Ours

We are thrilled to welcome Charif Shanahan as our next guest editor. He is editing the summer 2023 issues of Poetry with the magazine’s editorial team. 

The poet Marie Howe often says, “Poetry belongs to us.” I hear the statement mainly as a response to the estrangement so many students and would-be readers of poetry seem to feel from the genre—a reminder that while poetry possesses portions of our collective and individual subjectivities, we possess it, too. It’s a resource, a wellspring, a mirror, a conversation, a question asked, an answer to an unspoken question, a call-to-action or a call-to-reflection, a record, a testimony, a polemic, a revelation, a confirmation, a you are not alone, a you are alone, an imagination, an ineffable discovery, and so on. Whatever a poem does or touches, it is ours.

When I hear the statement, I hear, too, an emphasis on “us,” an “us” that is capacious and as inclusive as possible—not in a performative way that flattens us into sameness or cares more about optics than spirit, and not even in a way that keeps a door open and a seat at the table for everyone in the room, or trying to enter the room. But in a way that recognizes that the room is the entire earth, and we built all the doors and walls. Our differences, the cliché goes, are beautiful; they are also our collective strength, on which our survival depends. We need each other; we are each other. If poetry is the human voice, as it’s been called, there is, in a way, one tradition, even as we understand, naturally, that there are and have been countless ones.

Certainly, I’m not discounting the integrity of distinct poetic lineages, or the value of celebrating any one of them, which I myself will do in this role; I’m affirming that each tradition is equally human, inherently worthy, all of them relevant, important and central, an indispensable component of the whole. Poetry reminds me, daily, of the simultaneous singularity and plurality of human experience: for all our differences, for the ways in which we have attached meaning to those differences, hated one another for them, then structured and codified that hatred around them, we effectively are—or emerge from—a single source. Poetry belongs to all of us, then. “And,” as Elizabeth Alexander asks in an early poem, “are we not of interest to one another?”

As guest editor, I am interested in poems from any tradition, in any form, about any subject, from “emerging” or “established” poets, alike. Poems that return us to ourselves and to each other, however politically charged, whatever the cultural or social context. Poems that demonstrate the truth of our interconnectedness, not necessarily as discrete objects, but, together, through the diversity of aesthetic approaches and thematic reach they form collectively. Poems that, together, reflect the variegated fullness of the human voice—or, given the limitations of physical space in the issues, a wide portion of that fullness. Poems that testify we are here. All of us.

In May, I’d like my first issue to feature a special folio of poetry in translation and brief meditations on the challenges, pleasures, and necessities of literary translation. Alongside poems that have been submitted to the magazine for consideration, the issue will also feature a folio dedicated to Assotto Saint, whose Sacred Spells: Collected Works will be out in June from Nightboat Books. Saint—alongside contemporaries Melvin Dixon, Essex Hemphill, and Marlon Riggs—was pivotal in increasing the visibility of Black queerness in literature, and I’m delighted to have the opportunity to spotlight his work in the magazine.

Our June issue will focus on queer poetic lineages and the LGBTQIA+ literary giants on whose shoulders we stand—all of us, whatever your identity. The issue will feature the poems of self-identified LGBTQIA+ poets, exclusively, in addition to brief prose statements by poets of all identities on the impact of queer predecessors on their work. The issue will also include a special folio dedicated to June Jordan, a poet whose work was never included in Poetry in her lifetime, which will be curated by Solmaz Sharif. It will be an exciting issue—historical and current, at once—and I can’t wait to share it with you.

An official call for our June issue is to come, as are details about our July/August issue, which will contain a second folio on translation, alongside other new content currently in development. Thank you for reading and for being a part of our conversation through this art we all value and share. I’m honored to have the chance to participate in that conversation in this way, and look forward to meeting many of you through your poems in the time ahead!  

Visit our Submittable page for our translation call, which is currently live! Future calls will be posted on Submittable in the coming weeks.