Summer 2017 | 71.2

This issue of Western Humanities Review features, among other wonders, four short essays by Brian Evenson—on painting, breaks, ghosts, and monsters—all executed in a consistent manner, or method, in a form of curious and witty inquiry the author labels reports.

It’s a term that got us thinking, report, with respect to the rest of the issue—a term defining an approach to narrative, an attitude toward its subject—perhaps objective, or at least slightly distanced—perhaps completely subjective, evaluative—official maybe—though who’s to say what conveys authority anymore—with a tendency toward speculation rather than conclusion.

That is, a report’s author’s function is to provide something like “an account of a situation, event, etc.,” as William Woolfitt does in his poem “Mountain Sweep,” digging into some of the darkest soil of Appalachian history.

The report is “an evaluative account or summary of the results of an investigation,” or “a notification of something observed.”

“[W]hat held together / by youth alone comes undone,” John Sibley Williams informs us in “How Skin Comes to Resemble a Map.”

“Beyond ambulance windows,” notes Cindy King, “Dusk joins the sky’s dark pieces / Inspiring all things to come together.”

“My patience is a ragged scrap of flannel,” Sara Greenslit writes, reminding us that the report’s inherent admixture of objective purpose and subjective process—subjugating pre-linguistic perception, and perhaps comprehension, to translations into articulate idea and then writing—makes the genre particularly ripe for metaphor, for interpretation of what has not yet had any other words, for the reporter’s aesthetic intrusion, that is, for a sweet fashioning of fact, or something like it.

The report’s author records what he or she or they have witnessed, experienced, perceived, come to believe.

Which is to say, as Evenson’s titles suggest, as does Amy Pence’s “UFO”—aliens: yes? no?—we shouldn’t assume that a report’s subject is necessarily real. That is, report may also denote a rumor or gossip or a common, if baseless, belief.

“Are you seeing this?” Pence’s recollected, recollecting speaker wants to ask. “Did that really happen?”

It may refer to an accusation, founded or not.

“You are obsessed with how I react,” claims Marream Krollos’s speaker. “You make my hands hurt. You know I need you because it is you doing this to me.”

Of course, we know, too, that observation affects the thing observed, as Evenson and Pence and King and all the others’ subjects jitter and shine in specific and affecting ways throughout the process of their being languaged—languaged in the particular manner of their authors, wrapping them up in personal networks of memory, philosophy, literature, song, or play.

And our definitions above include, or assume, also, an auditor, the interlocutor, the reader, the report having been “brought by one person to another,” that recipient honored by it, in a sense, that initial one, the reporter, acting as a kind of “emissary,” which links our term, intellectually and etymologically, socially, to another, from the French: rapport.

“Monsieur Buys and Van Derdussen have made their rapport,” the Duke of Marlborough penned in 1710—

Yes, but let’s push on to rapport’s “harmonious accord,” to “a close relationship or connection,” to a “mutual understanding between persons; sympathy, empathy, connection”—

“I consider the people seated next to me,” Bret Shepard observes from his middle seat. “I consider / whether or not they are my family for a few hours.”

“Así era tu piel”: Idea Vilariño. “Your skin was like this.”

“Years now you have lived / beside the mountain,” Caylin Capra-Thomas proposes in the first line of a poem whose title, “Marriage,” more than adequately guides us into the mystery of her portrait—her report not just on the thing, but on the state of things.

Let’s push on to “a state in which mesmeric action can be exercised by one person on another”—push on to the visions of Korean-born artist Young-Il Ahn, his images—on our cover, in our gallery, our pages—his impressions, his observations of water, of the ocean, textured and voluminous, placid—maybe pacific?—in their carefully gridded containment—and yet implying motion with their contrasting dots of color—light? A rigorously executed glimpse, then, of change—water’s intransigence—between moments, turned by a sharp eye and interpreting hand, into a yawning—yawing?—permanence—awesome, awful—mesmeric, indeed.

A report such as this: a repetitive, musical sound.

“A resounding noise, esp. that caused by the discharge of a firearm or explosive.”

We report.

As writers, artists, makers, we are inclined, perhaps bound, to report the world as we receive it, as it acts on us, as you act on us—rewording, retooling our terms, our means and materials in order to provide some kind of accuracy—our duty—our kind of accuracy—idiosyncratic and strange, musical, considered, reconsidered, ecstatic and elusive, finding harmony in our rapport, something humming in a complimentary phase, in you.

We are deeply grateful to special editor Jesse Lee Kercheval, and to her authors and translators, for organizing a resonant tribute to eight remarkable Uruguayan women poets.

And now, come in, eyes and ears open to the testimonies.

Talk back. Sing. Act.