A letter to the reader of Listening in Many Publics, by Jay Ritchie

Dear Reader,

People often ask me: Why do you write poetry? I don’t think I have ever given a satisfying answer. To me, it’s like asking, Why do you watch the rain when it falls? Why do you listen to the wind when it blows through the trees? Why do you like marzipan?

I write the exact phrase to hear / what cannot be said

Poetry lets me experience the world anew. I get tuned in. I see things. In a world of constant crisis—ecological, racialized, future-narrowing crisis—poetry makes a window in the air. Somewhen there is another way. Poetry says that we can live to the fullest extent of our being, a possibility that animates the vision for a radically reordered world.

Have you heard
The parable of the mystic
Who preferred the sound of the orchestra tuning
Over Beethoven’s fifth symphony?

Listening in Many Publics, then, is political. But it does not rely on academic jargon to make its point. It locates emotional truths and sounds them out. Listening in Many Publics opens with a quote from Arthur Rimbaud, that radical enfant terrible who inspired generations of punks and poets. The quote was not written during Rimbaud’s days in Europe, but rather on the day before he died, long after he had abandoned poetry for the life of a merchant. The last thing he ever wrote was dictated to his sister: the detail of a shipment of ivory that was due for export. On his deathbed, the poet turned trader wanted to ensure his accounts were in order.

I remember learning to read & being confused 
By sections in the newspaper
Sports Entertainment Politics Arts
Aren’t they all the same thing?
Music

Rimbaud’s final words are a cautionary tale for what happens when we stop listening to the rain, and the wind, and the world. Listening in Many Publics is a book for the other world inside the one we live in. It wants us to make it together.

Today the future is where I breathe in
The need for a common language to talk to you
Beyond anything I can articulate

Thanks for reading.

Jay Ritchie

Jay Ritchie is a writer, editor, teacher, and McGill English PhD student. Author of the poetry collection Cheer Up, Jay Ritchie (Coach House Books), a collection of short stories, and a poetry chapbook, he has an MFA in Poetry from UMass Amherst and was the Assistant Editor for Metatron Press and Managing Editor of Vallum Magazine. Listening in Many Publics (Invisible Publishing, May 2024) is his latest book. Jay lives in Tio’tia:ke / Montreal. Find out more at jayritchie.org.