Guest Editors Reflect, Part Two

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 back 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. Read previous installments on the Editors’ Blog, and check back next week for the next installment.

When I had the honor, and by honor, I mean sheer luck and excitement of serving as guest editor for Poetry, I was at an uncertain point in my life. I knew I was tired of waiting. I knew I felt ready to say what I believed in. Ready to really forge a literal and metaphorical home—for my writing, editorial work, and life. It was 2021, and things felt in constant flux and uncertainty for everyone. The guest editorship coincided with the biggest changes in my life. Though I am a poet, I have trouble visualizing what I imagine with words. But I knew this to be true. I wanted the covers of the issues to feel like a reflection of change and the energy that surrounds it. I wanted everyone to feel the possibilities. 

Before I got the call that I would serve as one of the guest editors, I was trying for a lot of things. I had been submitting my book for a year, and some close calls but nothing definitive. I had been on the job market, determined to get a big head start, and same thing. And some things I would tell you about but won’t write about. Overall, I was grateful that I could even try. Then things started happening. I got a job as a visiting assistant professor in Pennsylvania; I defended my dissertation; I started the guest editorship; I moved only a few hours from my family for the first time since I left home; I was in a long-distance relationship; my first book was selected for publication; I got engaged and, together, we moved to South Carolina with jobs; I learned (again) what it was like dealing with bad leasing companies; and as I’m writing this, in the midst of boxes, we’re moving again, but this time to find a better home until we can fully claim one as our own. 

Home and movement have always been on my mind. I’ve always let myself move with the tides of school, happy to move every three to four years. But now, I realize that I don’t know how to make a home. It feels jarring to say that, but I realize I’ve always had my eye on the next thing, the next project, and that I’m not sure how to be present. The last three years are a testament to that. But one home I do know how to make is one with poems, which is the most sacred home of all. 

I consider my three issues of Poetry a sliver of a vision just beginning, a testament to writers who craft immaculate homes with poetry, motioning us inside, and asking us to sit and appreciate this moment of pause so we can look around. That’s what I strove to look for in those issues. I wanted to feel and imagine another’s world and the explosive trajectory offered after. I think that's why literary magazines and communities feel precious. And because we are invested in these worlds, we can always think of ways to make these very much alive spaces better. As a community, we should never feel satisfied with what we’ve built because we should never let go of the vision of change. We find homes in institutions, with organizations, but that’s all temporary. Our true homes are with our work and the people we build with inside this messy and beautiful world of poetry. No one can take that away from us. 

Though this is strange to say at the end, reflection is a funny thing. My past editor’s notes still make me cringe because of their earnestness. I almost feel embarrassed for myself, even now, reading the paragraph above. But who are we if we don’t let ourselves forget ourselves for brief moments? I closed my last editor’s note with a question I want to ask again. Where would we be without each other? Most certainly not here, with you.