The Aubade Letters (a selection)
In our reading period for Issue VII: Aubade, we received so many love letters alongside your stunning submissions. Your words made us laugh & thrill & cry, & we found such joy in getting to know the people behind the work, these souls who adore song just as much as we do. Here, then, is a smattering of our favourite notes from Issue VII submissions. Thank you for sharing your warmth with us. We don't take it for granted.
Half Mystic Journal’s seventh issue is a stunning collection of contemporary art, lyrics, and writing celebrating the dawn-dizzy dance—the first chords of warmth—the sun forgiving everything it touches. When the aubade issue speaks of hope, it does so with every knowledge of death as an old friend. When it speaks of hope it means baptism, reawakening, beginning. It means something sober yet mellifluous still, with a steady faith in how sunrise inevitably proves despair wrong. Issue VII knows it is impossible to sing and be afraid at the same time—and it knows too that the devil cannot stand mockery. It is available for preorder now.
Beloved Half Mystic, I have been deeply enjoying your releases since I first discovered you. The earnest rapture of your tone renews my own, so today I am extra-excited to submit three poems for your exclusive consideration…
A self-appointed paper poet, I've found it liberating to start singing some of my paper poems, unleashing their secret soul-melodies—”The heat of the star as opposed to the shape of a star,” as Mary Oliver said.
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Half Mystic is a recent discovery for me, and I am enchanted by your celebration of music in all forms. Aubade sings to me at this particular time in my life—a time of abundance and new beginnings.
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I love the idea of your journal being based solely around music, creating art around an art form that seems to be inspire everything we do, from the music of a spoon against the inside of a coffee mug to tears falling like chords in a progression that is never quite repeated. We never cry for exactly the same reason.
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Since my last submission, I feel like I've fallen even more for the softness of Half Mystic. I often find that the parts of the literature community that get broadcast most readily to the world have a harsh edge. There are rewarding things to be found in true crime and mystery but such a focus often leaves me feeling drained without even reading those pieces. Half Mystic always feels like a fresh wind when I'm feeling a little parched from the clamor of what I see on social media and in the publishing industry. A balm for the soul that tends the ache and reminds me of the warmth of well written words. Thank you for stoking that fire of softness.
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I was a musician (violin & viola) before I was ever a poet, but arthritis robs us of some things so my tune is now with words.
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Thank you for your time and consideration of these poems. More so, thank you for all you are doing for poetry. Especially poetry that intertwines with music. Maybe it can be said that all poetry does. How awesome the human ability to speak like birds.
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Nothing, perhaps, is as powerful and essential as a beautifully made song. Compact, resonant, undisguised in its emotional truth, a perfect song both reflects us and creates us... Do I need music because I feel deeply? Or do I feel deeply because I have music?
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A focus on rhythm is important to me, as music is an essential part of language, and I believe good literature of any kind is a wasted opportunity if you don't use it to magnify the rhythm.
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I once read the idea of music being universal, the great unifier. People fall in love to music; they fall out of love; they play it when driving their cars and sneak an earbud under their hair when maybe they really shouldn't. Music makes mundane things wonderful, or makes the sting a little sharper.
I have a fierce admiration for Half Mystic in terms of both the aesthetic and what you represent—inclusiveness, while taking stands against the horrible -isms and doing what's right even when it's tough. The overall feeling of the press is a comfort to me, music and writing and art all in one place, and at the same time I like the human element of your editors making sure to both look after the people you publish and care for those you don't. Half Mystic has the spirit of the home I'd like to build for myself one day.
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My literary passions have all their roots in the lyric—the elegy and ode—and how both genres are essentially song; songs of loss, songs of celebration.
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I've just spent several hours lost in your blog section. The personal essays are like poetry and they drew me in instantly. Music is a driving force in my life, intimately integrated into every aspect of me. I love to play my guitar and sing, though never really in public, and when I begin to write anything choosing the playlist is usually the first step. It seems strange that it never dawned on me that there would be a magazine like yours that examined the space where they meet.
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Music is the heartbeat of everything I do. It's been a sacred place to disappear to when the real world gets too heavy on my shoulders. It's both my lifeline and heart line.
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The past couple of months have been particularly hard, but I have been writing my way through it & it has helped so immensely. I am starting to let go of the anger with a tender wave, & to welcome forgiveness with open arms. & I will say, the previous Half Mystic issue, interlude, has accompanied me so warmly; I was actually inspired by Joyanna M.'s interview & have been listening to Chopin's nocturnes on repeat like heartbalm. The following poems are exactly this: learning to inhale in calm & exhale song, whichever form it takes.
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For me, music is waves beating against my voice when I say her name in my sleep. It is the color blue, and it smells like algae and regret and longing. Music is electric wires that channel feeling, the moment where they get on the plane, or the moment where they don't. Music is singing sad songs in the shower because loneliness is one hell of a drug; it is also happy crescendos for when I remember to brush my teeth, and depression goes on a short holiday. Music is a language that translates my every want and desire, even when she's not listening…
As a sapphic, confessional poet, I view my writing as an expression of bravery: soft even when the world is hard, honest even when inconvenient, unapologetic of the girls I have loved and the lines I have crossed. And above all, loud.
