Words Matter, After the Teacher, Said Unsaid, Texas Caprock Poet, The Unforgotten, Looking for Feedback

The Tribute Issue / June 20, 2026

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For my father, Jesse Kersey "Jay" Guest, Jr., called home on June 18, 2026. Until we meet again.
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Welcome to The Tribute Issue, where we sit with the oldest debt there is, the one we owe to whoever loved us into being, and ask what it means to pay it in words. A tribute is not flattery and it is not a monument. It is attention turned toward what we refuse to let disappear.

Today's poem, "On Paper," is itself a tribute sent forward in time, addressed to a descendant not yet born, staking everything on the idea that five words of love left behind can outlast us. It is a small poem about handing ourselves on.

I have built the rest of the issue around that handing-on. In Echoes I follow Paul Muldoon back to the teacher he elegized. In Devices I watch Mark Antony praise Caesar by swearing he won't. In Testaments I honor a poet of our own caprock. In Linger I kneel among the small tributes that outlast marble, and in my new department, Community, I ask you one simple question that will shape next week.

Scroll down. Someone you have not thought of in years is about to ask to be remembered.
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Jason
​jasonzguest.com​

In this issue:

Featured Poem ​On Paper​ Echoes ​The Debt a Student Pays His Teacher​ Devices ​How a Refusal Becomes the Highest Praise​ Testaments ​The Poet Who Stayed on the Caprock​ Linger ​The Small Tributes That Outlast Marble​ Community ​Write Me Back?​

Featured Poem

On Paper

On Paper
​By Jason Z Guest

To the child of a child of my child:
Words matter.
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Live if only to preserve five words of love
from your vines of life over harvesting
a thousand bitter raisins to savor
on the palate of posterity.
Words thrive in tension.
Some make their way
above waves of
hurt waters.
Others
outlive us,
drift beyond us,
forgotten, journaled
into the margins of a book,
hibernating deep in digital drives
for the discovery by tomorrow’s child.
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Study the virtues in poetry, prose, and song.
Words matter.
That’s all there is to it.

About Jason →

Echoes

The Debt a Student Pays His Teacher

​Paul Muldoon was born on this day in 1951, in Portadown, County Armagh, and raised on a farm near the border country of Northern Ireland, the son of a laborer and gardener and a schoolteacher. At Queen's University Belfast he fell under the tutelage of Seamus Heaney, who became his mentor and friend. The student did not stay in the shadow of the teacher. Muldoon won the Pulitzer Prize for Moy Sand and Gravel, served a decade as poetry editor of The New Yorker, and has been called the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War.

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But the line that lingers, on an issue about tribute, is the one he wrote after Heaney died in 2013. Muldoon opened his next collection with "Cuthbert and the Otters," a long, grief-filled elegy for the man who first believed in him. There is something exactly right about that. The truest tribute a student can pay is to carry the gift forward and then, when the teacher is gone, to turn and name what was given.

I have been thinking about that turning a great deal the last few days. We do not choose when the teacher leaves, only what we do once the room goes quiet. Muldoon's answer was to keep writing and let the loss become a door rather than a wall. It is the answer this whole issue is reaching for; when someone who shaped us is gone, it is the work we carry on in their name.​
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To read how one poet honored the mentor who made him, follow Muldoon back to where he began.

Meet Muldoon →

Devices

How a Refusal Becomes the Highest Praise

This issue's device is apophasis, also called paraleipsis. It is the art of saying a thing by claiming you will not say it. Confusing, right? For example, "I will not mention his many kindnesses" mentions them, and louder than a plain sentence could.

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No one weaponized this for tribute like Shakespeare. Standing over Caesar's body in Julius Caesar, Mark Antony swears he has come to bury Caesar, not to praise him, and then praises him so devastatingly that the crowd turns. He insists he will not read the will, that it is not fitting they should know how much Caesar loved them, and every refusal tightens the hook. The eulogy works because it pretends to withhold.

Apophasis is the rhetoric of grief for good reason. When we stand before what we have lost, we always begin by saying there are no words, and then we find them.

Digging into this poem, you will notice how it refuses to let the light go quietly, stacking its furious imperatives until the whole thing climbs toward that final, doubled command to resist the dark. That is auxesis (a fancy word you may remember from last week) doing its quiet work, not a list but an ascent.

To hear how a refusal to praise becomes the highest praise, step into the forum with Antony.

Enter the Forum →

Testaments

The Poet Who Stayed on the Caprock

Closer to home stands a poet of my own ground worth honoring. Walter McDonald was born in Lubbock, took his first degrees at Texas Tech, and after earning his doctorate returned there to teach for decades and help build one of the country's respected creative writing programs, before serving as Texas State Poet Laureate in 2001. He flew for the Air Force and carried Vietnam home with him, and his poems never left the hard, honest weather of West Texas: dust and cattle, fathers and missing airmen, faith worn plain as a fencepost. He wrote of the land the way it is there, unsentimental.

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What's striking is how late he came to it, and how little that cost him. He arrived at poetry as a grown man, a working Air Force pilot, drawn in less by ambition than by a hunger to be near good stories and to pass them on.

There is the entire impulse of tribute in a sentence. It's not to be the story, but to hand it forward. McDonald spent the rest of his life doing exactly that for the plains, the fliers, and the fathers he loved.

There is a particular dignity in a poet who makes the overlooked country his whole subject and asks it to mean something. McDonald died in 2022, but the plains he wrote of are the same ones outside the window tonight. A tribute does not always reach across an ocean. Sometimes it reaches across the county line.

To meet the laureate who made poetry of the caprock, read McDonald in his own dry music.

Read McDonald →

Linger

The Small Tributes That Outlast Marble

Some tributes are monuments. Others are small and somehow heavier for it. Ben Jonson, four centuries ago, wrote "On My First Son" for a boy dead at seven, calling him his best piece of poetry, in a grief so plainly stated it still stops the breath. John Dryden honored a fellow poet gone too young in "To the Memory of Mr. Oldham," farewell to one too little and too lately known. And then there's Thomas Gray, who in his "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," knelt at the graves of people whom history never bothered to name.

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That last one hangs the most. It is the act of looking at a life the world overlooked and saying, plainly, this mattered. Most of us will be remembered, if at all, by a few people holding a few words. Gray understood that the tribute paid to the unsung is the truest one there is, because no monument compels it. Only love does.

To sit a while among the small, unflashy tributes that outlast marble, linger here.

Linger Here →

Community

Write Me Back?

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Every issue I send goes out into a silence. Only sometimes do I get to hear back from my readers. So, tribute feels like the right week to ask you to it. This is the part of the letter that belongs to you.
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Going forward, Community will gather your replies, find the threads running through them, and open the next issue's conversation by reflecting your words back to this entire readership.

So here is my question for this week:

Write back and tell me. I read every reply, and the threads that run through your answers shape each Community section to come.

To send your tribute into the open where it can be read, write back and tell me who you are remembering.

Reply →