Guest Editors Reflect, Part Five

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. This is the fifth and final installment in that series. Read previous installments on the Editors’ Blog.

Thinking of this reflection, I go back to the beginning of why I wanted to be part of this institution, why I wanted a familial bond to the Poetry Foundation. While familial bonds still require relationship building, that work is often the most fulfilling, and while I wasn’t sure what my place was in this family, I knew an effort to be more inclusive commenced. I also know that “inclusive” generally means that—either through pressure or humility—a movement to acknowledge past harms is an objective. Whether or not I was able to verbalize harms did not readily enter my mind, but rather I was interested in the process to collectively till soil, discover remnants, construct new growth. As an Indigenous woman who is still experiencing harms from the formation of this country known as the United States of America, I have witnessed numerous swells to balance out justice come and go with the tide. Yet the lightness presented from the potential to go further than mere acknowledgement positioned me into a willingness to start the conversation with the editorial team (Lindsay, Fred, and Holly at the time the call for guest editors went out). 

I still stumble with my place in this family tree called the Poetry Foundation. I wonder how much of it is an offshoot of the Empire, a construct to reframe Indigeneity as invasive while our blood, bodies, thought are extracted to fertilize the soil. The process of knowing how to instrument this information and motivation was the logic behind grafting myself into the Poetry Foundation. My tribal philosophy and thought influence the People’s language which several non-Indian observers have noted as poetic. The Navajo language is rhythmic, lyrical—the poetic speaker can easily sprinkle in humoristic puns and alliterations. Our songs infuse repetition and history, and while they can be ceremonial many are simply social. This practice in Indigenous poetics was one of the objectives I wanted to bring to this family. I don’t really know what that means because there are over 500 federally-recognized tribes with US borders, hundreds more Indigenous peoples worldwide. Is sharing geography or space with the Poetry Foundation fulfilling part of the obligation to seek contribution from tribal communities? Does it mean something broader? And who is responsible for upholding the definition of what it means to seek contribution from tribal communities, revising it every few decades to align with current trends in society? 

As my time was temporary, I aimed to leave some new ways to format collective thought, and hopefully new ways to present a variety of poetics to build relationality. The fertilizer from the soil of that collective work between myself and the editorial team, those memories, mostly in the form of shared labor, reinforced the commitment to sharing the joy unearthed, hidden within poetics. And I am happy to be kin to that legacy.