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I have chosen to submit to Half Mystic because it is the only press that has thought to ask what music means to me.
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Music is medicine; I spend (entirely too much of) my money on going to shows; to move & dance & surrender into... I tend to go into my deepest meditations while dancing to (especially live, especially improvisational) music; here I believe I am most empty; words, sounds, colors, hues, sensations fly through me; there is a nearing of egolessness that of course can't be described other than a nodding to space; to grace. These experiences remain the closest I have ever gotten to freedom; to light; to spirit.
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I write a lot about home, about nostalgia, about memory. I think nothing speaks to this more than sound. We remember the sound of our mother singing in the house, of the critters crittering in the backyard. And though they may be the first to be forgotten, they are the richness that adds body to those moments, the furniture in the house of memory.
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Music makes us feel less alone in our experiences, and, for me, so does Half Mystic. Thank you for all of the beautiful things you've put into the world.
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With that said, I have always, always, ached for the magic of music. Music brought me to writing. When I started college it was as a journalism major with the aims of being my own version of Lester Bangs, touring with the Deftones (my favorite band), and writing of melodic wonders and throbbing crowds for the pages of Rolling Stone. That dream brought me to poetry, where I can continue to write about the rhythms and pulse of life.
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The universe is a drumset. Outside my window right now: weed-whackers and lawn mowers drone a low A-flat, inviting me to sing ragas. A car passes by, making a stereo sweep. Birdsong here and there. My fingers as I type this make tense little breakbeats. Everything is thrumming. What does music mean to me? Music is all, even silence, that lenient absence from which everything is born and everything returns. Music is gravitational waves and the wingbeats of a fly. Music has the strange capacity to both enthrall and annoy. I like looking at it from both angles: how does a song you love lose its power? But also: what happens when you're grocery shopping and suddenly that pop song that just gets you comes on, do you fall to your knees right there in front of the celery? Yes, it's happened to me—music is a mystery, so I write about it.
I've chosen to submit to Half Mystic because it's clear: the poets and thinkers and musicians and artists in H/M's pages are those who would fall to their knees, too.
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To me, music and poetry are kinds of incantations, and share sisterhood in that way… Sometimes musicality is stilted, stunted, or percussive. Sometimes it flows freely (especially under the light of the moon).
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As a poet, one of the main reasons I’m submitting to you is because I am deeply impressed by how you explore definitions of music, how you enliven the word—story, luminescence, violent quietude, shivering wonder—these all speak to the recognition of what it means to be fully and gratefully present in this world, on this planet, and to be present through poetic means. Music is what allows our bones to shake loose the stories of our being; it is the pillow on which our muses rest; it is the essence of a body in prayer, and if we’re lucky, it is an essence that our words are able to reveal. Everything is music, is math, is light. I can’t help but to think of the music of the spheres, the sounds from the void that forever sweep across our cyclical time here, the ineffable winds of our lives, the ones we must chase.
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Publishing through Half Mystic Press would allow my work to join in on your conversation, to be a voice in your choir (I deeply resonate with your mission and aesthetic). I trust in your editing and your eye, and I know that if you choose to publish this book, it will find the readers it’s meant. (Like many, I aim to write what I long to read.)
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Vanilla ice cream. MILCK's "Ooh Child." Bare feet on dust. Djembe rhythms.
I play a djembe from Ghana, West Africa because drums talk in ways words sometimes fail and I prefer to coax rhythm from skins with my hands rather than sticks. This makes sense, I suppose. I also knead bread by hand, baking sourdough almost daily to share.
I wonder at the generosity of spirit of those who welcome me—a woman with no claim to the West African continent, or to the historically all-male djembe tradition, or as an emerging poet at a late age—into the circle. This wonder translates to furious practice fueled by deep respect.
By hand. Sharing. Bread. Poems. Drums. Things I love. Half Mystic…
Why Half Mystic as a home for these pieces? You had me with the collage art. You kept me with the writing. You inspire me with the confluence of music, literature and art. These things are true, yes, plus there's an under spirit of Half Mystic that feels like a survival tonic. It's smart without being academic. Full of heart without being sentimental. It hits the right tone for me.
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I love that you ask what we’re listening to; I don’t know how to talk about writing without it.
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My oldest daughter just finished her last college audition. It has been an exhausting process, long drives every weekend, long waits in crowded hallways with some students posturing and others near the point of breakdown, long drives back home where school work waited or local gigs or just regular high school drama. And now we wait for a month to hear back—to hear if her music inspired them.
So that’s where I've been with music lately, reliving the last nine years of Suzuki and the last nine months of Saint-Saens’ Violin Concerto No. 3 in B Minor, Op. 61: 1. Allegro non troppo. It's not the most exciting name for a song, but hearing my daughter struggle with all of the technical complications of that piece has been terrifying and delightful and a little bit awe-inspiring.
So tonight she went by herself to hear her teacher play in our small town symphony, then came back and told me about the history of the New World Symphony. She even sang me her favorite sections, both as the symphony played them and as she would have conducted them. “I'm a romantic,” she said. “I just wanted some of those bits to last longer than they did.”
I know what she means.
Responses have been edited for length and clarity.