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Foreword
Although poetry has been many things (in many styles) to many people recently, it fascinates the journalist in me to know that poetry, in early history, was a means to relay information to a nonliterate people (it served a more didactic function than it’s now more artistic function in more recent years). Over five thousand years ago, when the earliest origins of the motion of poetry existed, writing was not common and poetry was used as an oral record of historic events. Poetry was used as a rhythmic way to relay information to peoples — the rhythm (and rhyme) in the words made it easier to remember, and more interesting to listen to.
Well, poetry today is designed for people to remember (even though we have the printed page to preserve these writings), and we all do our best to make poetry interesting to read and listen to. Although those basic elements (of rhythm and rhyme) still hole true today, it is only in the last six hundred years or so that writers have become more daring to create more complex and diverse writings. This complexity and diversity is what we strive for here at Scars Publicationas — we collect the best writings and share poetry that is’ the most memorable, the most artistic, and the most story-telling, because in its base form poetry tells you a story.
When I went to college as a news/editorial journalist, I wrote articles for the newspaper about not only news issues, but also social ones. Since then I have written stories in addition to poetry, it becomes clearer that like most writers, I have a story that needs to be told. Telling a story is the foundation of a poem, and every poet uses their own poetic vision through a myriad of stylistic choices to relay the message through their style.
Over the years with Scars, we have relayed quality poetry through magazines, then chapbooks, then paperback black and white books. Then we expanded with technology for color covers, then hard cover books. We’ve also taken poetry, set it to music and recorded it to compact disc... We’ve discovered that live poetry readings also can relay information effectively, since, like five thousand years ago when the oral word was the only way to relay information, a message can be relayed in poetry not only in the words we’ve written down or memorized, but also in the way we recite those words to people. So as Scars has released CD recordings of poetry, they have also included live performance recordings, so people can listen to the way an audience responds to words spoken in a poetic form. And yeah, we keep looking for ways to get the poetry to the people — since people work at their computers a lot, and with the advent of the ability to transfer sound over the Internet, we’ve created audio files in multiple formats for multiple operating systems (AIF files for the Macintosh, AU files for Linux, and WAVE files, as well as Real audio files and mp3 files). We’d even include video files (QuickTime movies and mpeg files) to give more to the reader as well.
But in our years of collection excellent writings at Scars Publications, we have never chosen to isolate poetry alone in a collection. Other than chapbooks and books from individuals, Scars has never included a compilation book of good writings from assorted people of only poetry. And although Scars has had poetry featured in Children, Churches and Daddies literary magazine and poetry has been included in Down in te Dirt literary magazine, we’ve never exclusively highlight poets.
Well, now’s our chance.
So with this volume we have chosen to take a select few poets and highlight their writing here. We chose to not make this a large book becaus (A) we have run larger collection books in the past (granted, they combined poetry and prose, but those books were larger, and were between 200 and 400 pages in length), and (B) we collect material from 6 months of issues of either cc&d magazine or Down in te Dirt magazine for people to peruse, which means that 4 collection books of writing (all of substantial length) have been produced this year alone. So we made the decision to have a small collection volume of only a select few writers. It carries less weight, which in a way may give more weight to the poems as you read them.
So enjoy these pages, and enjoy the evolution of poetry.
 This editorial is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License. |
 Janet Kuypers
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