Opening the Field: Editor’s Discussion, Spring 2023

Dear Readers,

April is National Poetry Month. To celebrate, the Poetry Foundation is releasing poem samplers for the 2022 Ruth Lilly Prize recipients, whose poems published in the April 2023 issue of Poetry form the backbone of this month’s Poem of the Day newsletter. All these samplers will be added to the 110th Anniversary of Poetry magazine collection. We are excited to share work from elders in the poetry community as a way to highlight lineages of contemporary poetics.

In addition to offering opportunities to reflect on poetic lineage and the archive, National Poetry Month is also a time to dream of new futures for poetry. Archives are places of memory and history, whether official, illegal, neglected, highlighted, contemporary, or outdated. Through poetry, memory and pain can live alongside our dreams in the archive, where these emotional charges dwell. Archives are spaces vital to activation and inspiration. What better time than National Poetry Month to continue reimagining the archive and Poem of the Day and to invite new ideas to carry us forward?

In my first editor’s discussion for the Poem of the Day blog in May of last year, I chanted “for the archive!” as a rallying cry to make the range of archival work at the Poetry Foundation more available and legible to the communities we serve. By design, the Poetry Foundation archive is a space in which everyone is welcome regardless of aesthetic or location on the globe. In the past year, we highlighted this welcoming through contextual and anecdotal editor’s notes in Poem of the Day and in these blog posts. We did this with the intention of creating transparency around what we do and how we work in service of readers and writers of poetry. Going forward, I hope to continue to create new avenues for engagement and new opportunities for conversation through the archive.

This month’s discussion is my last monthly editor’s discussion for the archive editor’s blog, ending one phase of an effort to start conversations and beginning the next. My next blog post will be at the beginning of summer, with blog posts following that on a seasonal basis. By lessening the frequency of my own Poem of the Day posts, I hope to increase the frequency of other voices discussing and making selections for Poem of the Day from the archive. One goal for my first year as digital archive editor was to begin pulling back the curtains to the archive. One of my goals going forward is to leave the curtains open, step away, and make more space for others to enter.

It continues to be an honor to write these posts and to curate this newsletter in collaboration with my brilliant colleagues at the Poetry Foundation. I could not be more excited for what is coming, the further “opening of the field.” Thank you for reading.

Power to Poetry,

Robert Eric Shoemaker,
Digital Archive Editor