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Cold Believers, Three Departures, Refusing Arrival, Open Water, Posture, Not Destination.
The Voyage issue / May 23, 2026
Welcome to The Voyage Issue, where not every journey begins at a dock. Today's poem, "I Want to Believe," finds two men high above Telluride, delirium setting in, and the radio filling the dark with something stranger than the cold. It is a voyage poem and the traveler does not know where he is going, only that he is already there.
This issue moves through four ports of call. Inside Echoes, I trace three kinds of going, each one born from a different kind of necessity. For Devices, I follow the oldest form built for motion, the one that refuses to arrive. In Creative Spotlight, I step inside a place where ordinary people recorded the open water in the only language they had, and in the Linger department I gather voices who understood the voyage as a posture, not a destination.
Some voyages are chosen, some are forced, and some begin in a truck cab off a sawmill road with salmon in your belly and the universe crackling through the speakers. Scroll on. The water is already moving beneath you.
Stay curious, stay restless,
Jason
jasonzguest.com
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Featured Poem
Echoes
Devices
Creative Spotlight
Linger
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Featured Poem
I Want to Believe
I Want To Believe
By Jason Z Guest
It’s nineteen degrees, cold and damp
with only a dash light to warm me,
a 3:15 wash of LED green
blinking as if to warn me.
We set a quick camp along Sawmill Road,
at eighty-seven hundred feet this night,
a test of patience for friend and me,
one November above Telluride.
In crackles and tales, the radio unveils
cosmic stories of weirdness in our skies,
we abandoned camp for refuge in a truck,
interstellar stories sending glances awry.
Only the delicacies of cured salmon in our bellies
fire as fleshy coals,
while gas fumes hang over fir and flame
as if space sighs to say “I told you so.”
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Echoes
Three Kinds of Going
On this day in 1823, Alexander Pushkin sat down in Kishinev and wrote the first stanza of Eugene Onegin. He was already an established poet, exiled from the capital to southern Russia by a government that feared his political verse. He could not leave, so he built a world to travel through instead. It was a verse novel that would take eight years and span the full arc of a life in motion. The voyage was invented because the real one was forbidden. |
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On this same date in 1939, Stanley Plumly was born in Barnesville, Ohio, into a working-class family on farmland. He would spend his career writing toward two figures he could never quite reach: his alcoholic father, dead at fifty-six, and John Keats, dead at twenty-five. Posthumous Keats is Plumly's account of the last months of John Keats's life: the carriage ride to Rome, the friend who walked beside it passing flowers through the window, the illness that was already terminal. Plumly spent twenty years writing it. His poetry worked the same way. He was always trying to reach people he had already lost.
Eight years later, in 1947, Jane Kenyon was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her life's work became a sustained voyage through depression toward ordinary light. She knew the water was rough and she kept going anyway. Her last collection, Constance, named the act of staying in motion through the dark. She died of leukemia on April 22, 1995, at forty-seven. She was still writing when she died, and the state of New Hampshire had just named her its Poet Laureate.
Three kinds of voyage, one date. The one forced on you. The one toward the unreachable. The one through the dark toward light.
Read Jane Kenyon's poems and biography at the Academy of American Poets.
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Devices
The Ode and the Open Sea
The ode is one of the oldest forms in Western poetry. It was built for the sustained addressing of something larger than the speaker. Think of it as a deliberate gaze, something not arriving, but just circling and building in intensity. It asks the reader to stay inside that circling without demanding a resolution too soon. Where other forms conclude, the ode lingers. It was designed for subjects that resist being said plainly and it needs room to breathe. That is why it has survived every era of poetry that tried to leave it behind. |
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That circularity is what makes the ode a natural form for voyage. The speaker of an ode is always in motion toward something they may never fully possess. Keats approaches the nightingale. Neruda approaches his beloved. Whitman approaches the open road. None of them arrive cleanly because the form will not let them. An ode holds the reader in the tension between longing and arrival.
Living poets have pushed the ode into new water. Clint Smith's 2023 collection Above Ground builds much of its architecture around odes to ordinary things like couch cushions, baby swings, the sort of silence that falls when children finally sleep. His "Ode to Those First Fifteen Minutes After the Kids Are Finally Asleep" opens with a couch and a handful of cereal dust and moves toward something that feels enormous by the end. The ode gets there by refusing to rush.
If you are writing about something you have not yet resolved, something you are still inside of, try the ode. Let it take longer than you expected. The time spent moving toward the thing is not delay. It is the point.
Read Clint Smith's work and explore the ode form at the Poetry Foundation.
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Creative Spotlight
A Ship Made of Hours
The Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, Connecticut, is not a poetry venue. It is the largest maritime museum in the United States, home to a working shipyard, a preserved nineteenth-century seafaring village, and the last surviving wooden whaleship in the world, the Charles W. Morgan. It is also a place devoted to what a voyage costs and what it gives. That matters for this issue. |
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The museum recently presented Monstrous: Whaling and Its Colossal Impact, an exhibition exploring the history and lasting influence of the whaling industry through rare artifacts from its vaults. The exhibition also featured contemporary artist Jos Sances's Or, The Whale, a 51-foot scratchboard mural of a sperm whale tracing the evolution of American industrialization. Their ongoing programming and living-history work ask the same question every great voyage poem asks: what does a human being carry across open water, and what does the water change in them?
Their collection includes logbooks written at sea by ordinary sailors, stretching back to 1841 and beyond. The logbooks are their own kind of poetry: spare, precise, and shaped entirely by what the writer did not know was coming next.
Find the museum's current programming and plan a visit below.
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Linger
What the Sea Has Always Known
The great poems of the voyage do not celebrate departure. They hold the traveler inside the act, and insist that is exactly where the traveler belongs. Walt Whitman understood the voyage as a posture. In "Song of Myself" the open road is the condition of being alive, of not arriving prematurely at any conclusion about who you are or what the world owes you. |
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Whitman's famous declaration is not a statement of fact, but a statement of ongoing capacity:
"I am large, I contain multitudes."
— Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself."
Mary Oliver spent a career making the argument that attention is itself a form of voyage. She did not need a ship or an ocean. A single morning walk through a field would do it. Her most-quoted question is not a question about geography. It is a question about how fully you intend to inhabit your life:
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"
— Mary Oliver, "The Summer Day."
The voyage is not always outward. Sometimes the whole distance is the length of an afternoon, the depth of a poem read from a loved one’s shelf, the gap between who you were one morning and who you become by dark.
Find Whitman, Oliver, and a full archive of voices at the Academy of American Poets.
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