Editor’s Note

My maternal grandmother, Willie Lee Lipscomb, was a poet. She wrote no books—she was not an academic; she worked with her hands and her body and made a way as a single parent to my mother and my aunts. I mean that she was a poet in the way she lived her life, in the inimitable balm of her laugh, in the way her words have lived on. My mother told me that she advised her children in this way: “Don’t start what you can’t hold out.” I think about all the things my grandmother held out, and, following her example, what my mother has held out: families reared and kept together, God poured through all of us, an appreciation for the value of a story well told. In our family, we do what we do in love and with Spirit guiding us.
     This makes me think about how much it means to commit, what it means to say a thing and do it. I have committed to the action of poetry—I am, therefore I write. For me, being a poet, and by extension, an editor, is a position of great responsibility to the communities I serve. I’m trusted with the words that I write and that I share, and those words have to do work on the page and in the world. Those words have to be life-giving. And then I think of what Harriet Monroe described in early letters from her editorial desk—an open door, a place for poetry to be celebrated, to address life in all its facets.
     What I want to commit to, in my tenure as guest editor, is my desire to open the door, yes, but also to open the windows so the fresh air comes in, to paint the walls a color which makes way for more color, to put a soft and easy chair in the reading corner and a plant to make things clean. I want Poetry magazine to represent the people who make poetry, who read poetry, who stumble upon it or study it, and who recite it on stages or speak it in languages not called English. I want to commit to the vibrant landscape of poem-loving humans. I want the poems to make folks shout—hallelujah poems.
     The poems collected here are deliberate in their breath. They speak authentically, they play with form and without form. They each start conversations that will, I hope, continue in rooms, journals, class discussions, kitchens, living rooms, books to come. These poems demonstrate my goal to simply hold the door open for folks to come in, regardless of their proximity to academia, regardless of their region of origin, age, race, gender identity, sexuality, or the style in which they write. These poems are on page and on video. Poems set across the world. This issue is not a special issue—rather, it is an issue which seeks to act as service, and as representative of my desire to make our literary roads wider and unreachable by supremacist or patriarchal vehicles.
     So, here I am, starting with this May issue, which is wrapped in gorgeous cover art by my fellow Birmingham-born artist Jade Pilgrom, with whom I attended the Alabama School of Fine Arts. Kudzu, which is prevalent in Alabama, is called an invasive plant, taking over anything in its path. Maybe my Southern charm is like that, too—maybe my feminism is like that, or my desire for liberation. Maybe those things are seed-planting things and they’re taking some root here. This issue was created via teamwork, and I have to give very specific and expansive thanks to two new members of this core team—Tania Quintana and Debora Kuan, whose minds and spirits have been invaluable to this process. We three, along with the interim editorial team, have worked hard and long hours to get this issue ready, and I’m grateful for the chance to present it to you.
     My grandmother taught me to be kind and deliberate, to do my best job. Here, my goal, in my part of this moment in time and in Poetry, is to move away from pretense, to keep focused on the heart of each poem, and to be good to the humans who write those poems at all stages of their lives. Here, I hope to commit to sharing poems whose goal is to live on the page, authentically. I’m starting it, and I hope you’ll help me hold it out.

Birmingham, Alabama, USA