Editor’s Note: A Formal Feeling
Emily Dickinson’s observation, After great pain, a formal feeling comes, is a performance of content. “After great pain” features four syllables, three of which are stressed, as if battered by physical or emotional blows. The following six syllables are alternately unstressed and stressed. They are an iambic constraint to violent emotion. They bear the unbearable, express the unutterable. Gregory Orr calls poetry the ordering of chaos in his Poetry as Survival. Long before Gregory Orr and after Emily Dickinson, writers have employed formal constraint to contain intense emotion. Sometimes, the feeling itself is formal, static, stiff, ceremonious. Time collapses and “the Feet, mechanical, go round” until we can let go.
Of course, the concept of formality extends beyond the literary to the sartorial: Gerburg Garmann’s front cover, “Of Nuptials and Nectar,” and Roger Camp’s photos “Mannequin with Blue Dress” (back cover) and “Fashion Macquettes, Paris, France” (table of contents) playfully expand the concept of “A Formal Feeling”. How much do clothes make the (wo)man? How much does form create content? This issue is a veritable literary wardrobe, beginning with Allison Field Bell’s microfiction abecedarians, wherein each sentence begins with the next letter of the alphabet, and in which the intricate form never overshadows the feeling at the stories’ core. In Kyoko Uchida’s “Nonetheless, an Excerpt,” the narrator, profoundly alone in a foreign city and in a crumbling marriage, clings to the form and structure of language. Other forms explore compressed time; the intensity that can barely be articulated and the cavities carved out by the heat of the moment after they’ve hardened and cooled. “There will be a last poet, but not a last poem” writes Brandel France de Bravo in her crown sonnet series “Time Release”. And sometimes music makes its own meaning, as in Malachi Black’s careful soundscapes and Paul Hostovky’s meditation on the caesura.
We are thankful to guest poetry editors Sherre Vernon and Jeremy Teddy Karn.
This issue is dedicated to the memory Jennifer Martelli, who died on Sept. 25, 2025, and features two new poems.
—Marcela Sulak, managing editor
April, 2026
Table of Contents for A Formal Feeling