DEAR READERS,

As the fourth iteration of our annual chapbook project, this issue of MIDTERM engages with the ideas of stasis and static through the work of nine featured poets. As we flip through the pages, we are moved first across the stillness of TR Brady’s bedroom, watching every feeling / not coming on, and finally arrive to stare at Sophia Terazawa’s gibbon, frozen in mid-air. The words themselves feel tense, full, as muscles electrified by the effort of immobility. And full, too, of desire — iterating in the body longing to push past [it]self, as TR Brady insists, and to reject the static “having” of itself. Rosie Stockton writes I want to be / nothing but / of things, gesturing towards fixed modes of physical perception and, in doing so, challenging their very being, their necessity.

Many of our MIDTERM FOUR poets have also laced their work with nods to auditory static — the sound that represents an absence of sound. An emptiness, an ambience. Like Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez inquires of canned laughter, how can we know if there’s a feeling behind a sound? I’m reminded by this idea — the crackle of static to represent an absence, or a laugh track both representing and enacting feeling — of poetry approximating acoustics, sounds transcribed onto a page only to be re-translated further by us, echoing in the shapeless space of our minds while reading. What are the distortions made by this process? Do they matter?

Moreover, these poets’ work, from Gina Lee’s to Annie Christain’s, touches on the violence, the harm, of stagnancy. Rest. Of silence. The word “stasis” originates from “histanai,” the Greek word literally meaning “standing,” or “stopping.” Formally, “stasis” refers to the concept of civil strife. In addressing stasis, these poems push towards rejection and towards change, however abrupt. They demand new forms of knowing, realization of the ways silence drifts towards complicity. They question not only who remains static and still, but who can afford to.

MIDTERM FOUR is as much about stasis as it is about departing from it. The poets in this issue, though writing on equilibrium, balance, and stillness, have produced work that shifts, that calls to unyielding fluidity and movement. I’ve recently learned about Stasis Theory, a method of discourse and argumentation created by the ancient Greeks. The goal — arrival at four conceptual stases, to reach a base level of agreement among a group when dealing with an otherwise inarguable issue. Stasis almost for the point of stasis, conclusion and common ground for its own sake.

The poems in this issue instead recoil from anything axiomatic. They linger only for a moment on a frame of stasis — before disrupting and deconstructing it entirely.

ALWAYS,
Lily