand. The inner workings of a poem; how it digs in its talons, how it stays aloft, how it sings…

 

One of the many virtues of Polyphony Lit, I believe, is the fact that it offers all of us (editors, readers, and writers) the opportunity to study the bird up close while still being able to admire the bird from afar. By writing detailed feedback to submitters, our editors experience the unique challenge of identifying why a piece is powerful (or not), how certain lines created a vivid image (or not), and how we, as writers, can continue to build on our skills. With its seasonal issues, Polyphony Lit provides a space to showcase and admire poems in their final forms, but behind the scenes, there is also a deep appreciation for the craft – the blood, sweat, and tears – that makes these final published poems possible.

 

II. The Rock Dove

 

Over the past six years, Polyphony Lit has changed the course of my life in ways that I can’t even begin to describe. Through Polyphony Lit, I’ve found community and friendship, affection and heartbreak, purpose and passion…

 

Back in 2022, I began organizing a poetry workshop called “Around the World of Poetry in 80 Days,” which traced a path around the globe and explored the perspectives of writers and editors from various countries. I found myself asking: What makes good poetry? How has history or cultural influences shaped poetry in your area? What does poetry mean to you on a personal level?

 

The topic pitches that students sent me for these workshop lessons were elaborate and varied: a student from Nigeria wanted to explore confessional poetry, while a student from India wanted to explore mythological allusions and retellings, while students from SoCal and Singapore wanted to explore how poetry overlaps with STEM fields like marine science and mathematics. These content creators brought new ideas to the table; ideas that I never would have discovered if I’d tried to create the workshop content by myself.

 

For me, this exercise was a means of community-building. Meeting in Zoom with students from different time zones, listening to them describe their appreciation for poetry and pitch ideas for poetry lessons... For me, it was a way of traveling the world and meeting new people from the comfort of my home.

 

However, this year, my connections with Polyphony Lit drove me to travel, for the first time, to New York City.

 

The train to New York was nine hours long (a slow-trundling tortoise that made all the local stops in rural Pennsylvania) and when we finally arrived in Manhattan, my brother and I were underground. Disoriented. We made our way across the dark train platform and ascended the stairs, zigzagging our way through the crowds of Penn Station and hopping on the escalators headed for street level. The train station was like Pittsburgh, I observed, only with more people. I wasn’t at all prepared to step outside.

 

When I first emerged from underneath Penn Station, I nearly stumbled backwards down the escalator, I was so lightning-struck 

 

No, lightning-struck is not quite the right word. Thunderstruck was more like it. Because it was not so much the sight of New York City that stunned me – with its vertical landscape of steel and glass building blocks. Rather, it was the sound that slammed into me. The tumult of voices, all blended together into an 85-decibel roar. Mandarin. Korean. Spanish. Marathi. German. And various languages that I couldn’t identify just by phonetics alone. 你好. Guten morgen. ¿Cómo estás?  It was like being hit by a linguistic bus – a bus carrying passengers from every nationality imaginable. It was the first time that I’d heard so many different languages in one place, and this, I realized, was, quite literally, what the Greek term “poly-phony” meant: many voices.

 

It was incredible. I was a two-dimensional circle that had just emerged from Flatland and discovered an entire world of spheres. And I never would have reached this point of enlightenment, if not for Polyphony Lit.

 

What was I doing in New York? I had traveled here to meet up with some Polyphony Lit pen pals for the first time. One of my friends, T., was a student from India who I’d met virtually in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic. With lockdowns in effect, it was difficult to walk down the street and talk to our friends in-person… so we’d started exchanging writing feedback with each other via email and we quickly became long-distance friends. My other pen pal, Lara, had served as Polyphony Lit’s Editor-in-Chief in 2020 and had gone on to study at Princeton University – and similarly, we had bonded over the experience of sharing creative writing with each other.

 

When we finally met up with T. in the Upper East Side, the streets were so teeming that even when we reached the agreed-upon street corner, I couldn’t spot her right away. I called out her name, and then suddenly she appeared – a splash of pink jacket and plaid skirt across the street – as if she had been summoned. As we made our way into Central Park, we talked about the books we’d just finished reading and about our writing projects and about Sylvia Plath (who had stayed in a hotel just a few blocks away before she wrote The Bell Jar.) It was strange, I thought, to pick up conversation threads that we’d started via email and continue them, seamlessly, in-person.

 

Walking through Central Park, it was difficult to avoid the pigeons. They strutted across the pathway as if they owned the city. They eyed the street vendors with scintillating intelligence. Made bold dives for the nearest hot dogs and gyros. When we walked straight through a flock of pigeons, they scattered around us, and surrounded by this flurry of feathers, I thought suddenly of a poem that I’d read in Polyphony Lit. I was reminded, instinctively, of Emmy Cho’s poem “ornithology,” which ends with a moment of release, an image that struck me as both pithy and cathartic.

 

“my lungs, wrought of air. your figure outlined in the dark

from my throat, blue birds.”

