Notes

When we speak of some activity, service, or thing needing to be accessible there are certain strings attached to our meaning. When we speak of needing accessible healthcare, we not only want easier and more transparent means of receiving healthcare services, but are also requesting well-trained physicians, laboratory technicians, pharmaceutical manufactures, etc. to provide their services in an accessible manner. When speaking of accessible public transportation, similarly, we make requests for bus drivers, rail workers, maintenance crews, and the list goes on. Truly, the thing we wish to be accessible, in order for it to be so, requires the accessibility and dedication of qualified individuals and organizations to produce, maintain, and provide that thing accessibly. When this topic is directed upon the Arts, the same is true. 

For over a year now, I’ve printed a statement of purpose in the back of every issue. The fourth and fifth words into the statement are ‘accessible poetry.’ While the logistics of making healthcare, public transportation, and other personal or communal utilities accessible is a long and winding road, only beginning with our former clarifications, similarly are the logistics of making poetry accessible. 

Following this is a non-comprehensive list of how I’ve intended to make Verses and its poems accessible. I hope some of you can translate this into whatever it is that you offer from your life.

1. Verses is offered exclusively in print, allowing readers to avoid seemingly endless heaps of digital poetry nonsense.
2. Verses is strictly curated, just as poor physicians cannot provide accessible healthcare, neither can poor poems provide accessible poetry.
3. Verses is free locally, and thank you to our non-local readers for paying shipping costs.
4. We expect no reading fees for submissions, your poems are sufficient payment.
5. We expect the utmost from our contributors.
6. We seek to support a contemporary body of poets, writing poems with the end goal of the poems being the work itself. As an accessible physician cannot practice with the end goal of making profit or prestige, but only the primary goal of offering quality healthcare, we expect no other goal of a poem to be beyond the poem itself.

Being part of an accessible society requires, first, each of us to be accessible in what we do and who we are. Accessibility is not something we can demand, it is only something we can provide.

- W.B.