Editor’s Note, June 2024

Early in my poetry journey, I lived in Seattle and had a few writing rituals that made me feel like a Poet. One was visiting  Jimi Hendrix’s grave way out in Renton with my notebook and pen. He, more than any other musician I’d heard, had poet-like tendencies. His lyrics, of course, but also the way he improvised with such assurance. For me, every riff he played contained its own six-string universe.

I visited his grave any time I could in those pre-GPS days. The Netscape directions were like a pirate map: park by the big beech tree across from the Burger King, walk for about one minute beneath the rainbow, and take a right at the sundial toward the bench. The directions mirrored Hendrix’s playing, a beautiful balance of artistic wonder, confidence, and uncertainty. The man was so shy that he had a partition put up in the studio so no one would see him sing, but you’d never know that hearing “Spanish Castle Magic.” And like the poet I wanted to become, so much of his vitality came from creating when no one wanted him to create: a Black man in 1967, early in the Black Power Movement, surrounded by all things flower powered and white, trying to play with the clarity that good music requires.

One of the LPs I have on the shelf in my office is Axis: Bold as Love. More than any other Hendrix album, it’s orbited by the folklore of its making. As the story goes, after recording Axis, Hendrix was so excited about the music that he brought the master tapes to a show, then left them in the back of a cab on the way home. He re-recorded most of the album later that night while he could still remember the parts he liked. Poets, you know what he was going through. How many times have you lost what you thought was your best poem on the street or at the grocery, then realized that what you left was only the beginning of something new?

Jimi Hendrix’s music is about newness as much as it is about artistic faith. He had the confidence that what he played was necessary, and the belief those notes could be heard the way he wanted. I don’t know if there’s a corollary to Hendrix in poetry, but I know many of us artistically searching poets have had similar experiences. In this issue, we see this uncertainty (and also beautiful abandon) in Joe Carrick-Varty’s meditation on friend and fellow editor Gboyega Odubanjo. We see it in Meghan O’Rourke’s essay as she defines “ambivalence” on and off the poetry page.

Poets might not always have the panache of the greatest rock guitarist ever, but we do have the same curiosity and desire. In the interview in this issue, Kwame Dawes says, “I am seeking to be faithful to the artist in me.” What a wonderful charge. We all need to be faithful to our inner artist, whether that art feedbacks through an amp or is written in a spiral notebook on a bench in a sundial’s shadow.