The Brooklyn Rail

“Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.”
–Plato

“Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.”
–Novalis

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.”
–Emily Dickinson

“The poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us.”
—James Baldwin

“Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundation for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.”
–Audre Lorde

April is poetry month, and as we celebrate it we surely miss how former President John F. Kennedy offered such beautiful words in his 1963 eulogy for Robert Frost at Amherst College: “When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment.”

The most urgent question we ask ourselves now—granting that poetry can serve as a profound and essential outlet for us and our fellow human beings here and across the world—is how we can elevate its importance for revealing our most unfiltered emotions, and insist that the truth of human experience prevail over any kind of propaganda that aims to inculcate a fear of supposedly inferior people undermining the integrity of our lives. Instead, we must insist on the importance of freedom and empathy. And one of the most basic aspects of freedom is of course rooted in how we communicate with each other, how we behave in relation to others in society, and how we apply what we’ve learned in the past to the needs of the present.

It is also important to realize that negative freedom—being free from something—has become more popular and powerful through the internet and social media than it ever was before. And it is now reaching even greater heights, with the threat of AI hovering over our media landscape and all our communication networks. More attention has to be given to our collective responses to this social ill, precipitated by the excessive emphasis on negative freedom, which leads to excessive self-interest and quick-fix solutions—and to the prevalence of sensationalized information that aims to turn us into identical, algorithmic creatures. And this inevitably leads us toward a dark abyss of potential nihilism without realizing it—to loneliness, self-isolation, and other forms of societal withdrawal that can result in changes to the very notion of personal freedom. But it is important to remember: if freedom is about me and not about others—or about us and not about them—then I or we never ask who I am or who we are. If we fail to understand the roots of evil, we will never be able to define what is good.

But at the same time, we have to remark how rewarding, momentous, and resilient our various communities in the arts and humanities have been in their ardent commitment to fight against this tyranny of algorithmic certainty. We have done so with hundreds of thousands of Instagrams, self-published podcasts, and Substacks, among other alternative platforms—most of which are free on the internet. Various spaces in which poetry thrives have done the same, and as such remain very much alive. These channels provide alternatives to the means imposed on us by those who are in control of the world of technology and advertising. The voices of the poets continue to help us move closer to the ideal versions of ourselves, cutting through the static that fills so much of the air around us. It is our fellow poets who constantly remind us that perfection is a mere illusion. “Poetry makes nothing happen: it survives / In the valley of its making … A way of happening, a mouth,” as W. H. Auden wrote in his 1939 poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.” In other words, poetry has never been about controlling people, or about the perfection associated with the artificial construct of our feeble minds’ vanity. Rather, it embraces and accepts the authenticity and imperfection of our lives—who we are, and what we aspire to.

May poetry thrive forever, with love, courage, and cosmic optimism for us all,

Phong H. Bui

P.S. This issue is our humble dedication to the remarkable lives and works of philosopher Jürgen Habermas (1929–2026), sculptor Thaddeus Mosley (1926–2026), composer Bernard Rands (1934–2026), and writer and art critic Calvin Tomkins (1925–2026). Habermas’s creation of the Theory of Communicative Action—a mere synthesis of critical theory and pragmatism—which led to much open, non-coercive language in his reframed structure of the “public sphere,” has profoundly influenced how the Rail undertakes our own public initiatives on all fronts free and independent; the aspiration to create great monumental sculptures from the salvaged wood of local forests, in the case of Mosley, was singular and inspiring for any artist who need not to appeal to both new technology and cosmopolitan existence; as for Rands, we often think of his brilliant body of orchestral and vocal works, characterized by their consonant lyricism, climatic intensity, and vibrant, even painterly exploration of orchestral color spectrum; and in his sixty-year career at The New Yorker, no one anywhere has amassed such imminently readable profiles on modern and contemporary artists with such extraordinary insight and intimacy as Tomkins. His collection The Lives of Artists is comparable to Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects from sixteenth-century Italy.

We would like to thank Advertising Director Kathleen Cullen for her remarkable work that kept our mediation with the world of commerce plausible; we’re grateful to Programs Associate Maggley Vielot for her brilliant contributions to our New Social Environment; the same is applied to the brilliant co-editor of our film section Edward Charles Mendez, whose work has undoubtedly elevated its wider readership. We send them our best wishes in their next journeys. Lastly, we are thrilled to welcome Joshua Chee Sanford as our new full-time Programs Associate and Jackson Pacheco and Keira Seyd as full-time Production Associates.