Memory is vital to our poetic craft as it sets out on the contradictory, wine-dark and bloody, yet clear blue sea. We draw upon shared words and sounds to heave and ho, to row, to invoke the Muse and convey her/his message. In fact, the poetic impulse itself seems to have been born in prehistory as a sacred mechanism of remembrance, combating the darkness with the illumination of words.
Memory unites past and future, amid all the challenges of the present. We write this editorial after a long struggle with the software which enables this magazine, with time and its ravages–the losses of dearly beloved ones–with despair about poetry and its incessant production. How can any editor keep up?
We write this editorial to thank all the poets and readers for their patience and persistence so that this labor of love, this Remembrance issue of Beltway Poetry, could see the light of day. Several associate editors (Renee Gherity, Kristin Kowalski Ferragut, Claudia Gary, and David Alberto Fernández) waded through significant technical and logistical setbacks to make it possible. Perhaps time itself must elapse, and challenges amass in their strange way, for the poetry of memory to achieve its rightful place in our world of amnesia and forgetfulness.
With love in poetry
Indran
Indran Amirthanayagam, Editor
David Alberto Fernández, Associate Editor
Indran Amirthanayagam writes poetry in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole. He is the author of thirty one books of poetry and poetry in translation, including White Space Sonnets (Sarasavi, 2025) - Winner of Sri Lanka's State Literary Award in 2026 - Seer (Hanging Loose Press, 2024), The Runner's Almanac (Spuyten Duyvil, 2024), Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia, Blue Window (Dialogos Books) The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press 2020),Coconuts on Mars (Paperwall, 2019), Uncivil War (Mawenzi House (formerly TSAR), Canada, 2013), and the Paterson Prize-winning The Elephants of Reckoning (Hanging Loose, 1993). Amirthanayagam is a 2020 Foundation for Contemporary Arts fellow in poetry, and a past fellow of the New York Foundation for the Arts, the US/Mexico Fund for Culture, and the MacDowell Colony. He publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions (www.beltwayeditions.com), edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly; co-curates the reading series Beltway Cafe at the M.L.K. He writes a substack at indranmx.substack.com