My friend Matt is a modernist. Our friendship has gotten a good deal of mileage out of a bit where I insist I’m not a modernist and Matt pretends to be annoyed and vociferously defends modernism. Part of the joke here, of course, is that in order to study contemporary poetry I very much had to “become a modernist” or at least engage with modernism, present at the Modernist Studies Association conference, read all the major works, etc., etc., because, as Hugh Kenner so memorably alludes in the title of his monograph (one I spent a hot, long summer in Washington DC reading for comps), as Pound is inescapable to the Era, so the Era is inescapable to us all.

I asked my friend, as a way of sparking inspiration for this introduction, to tell me what it means to him to be a modernist. This was on a Tuesday at 9:21am and we hadn’t texted in several days. He responded immediately without asking for context, naturally, and told me “I like those moments when it becomes clear that irony can also be the truth—or that truth can only be fully articulated as irony,” which strikes me as both beautiful and very earnest even as the subject of the thought is irony itself.

What we do at ballast is not free from irony but it is very earnest. We are not, I think, ironic in the fashion of the postmodernists whose irony resolves into cynicism.* Certainly not. Like Michael Daley writes in “Crucify Me on Mt. Rushmore (Stop Talking About Epstein)”: “I was there then / and I knew that sincerity and trust out there  in some wild blue yonder mountaintop.” There’s a truth out there in it all somewhere.

The annoyance at the center of my resistance to modernism is, perhaps, the same one that animates my annoyance at prose writers who say they don’t “get” poetry, as if a poet can escape the requirement to familiarize oneself with prose. (Try saying “I don’t get prose.” the next time you’re cornered by a novelist at a party.) I want more people to get in this thing with me, the poem, the joke. If you’re reading this, you are, so thank you.

All this is to say it strikes me as very fitting that we are, for our first special remarks, running a tiny modernism feature. What we wish to elude is inescapable, and also sometimes the desire to escape something is not really an expression of anything more than the desire to keep an inexhaustible and deeply earnest joke running with your friend.

*poor postmodernists, I shouldn’t be too mean, I do love you, too. How would we be here at the end of all things with this startling and abundantly various issue of poetry without you.