River Heron Editors’ Prize Winner
Editors’ Perspective on Ja’net Danielo’s poem:
Ja’net Danielo’s prize-winning poem, “Upon Reading That After the Universe Was Born, It Let Out a Primordial Hum,” opens with a meditation on the phonetic suggestiveness of the word primordial. The poem expands like its own universe, landing on funereal and difficult memories, cutting them with pop culture references like Snafu the Orca and Johnie Walker Black, juxtaposing living and dying with the presence of the hum—alive, still, in Einstein’s space as time. The choice of indented couplets for the form of this poem gestures to the architected platforms skillfully woven throughout this piece, that move and shift with the proximity of death. Time captured in Danielo’s piece matter; they are never lost in the cosmic gravity of her poem.
Ja’net Danielo’s inspiration:
This poem, like so many others I’ve written, was initially inspired by an article I read, in this case, about the first sound the universe ever made, evidenced by ripples in the plasma of baryons, photons, and dark matter through which it traveled. I thought of a series of events throughout my life that have caused their own ripples, their echoes ever-present. The poem’s structure, title, and first line draw from John Murillo’s “Upon Reading That Eric Dolphy Transcribed Even the Calls of Certain Species of Birds,” a poem whose sounds live in my body like no other.
Ja'net Danielo is the author of This Body I Have Tried to Write (MAYDAY, 2022), winner of the MAYDAY 2022 Poetry Micro Chapbook Editors' Choice Award, and The Song of Our Disappearing (Paper Nautilus, 2021). Her poems have appeared in The Journal, swamp pink, and Diode, among other places. Originally from Queens, NY, Ja'net lives in Long Beach, CA.
W: jdanielo.com
