Letter from the Editors-in-Chief

Spring 2024 Issue | Cloris Shi

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Dear Readers,

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Spring. A season of growth, renewal, and hope. But this year, in particular, I have found it difficult to characterize these past months as rejuvenation. There are wars in Ukraine, Israel, Myanmar, Sudan, Ethiopia, Syria, Colombia, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Yemen, and more. There are wars closer at home, too: in courtrooms, on the streets, at schools. In a time like this, I feel the urge to distance myself, to wrap a blanket around my shivering shoulders and stay still.

But writing jolts me back to reality. In writing this letter, I find myself thinking back to the devastating heart of the COVID-19 pandemic, the period of mandated isolation during my formative years. It was also spring then, in March of 2020, and I was a lanky seventh-grader, wide-eyed in fear and confusion. I remember feeling powerless in the face of rising cases, street protests, shouts throbbing with anti-Asian hatred, and later, intrusions of the virus into my own home. Perhaps it was this desperation that compelled me to scramble for pen and paper, for some tangible action I could accomplish on the daily. I started writing then, penning down a list of items in my emergency hospital backpack, a poem to the president, a letter to my future self. Writing kept the chaos out of my doors, more than a safe 6-feet away while holding hope ephemerally close.

A couple years later, the summer after my freshman year, I discovered Polyphony Lit. I joined as a contributor to the Around the World of Poetry in 80 Days workshop, pitching my idea of science-inspired poetry using intertidal animals as muses. In this worksop, editors from a global sampling of hometowns teach a lesson on poetry based on their cultural, geographic, or personal specialties. I was intrigued by how Polyphony enables my words to reach across the country, then over borders, over oceans. It’s easy to think of creative writing as a luxury — a distant babble from the rest of the world, clamoring about immediate solutions and concrete change. But it is now more than ever that we need it. It is now more than ever that communication enables understanding, and understanding enables progress. 

Spring at Polyphony Lit is bittersweet. On the one hand, spring is the start of the journey for many editors. We are preparing to host our annual Summer Editing Apprenticeship, an online mentorship training budding editors and equipping them with the techniques of professional editors. On the daily, I see new editors asking for submissions to review, blog articles to proofread, contests to read for. There are also many editors, quietly crafting exquisitely detailed commentaries, working behind the scenes of every issue, helping junior editors. As for the submissions to Polyphony Lit, I find in any handful of them pieces that are surprising, hilarious, comforting, and refreshing. There are tear-jerkers and thought-provokers, narratives challenging traditional storylines and poems upturning conventional forms. Countless times, I have been compelled to check the author information, to find more pieces written by our submitters. I am still amazed by how, here at Polyphony Lit, a voice floats through miles and reaches another, imbued with its original meaning and much more. It’s times like these that I feel so lucky to be an Editor-in-Chief here.

At the same time, this Spring Issue is the last of the three installments of volume 19. Soon, we will be bidding goodbye to graduating seniors. Soon, we will be looking forward to the 2025 fall issue. It seems like it was yesterday that I joined Polyphony Lit in 2021, not yet one year through high school, and today, I am counting the 365 days before I graduate high school. This year, Polyphony Lit will turn 20, and I will turn 18. Like the hundreds of editors before me, I am looking back at my time here, awestruck and grateful. 

Dear reader, you have before you an issue that is bravely uncertain, proudly hopeful. Maybe this is what spring is: tepid rain splashing on vivid flowers. Here, the speaker in “Lesson on Morning After” asks aloud “What if, hypothetically, we never find ourselves?”; in “The Nightflower,” one ponders “When are you no longer a child?” Here, a meditation on placehood concedes “I have to admit I did not know my body was trying to drive me this wild into the city” (“Cleanness”). Here, a contemplation of belonging is haunted by the Yoruba proverb “Ọmọ tó sọ'l é nù, ó so àpò ìyà kọ́,” translated by the poet as “a snail that jettisons its shell drags itself to the satchel of death” (“SONG OF A BROKEN LANGUAGE”). This issue is a wide-eyed stare into a world that both terrifies us and strikes us as worthwhile to navigate. It comes by no surprise, then, that many pieces in this issue explore one’s identity, how it is defined and redefined. One speaker characterizes themselves as “braised pork, splayed over rice” (“how Taiwanese food was invented”); another, as a “steam engine screaming ceaseless” (“portrait as passenger pigeons”); and a third, as an “ouroboro,” a snake biting its own tail (“How We Mourn”). These writers invite us to observe themselves mid-way, straddling the polyphony of tastes, sounds, and scents, complexities of being both and and. In this way, perhaps this issue does represent spring, in every sense of the word.

So, welcome in; take a seat and make yourself at home. Here in my town, the rose bushes look fuller than last year, and the citrus trees in my garden glow under the unabashed California sun. My grandmother is brewing tea for you, and my mother is preparing a bouquet. And here, in your palms (or at your fingertips), is a collection of writing bursting at its seams with hope. A toast to Volume 19, Spring!

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Fondly,

Cloris Shi