Editor’s Note

 

Like many readers of Poetry, I’ve occasionally clicked on the “About the Magazine” page at the Poetry Foundation website over the years—so this photograph may feel somewhat familiar to you, too.

There’s the big table of magazines with titles like FOLIO, Hudson, and a cryptic series of figure 8s intersecting the picture plane. Jaunty plaques on the bookshelves advertise that we’re at a staff meeting of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse—or a dramatic reenactment for the camera, more likely. All eyes are directed stage right, to the professorial figure wearing a bow tie, hands tucked in his pockets, holding forth on some literary matter for a rapt audience. Nobody addresses the young woman off to the side, her eyebrows raised, but she addresses a sidelong glance over her shoulder at the speaker.

I’m not sure how many times I’ve overlooked her.

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Overlooked in her lifetime and ours, Margaret Esse Danner (1915–1984) made an art of looking intently at the world around her. As the first Black woman on Poetry’s editorial staff, she routinely sought out other overlooked writers to publish under the magazine’s “Open Door” policy during her workday at the office. In her off hours, she gazed with fascination at newly popularized arts of Africa in magazines, museum exhibitions, and private collections, including a few prized items in her modest apartment on the South Side of Chicago. In poems like “The Lady Executive Looks at a Mangbetu Palm Wine Jug,” she even looked at others as they looked at African art, viewing these artifacts through their imagined perspectives. Inescapably alive to the look of things, Danner felt, on some level, that works of art watched her—and us all. “Who can escape the quaint, spellbound, gargoyle-like bronze faces/that stare from their settings of thin metal lace?” she asked of the ornate bronze bells transported—or more properly speaking, looted—from Benin, on display in a Chicago museum (“The Bronze Bells of Benin”). Danner looked long and hard at other forms in captivity too, such as Bushman, the first gorilla on display at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo, who died on New Year’s Day: “I’ve studied Bushman for years,” she wrote of this racialized African animal, “and can, along with the thousands of others who/loved the big brute, attest to his dignity” (“These Beasts and the Benin Bronze”). Throughout her life, Danner searched for the common lineaments of humanity across lines of race, ethnicity, and nation: “Whether Russian, French, Italian, or American” or “Ibo, Yoruba, Zulu, Congolese, Fan,” she wrote, “as I look into each different face,/I am exalted” (“Through the Varied Patterned Lace”).

But if you look for Margaret Danner’s poetry in your local bookstore, you won’t find anything in print.

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I first began looking into Margaret Danner after hearing the Chicago writer Ed Roberson discuss her poem “The Elevator Man Adheres to Form” at an online panel on “Chicago Poetry: Then & Now,” organized by the Newberry Library of Chicago in our first uncertain autumn of COVID-19. Roberson spoke knowledgeably about Black elevator operators in US labor history; the minister at his hometown childhood church had previously worked as an elevator man, a respected profession at the time, in Pittsburgh’s financial district. Yet if elevator technology expanded Black workers’ economic horizons, Roberson observed, it also furnished a vehicle for our nation’s claustrophobic racial tragedy. The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, he noted, was sparked by an encounter between a Black boy and a white girl in the volatile social space of an elevator. As I watched Roberson speak in the aftermath of Charlottesville and countless other acts of racist violence, my own lockdown began to feel like an elevator compartment with all of America crowded inside—and it wasn’t going up.

Later, I learned that Danner would have taken the Newberry Library elevator to the fifth-floor offices of Poetry from 1951–1956, ascending from the position of reader to the unexalted rank of assistant editor during her time at the magazine. Did she address a sidelong glance at the genteel white passengers exchanging pleasantries with the Black elevator man in that crowded compartment? The elevator, for Danner, must have felt like a space where she couldn’t avoid thinking about upward and downward mobility, race and society, and poetic justice. (In an upcoming editor’s blog post, I’ll consider the complex racial politics of Danner’s time at the magazine in further detail.) “The Elevator Man Adheres to Form” concludes with the poet’s wish that her literary vehicle might lift others, too, above their “crippling storm.” Today, Danner’s choice of adjectives would warrant a query to the author about metaphors of disability from the editorial offices at Poetry; her elevator continues to be a difficult site for thinking about race, gender, and class through our troubled historical language of access and accessibility.

“It indicts me,” Roberson said of the poem.

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As I started to imagine a series of issues for this guest editorship at Poetry, Danner’s elevator seemed like a possible place to begin. Its sliding doors opened onto a panoply of scenes from mid-century Chicago, including neighborhood poetry workshops with Gwendolyn Brooks at the South Side Community Arts Center, Bushman’s terraced enclosure in the Lincoln Park Zoo, and the vaulted expanse of the Baha’i Temple on the city’s North Shore. (Born into a family of Christian Scientists, Danner later converted to this universalist world religion from Iran.) But Danner wasn’t exclusively a Chicago poet, or a Poetry poet, or a Baha’i poet for that matter: she established a vibrant literary community, Boone House, at the historic King Solomon Church in Detroit; she taught an emerging generation of poets at Wayne State University, Virginia Union University, and Le Moyne-Owen College; and she traveled to Africa on a John Hay Whitney Fellowship to join Langston Hughes at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal. She sought to construct “a new free-form screen/of, not necessarily love, but (at the very least, for all concerned) grace” (“The Slave and the Iron Lace”). She adhered to form, and she broke forms.

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This issue of Poetry seeks to address an overlooked poet—and to bring Margaret Danner’s artful manner of looking at things to a wider readership. Several poets, scholars, and editors have generously contributed to this project: Ed Roberson enters into an animated literary dialogue with Danner for this folio; Adrienne Brown contributes an expansive meditation on the social history of Black elevator operators in “The Elevator Man Adheres to Form”; Liesl Olson writes an illuminating essay exploring Danner’s life and work in multiple historical contexts; Rebecca Zorach contributes an insightful reading of Danner’s adherence to the “blazing forms” of African art; and CM Burroughs addresses an intimate lyric essay to Danner herself. Throughout this effort, my coeditors at Poetry—Holly Amos, Angela Flores, Lindsay Garbutt, and Fred Sasaki—have labored with immense care for their historical colleague at the magazine. They ought not to be overlooked.

Our folio on Margaret Danner is only one element of a more extensive work-in-progress that will continue beyond my guest editorship at the magazine. The Poetry Foundation has committed itself to supporting Black historians in the research, documentation, and preservation of literature by Black poets and presses in the years to come. In a forthcoming issue, the magazine will highlight another overlooked poet, Carolyn Rodgers, who advanced and deepened the Black Arts Movement through her poetry and work with the seminal Third World Press. The Foundation and the magazine are currently planning further events, initiatives, and exhibitions to recognize and celebrate overlooked Black writers, editors, and activists whose work continues to shape contemporary American poetry today.

My own guest editorship will turn, next month, to the diverse communities of language-users from a transnational perspective, with a special issue on “Exophonic Poetry”—featuring work by migrant, refugee, and other poets who write in a “non-native” language. And I’ll conclude my guest editorship at the magazine with a May issue on pre-modern poetries of the world in translation, titled “Make It Old.” A Black Chicago author who worked in Poetry’s offices; an immigrant chorus of exophonic voices; and the ancient poetries of our world in translation—addressing poetry from past to present, from the individual to the community, and from the neighborhood to the planet might, I hope, open new dimensions in our experience of art, language, and society.

Along with our folio on Margaret Danner, I’m grateful for the opportunity to introduce an extraordinary group of contemporary poets, hailing from Nigeria, Turkey, Bolivia, Japan, Chicago, and beyond, who have contributed their work to this issue of Poetry. Let’s turn now to their “blazing forms.”