Guest Editors Reflect, Part Four

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 final installment.

Literary magazines are a little like historical dynasties—some go out with a whimper, some with a bang, while others keep calm and carry on. From its founder, Harriet Monroe, to its present editor, Adrian Matejka, Poetry has been guided by a succession of capable, and often visionary, poet-editors for over a century now. My own turn in the magazine’s offices unfolded during a brief interregnum in this literary succession, when Poetry opened its door to a series of guest editors. We were each given three issues to plan, assemble, and promote, with the support of the magazine’s capable, and often visionary, editorial staff. I had no prior experience working at a periodical of any sort, let alone the oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English-speaking world.

Looking back on the issues that we published from March 2022 to May 2022, I can’t help but marvel at how much happened in so little time. We assembled a historical folio on the life and work of Margaret Danner, the first Black woman to serve as an editor of Poetry; we published a special issue devoted to “exophonic” poetry by migrant, refugee, and Indigenous writers who, against all odds, make art in a second language; and we celebrated ancient poetries of the world in translation, including an Egyptian hymn to Ra from four millennia ago, Medieval rune poems excavated after a fire in the harbor district of Bergen, a late Tang dynasty love letter, and what might be the first Japanese tanka about baby diapers. We combed through research archives, consulted lawyers about literary rights and permissions, and tracked down next of kin. We commissioned essays from scholars, literary activists, and poets on everything from African art to diasporic writing at the pop-up Center for Refugee Poetics. We recorded podcasts on ghosts, shit, and elevators, including a moving interview with the late poet Jay Hopler. It was a time of transition, self-study, and reinvention for the Poetry Foundation, and for American society writ large. Oddly enough, I never set foot in the offices of Poetry during this period; we worked remotely, in the midst of an ongoing pandemic, with strange new words like “Omicron” entering into our lexicon day by day. 

Through it all, I came to learn that literary magazines are more like ordinary families, and less like historical dynasties, than I’d previously imagined. When I had to fly unexpectedly to India for a personal emergency midway through my guest editorship, the editorial team at Poetry—Holly Amos, Angela Flores, Lindsay Garbutt, and Fred Sasaki—sent flowers, kept calm, and carried on. I know that my fellow guest editors, Esther Belin, Su Cho, Suzi  F. Garcia, and Ashley  M. Jones, have felt the care and support of the Poetry family during their time at the magazine as well. With Adrian Matejka’s transformative arrival, Poetry’s dynastic succession has evolved into something more like a republic of letters. I’m looking forward to seeing what future guest editors welcome through the magazine’s open door over the years to come. As for myself, I’m now serving as poetry editor for the Paris Review, when I’m not busy co-editing the Phoenix Poets book series at the University of Chicago Press. The guest editor program opened those doors for me, and I’m excited, in turn, to open doors for others through this editorial work. Poetry can make shit happen.