This spring I taught a graduate seminar on endings. We studied the endings of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and film and found ourselves surprised, manipulated, alternately pleased and displeased by the manipulation, puzzled, elated, irritated, stunned into thoughtful silence, and sometimes transformed. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, our great theorist of poetic closure, explains that “Whether spatially or temporally perceived, a structure appears ‘closed’ when it is experienced as integral: coherent, complete, and stable.” I quibble at her final three descriptors, but a few things are worth further consideration. That endings can happen in time or space is a good reminder that leaving a house party and finishing a meal have the same effect: the experience concludes. Herrnstein Smith’s use of the word structure, then, is conceptually open—the opposite of closure—and might describe any form or genre or, indeed, experience. A Rolling Stones song or a Joan Mitchell painting. (The class and I decided that a painting does conclude when you turn around, close your eyes, or simply step away.) So, too, could a structure be a conversation between a professor and her students or, yes, a poem.

Or an editorship, I suppose . . . How does a class on endings end? How does one—how do I—step down and away from the post of poetry editor at New England Review, an experience I have so thoroughly loved?

Endings, the class, ended gently. We sat around a long table at a Tex Mex restaurant in East Austin and, amidst Tina Turner singing “Simply the Best,” discussed Justin Phillip Reed’s “When I Was a Poet”: “I was a poet then. I lamented the lyric’s / optimism for a sympathetic ear.” I read these lines aloud. Meanwhile, Tina: “Stuck on your heart / I hang on every word you say.” An incongruous duet. A true mess, plus chips and guacamole.

Eventually, we turned to Laura Jensen’s “Praise” and said our goodbyes to the subject matter and each other. Some had “last words,” a playful prompt I proposed for the most game amongst us when famous last words in books and at the end of life came up. Samuel Beckett: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” Gertrude Stein: “What is the question? What is the answer?” A pink-haired MFA in fiction student: “I was right!” Others expressed uncertainty about whether any end was possible. A graduation ceremony loomed in the coming days. Next week the weather would change again, a forty-degree drop and an infrequent sun.

Beyond form and genre, beyond canons and anti-canons, beyond time and space, art is an experience. It is a feeling, an attention, an invitation. As poetry editor of New England Review, I found that art has been a conversation between my intrepid staff of readers and myself, amongst my fellow editors, and with each issue’s community of readers. I would love to say that none of this ends, and that is somewhat true. Again and again, my students and I discovered that resolution is a fiction and that the best endings were the ones that followed us into the rhythms of our daily life. Many of us will never stop thinking of the last line of Wallace Stevens’s “The Man on the Dump”: “Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the.”

I want to end on such evocative particularity. “[T]he experience of patterns and principles of generation is dynamic and continuous,” our theorist of poetic closure observes. Ending “does not mean that our experience of the work ceases abruptly at the last word.” One way to read this in the context of my note is that there will be more poems, that the reading will continue on both sides of the page, and this is the abundance that ending cannot contain. The the is the book of translations at my elbow, the glasses I keep losing on my head. I don’t want to oversimply the radiant enigmas of Stevens’s philosophical insight, but I am also hesitant for you to turn to the next page, the next issue, the next day. Let’s diagnose this as the anxiety of endings or the anxiety of care: is an editor the shepherd or the flock of sheep? A bit of both, perhaps?

These past five years I’ve wandered through poems with an expansive curiosity, aided always by my staff. I name them here, bowing to the keen eye of each: Nico Amador, Eric James Cruz, David Francis, Carolyn Orosz, Tiana Nobile, C. Rees, Leslie Sainz, and Liza Watkins. Now I am alone and lost on the field of gratitude. There are no fences here.

In one live performance, Tina Turner so absorbs the compulsive energy of the refrain that a new refrain erupts from her body spontaneously and on tempo: “But tear us apart, no, no, no / Baby, I would rather be dead.”

A refrain is a pattern that seeks resolution through an inevitable change.

Or maybe it just stops.

No, no, no.

—Jennifer Chang, poetry editor

Note: While Jennifer Chang will conclude her duties as poetry editor shortly after this issue is released from the printer, more of her selections will appear in the next issue. In the spirit of her editor’s note above, this ending is to be continued.

Subscribe to Read More