Dante's Heart
One Wild Moment
A Footnote from the Editor
We founded this town.
Sowed raspberries from cane
brought in night
let the bushes grow wild
thick and claws.
-- Jenn Nunes
The best of the art and literature of the fantastic is about the unexpected
expected --
G.K. Chesterton wrote in "The Ethics of Elfland" that fairy stories let
rivers run with wine so that we might remember, for one wild moment, that
they run with water. This idea--that the encounter with the marvelous allows
us to see our own world again for the first time--provided the founding
impulse of Dante's Heart.
In that one wild moment in which one catches an expected object or artifact
(something previoiusly unremarked in the debris of our experiences) from
an unexpected angle, when the river we have walked by every morning
suddenly appears the color and richness of red wine, anything is possible.
We might look up and see what's around us with renewed appreciation, or
with horror at that to which we have been too long blind. This is one of the
benefits that the art of the marvelous can offer us: to wake us, jolt us,
astonish us, shove us or seduce us into acts of admiration, acts of worship
or penance, acts of inquiry or classification, acts of survival.
We hope this new issue of Dante's Heart, with its fiction, art, interviews,
and especially the winning entries of the 2008 poetry contest, will offer you
many wild, active moments.
Daniel Fusch
May 29, 2009
A Footnote from the Editor
We founded this town.
Sowed raspberries from cane
brought in night
let the bushes grow wild
thick and claws.
-- Jenn Nunes
The best of the art and literature of the fantastic is about the unexpected
expected --
G.K. Chesterton wrote in "The Ethics of Elfland" that fairy stories let
rivers run with wine so that we might remember, for one wild moment, that
they run with water. This idea--that the encounter with the marvelous allows
us to see our own world again for the first time--provided the founding
impulse of Dante's Heart.
In that one wild moment in which one catches an expected object or artifact
(something previoiusly unremarked in the debris of our experiences) from
an unexpected angle, when the river we have walked by every morning
suddenly appears the color and richness of red wine, anything is possible.
We might look up and see what's around us with renewed appreciation, or
with horror at that to which we have been too long blind. This is one of the
benefits that the art of the marvelous can offer us: to wake us, jolt us,
astonish us, shove us or seduce us into acts of admiration, acts of worship
or penance, acts of inquiry or classification, acts of survival.
We hope this new issue of Dante's Heart, with its fiction, art, interviews,
and especially the winning entries of the 2008 poetry contest, will offer you
many wild, active moments.
Daniel Fusch
May 29, 2009
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