The Elegy Letters (A Selection)
In our reading period for Issue X: Elegy, we received hundreds of love letters alongside your submissions: about music & hope, about poetry & survival, about your favourite ice cream flavours & the songs that keep getting stuck in your head. As always, your words made us laugh & thrill & cry & sing, made us wake up & stand up, made us feel the spine of the why behind our work. Here, then, is a smattering of our favourite notes accompanying submissions to the elegy issue. Thank you, songbirds, for sharing your warmth with us. We don’t take it for granted.
Half Mystic Journal’s tenth issue is a stunning constellation of contemporary art, lyrics, poetry, & prose celebrating the last dropped petal—the mirror in mourning—the light still on for what was once beautiful. As we reach the end of Half Mystic’s first act, we look back on the years stolen or borrowed, hold our grief open & stand very still in the strain of song that washes from its depths. Stand here with us, dear reader.
I am submitting to Half Mystic because I thought you might be interested in this story, which is a journey through, among other things, sound, myth, and music—beginning, speculatively at least, just before the universe existed and so in perfect silence.
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I’ve chosen Half Mystic for a possible home for my work because of its dedication to that pursuit of the alchemical lyric, the swirling root of what is.
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Each of these poems takes its title from a lyric of the song that it echoes/mirrors/elaborates as a way of elegizing the song itself while also mourning the passing of time.
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Music is, like narrative, a way to organize time, and so make it meaningful.
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Hello—thank you very much for your creations, and for considering these two poems for publication in the elegy edition of Half Mystic. As I write this I’m listening to “The Moon Song” by beebadoobee, and it’s just after dark, 5:37 PM. I hope you find something undeniable here.
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For me music in poetry is inseparable from the body. I write work in hopes of engaging readers’ lungs, teeth, lips, tongue, and throat because I believe that the ritual of the poem demands physical engagement. My poems draw on incantations, hymns, and liturgy to draw the whole person into engagement with questions of the spirit.
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And what’s more musical than chaos?
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Much of my poetry is elegiac, but the three submitted poems in particular are written for my sister, who passed away in 2007 and with whom I share a lot of this world still.
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The theme of elegy is one that has great resonance for me. I studied some years ago with Larry Levis, whom I believe was one of the great elegists writing in the 20th century. In an essay on Levis’s life, Carolyn Forche wrote, “‘[P]oetry of witness’ ... doesn’t mean to write about political matters; it means to write out of having been ... incised or even wounded by something that happened in the world.” The poems I’m submitting are elegies for three of the over 44 trans and gender nonconforming people murdered in 2020. Their deaths have incised me. I’m a new student of piano, starting my lessons improbably with the mid-career work of Joni Mitchell, notably “Blue” and “River.” It's slow going and sustaining all at the same time.
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My favorite ice cream flavor is strawberry, both for the color and the flavor, but I’m inclined to say it has a lot to do with the color.
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I’m a long-time concertgoer, and as I’ve gotten older I probably attend as many tribute band concerts as “regular” ones. I also used to trade video bootlegs of my favorite bands (a lot of prog rock, but other stuff too). Some of the focus on collecting that I saw and got caught up in a little myself (as opposed to just experiencing the music) inspired this story.
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In an era of disembodied experiences, I’m interested in exploring the senses, emotion, the dirt-world, and the tangled guts of our value-systems and histories.
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I feel a kinship with sound and the makers of sound. It’s like sound is transportation. As poetry is. As image is.
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I am grateful for the writers you publish whose heart-filled imagery gives new color to the world.
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Half Mystic is my dream home for this project because it does justice to beauty and lyricism by demanding integrity from it. The pieces encapsulate what music does for me—they temper time as a unit of life, showing how the only difference between the right notes and the wrong notes is the way you play them.
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I saw a beautiful murmuration from my car, so I pulled roadside and auto-dictated a poem. It’s hard, listening to my own voice read it back, because it sounds tired, like I have gravel in my knees, and also because I wonder if I sound morbid. I root: thinking of death seems as beautiful as thinking of birth, a marking of attachment.
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I study mathematics and practice Tai Chi. I walk around feeling loved. I keep a flashlight by my futon in case I have a brilliant idea at night. I don’t know where math or poetry come from, so I enjoy the mystery. I like: aeroplanes with propellers, earthworms, the San Francisco 49ers, and AC/DC’s “It's A Long Way To The Top.”
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My husband and I met singing, and we sang together for fifty years. He died two years ago but the vibrations haven’t died. So your theme and your devotion to music both touch me.
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I am submitting to Half Mystic because of your attention to sound as a method of deep exploration of intense and immensely human themes. Music to me is language—it is the method of nearing the untouchable and unfathomable.
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This piece is an elegy and also a work of gratitude. It mourns the city I grew up in, and a vibrant and mysterious arts scene that has largely vanished. And it both mourns and honors the woman who—quite unawares—set me on my path towards it, changing my life forever.
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My work as a writer is aimed at truth which, like a song, cannot be contained.
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I was elated to see the current theme because these three poems of mine are certainly elegiac, but also because the style and content of Half Mystic are always rich, diverse and often ethereal. That’s kinda where I live, you know?
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Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams around the corner has a flavor called brambleberry which, when I had it a month ago on the occasion of my birthday, was my first ice cream in 2021 (?!). I have had three ice creams since. Life is short. Brambleberry rules.
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This piece is about music so mad to be made it can do nothing but burst out of your seams. It’s about what we ask of music, and what we search for in it, the chase that it provides, and the ultimate thrill of that chase.
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I love this theme for the upcoming issue as I’ve been finding a lot of comfort in elegies after recent loss in my family. Thank you for what you’re building.
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I believe that good poetry is always penultimate—it suggests without defining and points without arriving. This quality of “not quite” is what enables me often to be with the poet and yet find room to discover my own connections to their words.
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So, my older son has synesthesia—he plays jazz trumpet—and we often joke about what food might taste like if his “correspondences” weren't between sound and color, but taste and language. When I saw your prompt about “your favourite ice cream flavour,” I was reminded of one of our imaginary flavours: Miles of Mint, which is a Miles Davis-themed concoction in which—you guessed it—the mint actually tastes blue.
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Since you ask, I am a devotee of Pegasus Books of Berkeley. It’s a superb store and I’m a sucker for used books. I love the roulette thrill of seeing what’s on the shelf when I chance in. Whenever my parents want to give me a present I ask for a gift card to Pegasus so I can indulge without guilt.
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My favorite independent bookstore is Massy Books in Vancouver, BC. I could live there.
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I feel like all nature poetry is elegiac to some degree, being works of memory on subjects that are continually destroyed in the name of human progress. In my work, I try to pivot my focus towards human concerns that are linked with the natural world’s destiny: impermanence, solitude, quiet despair, and a persistent longing for connection.
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I was drawn to Half Mystic in my search for presses to share this work with because of the transparency of your own focus on music, that it’s yet undefined in some ways—more of a prayerful intention than a list of rules. I find that very musical in itself.
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I now return to combing my iTunes library for autumn-appropriate music (because I can’t put off the autumn-longing any longer and building playlists is apparently how I cope…).
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These pieces are me dancing at the end of the human world.