Editor’s Introduction

I had all kinds of big ideas about what I wanted to do with my first issue—the 110th anniversary issue!—of Poetry magazine. I want(ed) to put my favorite poets in conversation with the many past contributors to the magazine to interrogate the significant absences in the magazine’s archive. I want(ed) to create an issue that would build on the unequivocal transformation that happened at Poetry over the past couple of years. I want(ed) to showcase the beautiful confluence of voices in contemporary poetry. I want(ed) to offer an idea of what Poetry might look like in the future. But, of course, I started in my new position about six weeks before my first issue needed to be assembled. Even if I’d had six years to curate this, a ninety-six-page magazine cannot reconcile the past or predict the future any more than it can tie its own shoes.

What I’m saying is I began this job in a convergence of ignorant and well-meaning ambitions. Maybe my first introduction isn’t the place to admit all of this, but one of the things you’ll get from me while I’m an editor here is transparency of process and editorial proclivity. I am—as a writer and a curator—indebted to our poetic past just as much as I am inspired by our poetic possibilities. Poetry is, as Aristotle said (and I’m paraphrasing loosely), an expression of what might happen. While this issue will give you a sense of my and my coeditors’ general enthusiasms, it is just a stutter step into the poetic continuum. It’s the introduction to the introduction for a wide-ranging, forward-looking project of curation and excavation that begins with this issue.

Instead of trying to curate a single issue celebrating the 110th year of Poetry, we are using this historic issue to begin a multi-year, long-form interrogation of the magazine’s complicated archive in hopes of illuminating some of the brilliant poets who weren’t given access in the previous decades. You get to see the beginning of that excavation in this issue as we highlight the gorgeous work of Carolyn Marie Rodgers, author of numerous books, cofounder of Third World Press, long-time Chicago resident, and a vital Black poet whose work never appeared in the pages of Poetry until now. It’s impossible to separate the work we do as poets today from the work that’s already been done, often in silence and without institutional encouragement or adulation.

Since being selected as an editor of Poetry, I’ve thought quite a bit about the different obligations poets have to the art of poetry, in contrast to the obligations that editors have to the art. Poetry is the great amplifier of consciousnesses, and the poet’s fundamental job is to transform the world through song. Whether those songs are of praise or protest or caught in the throat by the joy of  being, they are songs that need to be sung relentlessly into the ether. An editor’s job is to aid in that amplification and transformation—sometimes by making space where those poems might rest in silence, sometimes by trumpeting the poems and their poets from the rooftops in the midday sun, and other times by listening, then suggesting alternative incantations of vowel and simile. We poets are a capacious, hungry crew, and this incarnation of Poetry will be in service both to those needs and the needs of our readers.

Capaciousness is one of the defining characteristics of poetry for me, whether it is in verse or in metaphor. But to be open to all those broad possibilities, one must come to the page—as a reader or writer—with generosity. In this new editorial role, I am imagining Poetry as a space for conversation as much as it is a testament to the revolutionary work happening right now. I am imagining these pages to be welcoming, even as they remain a rigorous document of global poetics. The magazine, alongside the Poetry Foundation and its president Michelle T. Boone, are in the process of reimaging how to engage with poetics and the creative economy we poets have labored in—mostly thanklessly and unseen—for entirely too long.

This Poetry hopes to dismantle the familiar literary hierarchies and coteries. This Poetry hopes to be just as radically transformative as the original iteration was in 1912. To slightly remix “The Motive of the Magazine” Ms. Monroe wrote for the very first issue: we want our magazine to question even as it provides respite, to amplify the voices of poets and readers while being a space where all kinds of poetry can be read, heard, and received with the wonder and grace it deserves.