Sixteen years ago when I began compiling the poems for the first issue of HCR, things felt quiet. At least in retrospect. I was living in Texas one year into a historic new presidency, staying with my father as he recovered from a minor stroke, between jobs and worried about the economy but overall still hopeful and chasing down leads that might carry me into a future full of creativity and comfort.
In some ways I found that, as I am now sitting in New York in a cozy house as my family sleeps, surrounded by books and in the midst of many fulfilling creative projects, writing this note for HCR’s 50th Issue as I look out on a silent street speckled with snow and the autumn detritus beneath. But it feels like a much darker world. A world some of us may have suspected but no one could have fully imagined. Instead of a young, dynamic president attempting to manage an economic crisis, we have a near-unintelligible, venom-spewing grifter sewing division and violence for his own profit, a man who savors other people’s pain while raging that he has no Peace Prize of his own, marching us forward into a future that feels so very bleak. Instead of hopeful, I’m scared. Less so for myself but for people who don’t have my specific social safety barriers—white, straight, employed, a cis male. In some ways I could keep my head down and just let this pass and I’d probably be okay, but at what cost?
People in my neighborhood, including children in local schools, are disappearing, shipped off and deported. I know people losing jobs to water-chugging technology that only seem to enrich the rich and ruin the once-protected wildlands this nation claimed as sacred. Sacred no more. And just two days ago, federal ICE agents shot and killed a mother, a fellow poet: Renée Nicole Good. Our grifting leaders can make all the claims they want about this woman, but her murder will stand out in history as yet another clarion call against the sycophantic tide of greed and violence designed to feed the ego of one man. As with George Floyd and the hundreds, thousands of vulnerable people of every color, creed, persuasion, and orientation who have died under the knee, boot, knife, and hail of gunfire of political violence in America, I wonder—will anything change because this human died? This poet? Did anything change the last time? The last hundred times? Maybe a tiny bit. But not enough.
It remains to be seen if enough will change again to give this country hope, but in the meantime, we fellow poets will do what we do—write, publish, recite, speak up, and speak out. It feels like such a small thing against the tide. In no way at all does publishing one more issue of an online journal called Hobo Camp Review feel like fighting back, but every tide is made of many many small acts. May this be one more drop. I hope you enjoy the issue and that you support the poets you know and try to read some poets you don’t. I hope we don’t lose any more poets. Any more mothers or children leaving school or fathers trying to work or friends, strangers, human beings trying to find a little hope in a world that feels so vacant of it.
So write. Share your work. Protest and support decent causes in your community. Create something hopeful, record something tragic, document this time. And maybe sixteen years from now we’ll look back and say it was chaos, it was horror, but we kept hope alive in every small way we could, and it got better. Maybe. I hope so.
This issue goes out to Renée Nicole Good.
James Duncan
Editor
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