Time Space Home and Place

Join the Conversation, Volume 1, was in the process of publication before 9/11 (pub. 11/20/01). In the interim between Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, our life experiences, conversations, reflections and writings reveal to us a world becoming even more “strange and paradoxical” than before. Everyday experiences of time, space, home and place seem out of joint. War, fear, and terror invade our waking hours as well as our dreams, subliminally for some and desperately real for others.

Nations and the whole of global society seem to be dividing along new (or ancient) fault lines. A language of violence, double speak and radicalism-left and right-invades everyday speech. We float, at times, even in our own imaginations as mistships without power, drifting through fog. Yet the mission and function of poetry, essay, story and drama, as well as all the other creative arts, has not changed. Now, more than ever, we need to embrace our ravaged world face to face, reflecting upon the specifics of our times, space, home and place, searching for the universal experiences of human life that bind us, so we may become conscious of our shared inner journey in order to imagine and help fashion, with hope, a new future, a future as sure to come as the rising of the sun or silent appearances of stars in the night. And so, our poetic and prose explorations come to act as a prism through which the reader too, may participate in our conversations about a variety of subjects, from cities to seasons, from unsettling illuminations about war back to the chords that once connected heart and mind, to garner some small iridescent pearls of wisdom about how language might, alas, save us all; poetry on so many levels seems able to do this. At the very least for us, in our conversations we realize that after all, we live in the age of outer space. Through the eyes of our astronauts, we have seen what no other age has seen: “our real world” as it looks from the moon-a beautiful blue, spinning ball with “no frames, no dividing boundaries”. This is our home. And so…though our conversations may pause…conversation will never end.