 

It struck me that these birds were once used as messengers, connecting far corners of the earth. These simple pigeons were the distant predecessors of snail mail and email.

 

How long would it take a pigeon to travel from Pittsburgh to India? I wondered. Could they even fly across the ocean, non-stop?

 

Only now did I fully appreciate the distance that we had just bridged. Under any other circumstances, T. and I never would have crossed paths, and yet, thanks to Polyphony Lit, we had ended up in the same place at the exact same time.

 

Wouldn’t it be accurate to say that Polyphony Lit is not just a green jay, but also a messenger pigeon, connecting people from distant reaches of the globe?

 

Later, I met Lara outside the Strand Bookstore. I had never seen a multi-story bookstore before, and as we wandered from table to table, like kids in a candy store, we chatted about Lara’s professors and her latest writing assignment at Princeton. In the “Explore NYC” section, by complete coincidence, we stumbled across one of Lara’s fellow college students, who she’d just seen in Princeton that morning. “It’s weird,” Lara told me, “how you bump into people in New York.”

 

Polyphony Lit, similarly, is a place where you will bump into people unexpectedly. Maybe someone you met at the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio. Maybe someone whose work you read in another literary magazine. Or maybe a complete stranger who incidentally, has read the same books, and on a subliminal level, it feels like you’ve known them your entire life.

 

III. The Nightingale

 

If you look closely, the green jay and the rock dove are not the only birds you will discover in Polyphony Lit’s aviary. On our blog page, a triumphant piece of artwork by Ayah al-Masyabi features a phoenix. On our Voices Blog, Ukrainian writer Kateryna Lenets reflects on the iconic nightingale in a memoir on the Russo-Ukrainian War. “The sound of a motorcycle mixed with the song of crickets pours in through the slightly open window,” she writes. “There are no nightingales in the city.”

 

In Ukraine, the nightingale is a national symbol; a feathered representation of home, family, and hope for a better future. For me, the nightingale has also come to represent a new era in Polyphony Lit’s history; one defined by globalization and one that has been shaped by decision-making power being placed in the hands of student leaders.

 

In October 2022, a Ukrainian nonprofit organization called “Teen Side” reached out to me via email and asked to collaborate on a project, publishing memoirs written by youth refugees from Ukraine. Later I met with one of Teen Side’s leaders, Kateryna Kishchynska, in Zoom, and the more that we discussed the project, the more it struck me as relevant to Polyphony Lit’s mission and values.

 

It has become apparent to me that Polyphony Lit is no longer just a Chicago-based literary magazine. Gradually, we have migrated from mail-in submissions and in-person workshops to an online platform which is accessible to students around the globe, and simultaneously, the subject matter featured in our publications has also expanded. We publish “The Best High School Writing from Around the Globe” – and so it is only fitting that we discuss global contemporary issues. It is only fitting that we acknowledge the wars, the political upheaval, the pandemics, and all of the life-changing events that are shaping a new generation of writers and readers.

 

In this issue you will find excerpts selected from our blog series on the Russo-Ukrainian, “Wake Up, the War Is Here.” You will also find pieces written by Polyphony Lit’s Claudia Ann Seaman Award winners from 2010 through 2024. Collectively, these pieces showcase a wide array of voices and styles that are exuberant, furious, thoughtful, pensive, cuttingly satirical, and many other things besides.

 

In “Coney Island Island’s Not a Slum, But It’s No Manhattan,” Eda Tse plunges readers into a vivid cityscape. New York City at Christmas-time is a place where you can “run and run and run” with “nowhere to go.” Throughout this memoir, subways rattle underneath the city and subtext rattles beneath the lines, navigating the speaker’s conflicted thoughts on identity, sexuality, and family. In “Notes on the Third Graders,” Frani O’Toole shows us how we all cope with grief and how, sometimes, children are more resilient than adults could understand. Meanwhile, Caylee Weintraub’s “Lake” plunges readers headfirst into the fathomless waters of trauma and memory loss, and Kateryna Andriichuk’s “Emergency Backpack” shares a moving glimpse of survivor’s guilt. Soundtracked with the blare of Bollywood music, “2 AM In a Bombay Bathroom” exposes us to both the joys and heartbreaks of romantic and platonic love. And “Lesson on Morning After” speaks through fruit; apples, blackberries, and limes give us a taste of the speaker’s quest to transform mundanity into “zest for life.”

 

Many writers and readers turn to poetry as a source of comfort and strength during difficult times, and so Polyphony Lit is also a nightingale: a voice of comfort that continues to sing in the darkness, even when the Doomsday Clock reads 90 seconds to midnight. It is true; there’s a lot to mourn in 2024, but there is also a lot to cherish. Polyphony Lit and the student leaders on our team make me hopeful about the future, and I’m confident that if we continue to give teens the reins, then they will continue to lead with unity, camaraderie, and above all, empathy.

 

I hope that you will also find solace in these pieces, and I hope that together we can build a brighter future, filled with green jays, rock doves, nightingales, and birds of all sizes and colors. Here’s to 20 years… and many many more!

 

Best,

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Julian Riccobon