Categories — like “Pacific,” like “poetry,” like “feature” — are meant to contain places, genres, ideas, and yet this one cannot. As its editor, I can perhaps live with the word “feature,” even as it also points toward containment, but I cannot fathom the Pacific. While most readers of Jacket2 will be aware of the term “Pacific rim,” which like a basketball hoop contains the emptiness inside it, those of us who live on Pacific islands think of them as foremost a “basin,” as Oceania, a place that cannot be so easily defined, lineated.
