Enter  SPEECHLESS

 New Name – New Preface

Struck.  Left.  Rendered.

Poetix the Magazine has been  (all of the above) Speechless.   Obviously some explanation is called for.

I could point to various shades and specters of meaning – the fact that ordinarily speech suggests words spoken aloud and the printed word, therefore, is speechless.  Or I could remark on the curious qualities of the speechless state, which usually lasts only moments or less, and in which one hangs suspended – neither grounded nor airborne  – while the mind struggles to find a context for, a response to, some unaccountable New Thing. 

But would that be the whole story? No.

It went down like this.  I was working at my computer, wishing I weren’t doing something as banal as working at my computer, when an angelic manifestation of Joan of Arc – or as they say overseas, Jeanne d’Arc – appeared before me accompanied by the Spirit of Christmas Past.  Together my own patron martyred warrior saint and the Dickens character conveyed to me – through a combination of telepathy and charades signings – that I should change Poetix the Magazine to Speechless.  Well just imagine.  I was speechless. 

Suzanne Lummis

Editor, Speechless