The Inner Editor Speaks, but Not Quite
written by: Jane McCarthy
Good poem, not perfect,
as though we were discussing pears at a market stall.
This one, pocked, bruised,
sweetness sloshing beneath a mottled skin,
is the one you eat leaning over the sink.
This one you remember.
Perfection has its virtues, of course.
There are flawless spheres,
platinum circles of verse that roll without a bump,
but they roll away too,
down the neat avenues of anthologies,
polished as billiard balls,
and leave you with nothing
on your tongue but the chalk of admiration.
No, what she wants,
what an editor with skin and nerve wants,
is the unruly accident of vitality.
The poem that trips on its laces,
stubs its toe on its own enjambment,
and in that clumsy stagger reveals
the comic dignity of our kind.
Risk, she says.
Ambition, she whispers.
Idiosyncrasy, she purrs.
These are not just synonyms for success;
they are the synonyms for being alive.
For there is no duller fate
than a literature that sits politely,
back straight, hands folded,
waiting to be chosen for the dance.
Better the loud shirt, the cracked note,
the foot stamping slightly out of time.
She wants range, yes.
Range is the word of orchestras,
of rainbows, of breakfast buffets.
Range means you can put
the exquisite sonnet beside
the anarchic prose-poem,
the song of one dialect against
the strut of another,
and what results is not noise but
conversation.
And why not conversation?
A platform is a dinner party,
a salon, a clamour of voices in a single room.
What would be the point if all spoke alike,
if every syllable marched in step
like toy soldiers on review?
No, better the shy debutante
with her trembling villanelle,
beside the grizzled veteran
who long ago stopped counting sestinas.
Better the translator carrying a world
between her parentheses,
better the ignored, the overlooked,
the poet with mud still fresh on their shoes
from a country road
we had not thought to walk before.
And in the end,
what end is there but delight?
That sudden gooseflesh,
the back of my arm prickling
as if a stray angel had brushed past.
That is the currency,
the true transaction between poet and reader.
Not perfection. Not permanence.
But the gasp,
the click,
the hush.
So yes, send me your poems,
the wobbling, the luminous,
the dangerous, the brief.
I will seize
pause,
lift my head,
and for magical moments,
feel entirely awake.
- The Inner Editor Speaks, But Not Quite - January 31, 2026
- Jack of All Lanterns - October 30, 2025
- What Happens In The Dark - September 20, 2025
