I first encountered the word “beatitude” in plural form. Either proclaimed from a pulpit or inscribed in the translucent pages of my mother’s bible, I was met with a lilting litany of blessedness. But this issue is not particularly interested in such virtue; certainly not an individual striving toward a heaven. Instead, it turns our heads toward an attunement to what’s right in front of us. A biding for it, a listening. This issue beholds nature in its heart in the same stroke as it recognizes its vulgarity. These pieces question reverence and reveal a vacillation between distance and proximity with spirit(s). They sing with ghosts as much as they attempt to exorcise them. The beatitudes of this issue sweat, holler, are at times apathetic. They call up violent memory. And they imagine alternative ways of participating in awe with deft hands. Contributor Bre’Anna Janay: “And so I took it upon myself to forge beliefs of my own. I wonder, is that sacrilege? I know my gods don’t punish me for collapsing them into existence.” These pieces take it upon themselves so beautifully.

I must mention that this issue is, in very large part, a spiritual tribute to Bob Kaufman’s journal Beatitude, which began in 1959 in San Francisco, California. If there is a blessed figure perched on a mount delivering a word, it’s Bob standing on a chair in a cafe bursting into a poem, captivating passersby. Is it recitation of someone else’s work? Is it spontaneous composition, combustion? Likely, all three. Emergent Literary is trying to hear itself in the polyphony of past journals who embodied wonder and awe just as they told the truth about what is unholy in the world.

I suppose what I mean to say is that beatitude reminds us that we have the propensity for participating in the everyday ecstatic. Ecstasy being terror and joy. We can marvel at things— be they quotidian or supernatural, or quotidian and supernatural. We can imagine blessedness anew, gaze at that midflight bird, incline our ears at the foot of an oak, check the weather before our feet hit the bedroom floor in the morning. I might offer that we have to engage in awe to survive. And it’s hard surviving. Art can interrupt circadian dissociation, jolt one out of blurry brain fog. Give us a reason to attempt movement in the apocalyptic swelter. It can make our mouths fall slack before we know it. At natural phenomena, at touch. Beatitude always feels like that head-cold haze of coming back from the dead.

With all love and warmth,

KAC

July 2023

Cover page of Beatitude Issue 2, 1959