Introduction

ON RARE OCCASIONS, academic conferences turn out as they should, and pilgrims making the journey find what they seek. The trek to the American Comparative Literature Association's annual meeting is one I've made more times than I can count, in part because its seminar format—where participants assemble around a theme and meet as a group for two or three days running—favors such an outcome. This year, I fled to Los Angeles for the ACLA, during a week of so-called spring in New England, and found there a panel on poetry and public feeling, convened by Tristam Wolff and Lily Gurton-Wachter—one site where the call was answered.

On the second day of this seminar, the latter session leader began with a rumination on Blake's second chimney sweeper poem, that song of experience where "a poor black thing … taught to sing the notes of woe" comments: "And because I am happy and dance and sing, / They think they have done me no injury." Gurton-Wachter, in a problem-posing move worthy of Freire himself, focused our attention on a troubling existential claim: the sweep does say, "I am happy"—not "I was" (as in the previous stanza) or even "I seem." How, she wondered, can we make sense of this claim? The word "happiness," she reminded us, is related to luck and fortune, and likely borrowed into English from Scandinavian roots. We're happy when fortuitous things happen.

That Blake's sense of "happy" might bear a trace of its original meaning suggests his use of "injury" may as well; early on, this Latinate term was largely legal, "wrongful action or treatment," "infringement of another's rights." As Nancy Armstrong and others have shown, English literature during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries called upon readers to sympathize with disenfranchised classes, to care about their rights and the wrongs done to them. A posttalk discussant emphasized the prescient presence of minstrel theater in Blake's lines: a "poor black thing" said to "dance and sing" would soon take center stage across the Atlantic. What it takes for an object to become a subject, for "happiness" to become internal, or "injury" to be embodied are issues that Blake's prophetic poetry envisions, and the centuries following have yet to resolve.

Just such a nightmare weighs on the brains in these pages, from Bob Hicok's opening "artist's statement," where he's "the lone yak forever surrounded by wolves," to James Haug's riverine thoughts, "a murky reflection of the heavens." In our summer issue, people make their own history, but they do not make it as they please. Whether it's Mhani Alaoui's young Aya, who stands up to her "expat," or Mirfet Piccolo's protagonist, who fails to save his children from the fascism he chose to follow, or the dutiful sons tormented by their aging fathers in stories by Charles Swift and Dave DeRicco—in each case, history weighs on and frames the struggle. Whether it's Sarah Rose Cadorette seeding hope in Haiti, Molly Quinn prompting a scene change in the psych ward, or Geneviève Piron recalibrating our compasses in Siberia, the lesson is clear: it doesn't matter what happens to you, all that matters is what you make of it.

There have been better moments: Roger Mills recalls JFK's tribute to Robert Frost (first published in this magazine, back in 1964), where our nation's leader saluted the arts and pledged to support them: "If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him." Joel Westerdale also returns to Frost, demonstrating that the Good Green Poet's most famous poem is best read as an exemplar of Nietzschean amor fati. One wonders, nonetheless, what any of these éminences grises would have made of Panteha Abareshi's searing testimony to the contemporary experience of women of color, front and center in this issue. William Blake, perhaps, understood something of Abareshi's message over two centuries ago: "God and his Priest and King … make up a heaven of...