Guest Editors Reflect, Part One

From 2021 to 2022, five guest editors curated three issues each of Poetry magazine. (A sixth guest editor, Charif Shanahan, is currently working with Poetry.) We asked those five guest editors to reflect on their time for the exhibition “Poetry” Magazine Cover Flats, May 2021-September 2022, which is currently on display at the Poetry Foundation and will next travel to the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona. This is the first installment in that series. Check back next week for the next installment.

It is strenuous work to make a beautiful thing.

Maybe I knew that before 2021, the year in which my life changed in so many unimaginable ways. But maybe I didn’t, and the processes of breaking and rebuilding showed me, solidly, that to make any kind of beauty in life requires labor, sacrifice, dedication, and faith. 

In January 2021, I began my journey as the first in a series of guest editors of Poetry magazine. This was huge, a million-fold: such a big magazine, such a new opportunity, such a chance to show up as a Black Alabama Poet on an international stage. I could bring my people with me as I opened this new chapter of my career. I could change what people thought of when they thought “editor of Poetry.” My brown face, my 31 years, and my unapologetic commitment to equity and community would be the image of An Important Editor. I could break the walls which had rubbed my shoulders raw for most of my writing life. 

That year also marked the second year of the global pandemic. I was, as we all were, working from home. I taught my high schoolers online, I watched my father work in the backyard garden after his long days as a fire chief and paramedic. I had navigated the breaking of my (somewhat) stable reality via the lockdown, the summer of protests after George Floyd’s murder, after the sudden death of my cousin during the first wave of Covid in New York. That loss rang loud in my body every single time I left the house for any reason—every breath seemed a betrayal of my safety. And so now, here I was, shouldering all that and now shouldering an enormous magazine. How could I make a safe space for myself, for others?

I had to remember where beauty is born—in our souls, in our sense of family. So I showed up as myself—curious, ready to learn, eager to serve the wide and wondrous people. And the work was hard—let no one underestimate the emotional commitment of an editor. It is more than just reading through the endless Submittable entries, leading meetings, deciding on page order, wondering if this should be a fold-out or maybe just a digital feature? It’s also: if we pass on this poem today, will this author feel rejected from the craft; is this turn of phrase making me feel sad because it’s a sad poem or is it simply that the word “rainfall” makes me think of death; how can we include all of us who feel so ignored in the literary landscape with equity and respect in mind; what politics is there in punctuation? The work called me to break apart my preconceptions about editing at such a scale and build the team around the small and human goals—always be service-minded to the work and the poets. Always make room for your own humanity in every meeting, every email, every task. 

And then, the year broke in another way—just a few months after I began my work as editor, and just as we finished the first of my three issues, my father passed away unexpectedly. There, again, my hold on reality slipped away. The world became a soup of questions and pain, an endless elegy. 

He was a beautiful man. His life had not always been beautiful, but he made sure mine was. Mine and my siblings’. My mother’s. We are the fruit of his labor, we are the beauty made from breaking. 

The team I had tried to lead with empathy then turned that empathy to me. They held me up to the light, although I was only cracks, no whole. How could this be “just about poems,” then? This magazine, this big giant in the literary world, this scary new chance in my career became a way out of the darkness. The work could pull me back to something like life. Before my dad’s passing, all the pressure of this opportunity made me nervous, made me afraid of what people would think of my issues of the magazine they thought didn’t belong to people like me. But my dad, as always, taught me the real lesson: None of this is about the fleeting opinions of others. None of this is about the ways of the world. Instead, our heart’s work is always about our hearts, first. We set our intentions and we trust that the Spirit which guides those intentions will ring loud. We bathe in humility and know that we are in service, always. That service does not pave the way to harm, and if it ever does, service always leads us out. 

Those three issues showed me the beauty that can exist in poetry—that there’s room for someone like me, Black and deeply Southern, liberation-minded and suspicious of any tower, ivory or otherwise. There’s a path for us, and there is abundant joy for that kind of poetry. We are that joy.