peripheries

Francis Ponge, with characteristic precision, describes the ordinary pleasure of walking through a doorway—“your progress slows for a moment, your eye opens up and your whole body adapts to its new apartment.” Your mind must also adapt to a new conceptual space. Walking through a door interrupts your thoughts and can even cause you to forget why you were walking through it to begin with. The very act of crossing a threshold, neuroscientists have discovered, disrupts memory. It can also be a spur for remembering: if you misplace a word, check the next room. 

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This works, because we parcel out information into box-like categories and represent such psychical structures in our embodied lives. Rooms represent units of memory. Medieval memory artists knew this, building “memory palaces” in their imaginations, and leaving items in conspicuous places. To remember those items, they had only to walk back through the palace. Poets knew about memory rooms too. Historically, poetry had a pragmatic memory function: so many elements of craft—rhyme, meter, image—were originally mnemonic devices. The stanza—Italian for “room”—is another such device, illustrating our method of capturing the passage of time in discrete units or events. 

Few readers memorize poems now, but poetry still mirrors their cognitive architecture, and poets still design these containers to preserve and display the past.  

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Two folios in this edition, guest-edited by Peripheries’ editors, explore the poetics of rooms. Amanda Gunn invited seven poets to ask “of these interiors,” in her words: “what light do they let in or keep out, what peoples them, what foundations are they built upon?” Amanda also shifts our orientation ninety degrees to consider how poems take up room on the page, in the book. 

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For the next folio, “the Book, the Room,” Gabby Woo and Yongyu Chen invited writers and visual artists to respond to Mallarmé’s dream of a book roomy enough to contain everything, on condition that their contributions would traverse digital space to a physical room before residing in this volume. Contributors’ words and images lived in Gabby and Yongyu’s bedroom, which “left its traces,” the editors write, listing: “shifting light from the north-facing window, slow accumulation of dust, images peeling up at the corners, paper curling from humidity.”

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The folio form is itself a discrete compartment within a larger volume. In issue three of Peripheries, we began inviting experts to guest-edit folios on special themes, and every edition since has included a folio (available on our website). This year we have built an enfilade: a series of six adjacent “rooms.” 

The third folio opens the door of literary form onto the “real world.” We invited the Australian poet and scholar, founder of Rabbit: a journal for nonfiction poetry, Jessica Wilkinson, to collate nonfiction poems that work with archives—historical, biographical, scientific—to present research and document events—sociopolitical and personal. The folio consists of ten such projects, including a poem that recounts six women’s experiences of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Another poem juxtaposes the lives of two wives of male artists, and another studies the journals of a nineteenth-century scientist who dissected platypuses. 

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Contributors to the fourth folio also work with archives. Peripheries music editor, Andrew Schulman, curated this folio of musicians and musicologists who preserve, interpret, or adapt obscure source material, including an Irish poem, thirteenth-century chants, and songs with less than one thousand streams on Spotify. Showcasing this artistic processes of collage and improvisation, the folio also includes a QR code to access audio. 

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In the clearest example of cultural and linguistic preservation, the fifth folio is a collection of Yiddish poetry. Daniel Kraft invited ten translators to each translate one Yiddish poem of their choice. Several of these translators are involved with the Yiddish Book Center in Massachusetts, where Daniel has also been a translation fellow. 

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Recognizing our community institutions, the final folio in the collection commemorates the beloved Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Harvard Square on the eve of its one-hundredth year. The store’s manager, James Fraser, invited ten poets who have read their work at The Grolier over the course of their careers to submit a poem from a recent performance and an older poem dating from their first reading at the shop. Each poet also includes a note remembering The Grolier’s role in their career, and Peripheries also thanks James for first stocking our journal and displaying it in The Grolier’s iconic shop window. 

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The cover of this seventh edition of Peripheries features an image from the whimsical series “Entrecorps” by the Belgian-based artist, Mélanie Berger. This protean shape leaps, hides, and reels—with a surprising range of emotion—through the journal to land on each of the folio’s cover pages. 

These covers function like doors, “with a friendly hand one still holds on to it, before closing it decisively and shutting oneself in” to the world of the next collection. If so, you are about to enter Peripheries’ in-house collection, whose artworks also perform the work of memory. We invite you to consider how they reflect processes of retention, delimitation, and loss.

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Our in-house collections are never themed. They reflect a year’s work, with all its contingencies and chance encounters. We also document Peripheries’ events that year; this edition includes craft talks which Tracy K. Smith and Donald Revell delivered to our community, and from which we trust our readers will benefit. 

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This issue also features the winning poems of our inaugural poetry competition judged by Josh Bell. Second prize went to Alan Yan for “Impossible Blue” and first prize to Alinh Dolinh for “Dream Sequence Stricken from a Tapestry” whose “odd, blazing breadth of tone and diction here—britomartian to gorget, cellophaned to heft,” Josh writes, “is the announcement of an arrival, of a world coming into focus.”

Along with the annual competition, Peripheries can announce a residency and writing retreat—a world of poetry endeavors. The journal and its events are only possible because of the hard work of our designer, editors—guest-editors and members of our editorial advisory board—and readers. And because of the ongoing support of Charles M. Stang, the Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School, and Gosia Skłodowska, the Center’s Executive Director. Peripheries is grateful for its home at the Center, and proud to release this seventh edition into the wide world this spring season, 2025. 

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Sherah Bloor, 
Editor-in-Chief