Editor’s Quarter Note
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Hey friends,
It feels increasingly important, lately, to spend time and attention with one another’s imaginations. Thanks for finding your way here, however you did.
I won’t keep you long. This, the first installment of the second issue, is awaiting and full of wonders. First, you’ll meet an enrapturing character named Dead Elk as he journeys through two different poems from Michael Garrigan. Next, Claire Hinkley meditates on the songs of Adrianne Lenker’s Bright Future album in a moving personal essay exploring the limits of language and the limitlessness of love. Nyle Holihan then drives us in his pick-up truck of a poem across town while playing a Townes Van Zandt song, through a swirl of images to an unexpected place. And what could be more unexpected in the summer of 2025 than Evert Wilbrink’s essay investigating the industrialization of art on cruise ships, with a port of call for the legendary cult musician Captain Beefheart? The captain then hands over the wheel to Bob Seger with Kelly Kerrigan’s personal essay about summers on the lake of her yesteryear, and the way that music can supersede nostalgia, providing us opportunities to be newly present with the past. Finally, we catch a sunset on the horizon with musician Sally Anne Morgan’s meditation on the life and work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and how it inspired her own most recent work, the arresting album Second Circle The Horizon. I don’t want to spoil the context she provides in her piece, but I’d love to leave you with something she charges us with: “May we build extra rooms… in our music, in our writing, in our art, and leave these rooms open.”
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Keep listening!
Lou Turner, editor
Quarter Notes Magazine 