about our project

“Only in the beauty created
by others is there consolation…” (Adam Zagajewski)

 

This online journal grew out of a months-long email engagement with the poetry of Adam Zagajewski. Tim Buck, Julie Shavin, and Jillian Parker consider his poems to be remarkable and exemplary, rooted as they are in tradition while conveying their unique aesthetic moods – poems imbued with the high style.

Our mission is the recovery and discovery of poems in which the poet has become language itself and is speaking a quality of time’s mystique. Such poems hold a paradoxical, ambivalent tension between joy and melancholy. We prefer that kind of poem, wherein the poet almost disappears during the transformation of experience into the substance of written art, into the texture of an almost musical truth. Oftener than not, those poems are strangely coherent and hospitable. The reader requires no secret code or sticks of dynamite to uncover a sense of what’s being said, what’s being meant. And between the lines of certain poems, beauty hasn’t been forgotten — it echoes from unseen strings.

Our plan is to publish a quarterly journal, dedicated to poetry, essay, and other art forms. For now, this blog is our gradual heralding of the later magazine. Spectral Lyre blog will familiarize you with our general vision: poetry and other forms of expression as primarily aesthetic and metaphysical happenings.

Besides eventually publishing new poems, we will bring to fresh light older poems by master poets. Other kinds of masterful work — in the visual arts, music, and prose — will complement our emphasis on poetry. We’re also keenly interested in translation.