With its scores of headlines designed to distract, distort, and disturb, this far into 2025 has me longing even more than usual for a healthy dose of kookiness. Not as retreat, nor escape, nor even as diversion. I’m thinking of willful and, beyond that, tactical kookiness. The kind of kookiness that pokes holes in the narrative, subverts expectations, offers alternatives as a form of survival.

To put it another way, I’ve been thinking about kookiness, or zaniness, or whatever word you want to slap on it, as an aesthetic mode amid times of turmoil. The wryly novel. The unpredictable movement. Sardonic humor as a small act rebellion. One that might snowball. One that lands–with all its idiosyncrasies and in-jokes–with some other like-minded lifeform and suggests comfort and strength against wholesale gaslighting in this latest instance of the Theatre of the Absurd within political arenas of all kinds.

In other words, I’m envisioning ad hoc kooky clubs popping up all over the place, detonating and dissolving at unpredictable rates, leaving glacial institutions breathless, unable to keep up or pin down, sheer silliness with an iconoclastic bent and a galvanizing impulse for the lesser heard and the marginally seen. Such a stance keeps kookiness from mere frivolity as well as being grounded in more than caustic mockery alone—though mockery, too, befits a rebellious strategy and underlies an unexpected logic all its own. Kookiness, though, moves nimbly, I think, so just as it accumulates a greater gravity around it, it’s on the move again. It builds a network without necessarily worrying about leaving a structure in place. Speaking of kooky, it might just chime with Groucho Marx’s storied quip that “I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.” That is, its eccentricities live and breathe on the fact that it doesn’t lie still long enough to be placed in any formaldehyde jar.

Sara and I, in building out ballast issue 3.3, discussed the character of the work we’ve pieced together here. Sara was right to diagnose a “certain necessary darkness” and “a big sadness” in her editorial to 3.2, yet in this issue we both noticed a decidedly zany and deliberate kookiness which, for me at least, brought something resembling–dare I utter it?–like hope. 

Friends, I humbly encourage hope.

Because along with the kookiness, this issue is teeming with intimations of intimacy that is a lyric’s bread and butter in desperate and meager times.

See, for instance, Alec Hershman’s opening lines from “Out-of-Sight-Out-of-Mind Works for Everything but Sex & Money &” which read “I write to hold myself in pieces / close together.”

Or consider the ecological plenitude even for a planet in crisis. There’s damage–irreversible and timestamped–and yet there too is repair on other, less measured scales. There’s Nicholas Alti’s “Levitation, Hypothetically and Now It’s Eleven, Actually,” noting that is “Opens with sassafras, artemisia, sumac, turtles with huge tumors: / in any habit reduced to some carnivorous interloper” and ending on “twelve degrees warmer and our world is uninhabitable / could you image the magnitude of a body limitless.”

Yeah, in fact, the ecological is another strain in this issue–as with many issues in ballast. See BEE LB’s “dualities.” See Austin Miles’s “tree landscape prize by enterprise” and “08/22.” Or Damon Pham’s punchiness via extreme brevity in “Landscape.” Or Laura Sackton’s “Impossible Architecture.” Or Katherine Schmidt’s “Above all else.” There’s Carol Barrett’s kaleidoscopic entries of “Russian Knapweed.” There’s Mary Beth Becker’s apostrophe to the namesake world-ruiner in “Comet.” There’s Cecille Marcato’s “Modern Cartography” and its interrogation of human impact large and small.

Large and small, there’s occasion in each of the poems in this issue to recognize and relate. To form those little pop-up tents of kooky communities leaving space for lyrical depths and, yes, detonations.

These are troubled and tragic times, friends. I can’t offer an exit. I’m stumbling through the darkness too. To borrow the parting beauty of Lily Tobias’s “Thirty Lines on a Lighthouse,” we are, I sense, all doing all we can

with nothing to trade
but the words we use to pin
fragile wings
of otherwise unsayable things

Fortunately for us, imperfect and imprecise as these words here and the words abounding in this issue are trying to attest to, each utterance is an outstretched hand reaching out and after one another. It may seem paltry, or foolhardy, or naive, but I’ll chock it up to me leaning into kookiness. And if you’re reaching out your hand, I hope our fingertips touch.

Lily Tobias once again sums up the sentiment thusly:

My friend, 
what I am trying to tell you is 
it’s only us 
now in our singular boats, 
seeking the harbor.

—Jacob, for ballast