I have friends who tease me because I like the photos and videos of dogs and cats where someone has written them “talking” in modified English, a sort of cute-speak. I guess I’m supposed to eschew that sort of twisting of language for popular consumption. But I have two dogs and three cats, and, frankly, I can sometimes imagine them thinking that way. It’s funny and can be clever, a way of changing the angle of my perception so I see the world a bit like my pets might. And it often turns that lens back on human behavior, revealing just how odd we are by forcing us to see our ordinary activities in a new light.
This, of course, is what we ask language to do in poems and essays. How can we see the world afresh? A metaphor can knock us out of our routine understanding of a thing; a story about someone else’s childhood can re-frame how we see our own. Maybe we weren’t the only ones who hid in the back of the coat closet, enfolded in the smells of winter. Maybe hummingbirds are like tiny alien spaceships, hovering, moving backwards, and then speeding away faster than sight.
I think we can get too complacent in our everyday lives, forget how much we don’t know. Sometimes we don’t know how much we needed a poem, or essay, or comic, until we’ve read it. I hope there’s something you need in the virtual pages of Sweet Lit, which will be released bit by bit over the coming year, every couple of weeks or so. I hope our new tools for finding the works you need are helpful. Thanks for going on this journey with us, and welcome to our new website, redesigned by our intrepid Admin, Deedra Sukrungruang!
–Katie
