letter from the guest editor: poetry on the periphery

by Tavis Gray

Another week gone, another week come. This week I’m in New York and I’m thinking about how a wide action is not a width. I’m thinking about the equation of things. I’m thinking about how much time I spend in my car and how now, two days removed from Los Angeles, what it will be like to get back behind the wheel, and if I’ll remember how to accelerate. 

That was a metaphor. And this is poetry week on The Fluf!

Poetry is all around us. It orbits around the facts and the concrete; it is our peripheral sense maker, the cloud that moves low through the city. It brushes off the dirt. Sometimes it creates its own. And yet it’s there for you. In the darker nights when you seek it out and the bright sun soaked days when you’re doing just fine and even when you aren’t looking at all—say, you step in a puddle and a line breaks right from your shoe to your head: that’s poetry.

Stay with us this week as we deal kindly in verse. We’re excited to share with you pieces by working poets, brand new poets, and those who tread waters in between. There will be poems dealing in footnotes and evil, punctuation and Eden. And though that may sound a wide action, remember that poetry’s width is not in its authorship or its subject, but in connecting the unexplainable to the everyday. The reader to the wonder. 

And you, dear, to our poetic little corner of this internet.

Wishing you a week of good width,

your guest editor