The key word is “special.” Perhaps the American Society of Magazine Editors’ recent decision to honor The Virginia Quarterly Review’s fall 2007 special issue on South America will in the future inspire editor Ted Genoways to put together more than the journal’s usual share of special issues. Already, the summer 2008 edition can almost be considered two special issues in one, mainly consisting as it does of two chunks of material, one labeled “No Way Home: Outsiders and Outcasts,” and the other “A Special Portfolio of Israeli and Palestinian Poetry.”
“No Way Home” focuses on places ranging from Jena, Louisiana (where in September 2006 nooses were hung from a tree on the grounds of a high school), to Bulgaria to India, and deals with “not only the role of race in defining communities,” Genoways writes in his introduction, “but also ethnicity, nationality, and political philosophy.”
All nine articles, whether intensely personal, such as poet Natasha Trethewey’s account of her return to her hometown on the Mississippi Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, or somewhat personal, such as fiction writer Daniel Alarcón’s memories of being an envoy in Syria, or springing solely from objective concerns, such as journalist David Enders’ examination of Palestinian refugees in Iraq, are essentially bent on letting the details tell the story. The absorption of facts and observations is a crucial step toward comprehending such a beguiling world. But in this era when visual images reign supreme (this is a good time to remark how dynamic the photographs are that accompany each piece), the dearth of analysis is unsettling.
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On the other hand, the pieces skillfully—to say the least—provide a forum for readers to do some thinking on their own. For instance, Charlottesville poet and writer Gregory Orr’s look back at his involvement in the civil rights movement in Alabama in 1965, which included being kidnapped by vigilantes, reverberates with the convoluted question of what really happens as time heals wounds.
The poems in the portfolio are all by well-established contemporary Israeli and Palestinian poets, which doesn’t, of course, mean that they are well known in America. The one exception is celebrated American poet Naomi Shihab Nye, who was born to a Palestinian father and spent part of her youth in the Middle East.
It’s both disconcerting and fascinating that the poems connected in some way with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which make up most of the portfolio, have a certain sameness: an easy lyricism working hand in hand with an indignation over human folly that sounds more quizzical than plaintive. But that’s not to say the poems aren’t accomplished and powerful. They’re clear proof that political poetry is a viable genre—an issue that’s debated in America only because of our “special” status as a country sheltered from political turmoil.