Editor’s Note, September 2024

In 2003, I was living in College Station, Texas, ducking grackles and dodging tumbleweeds while serving as managing editor of Callaloo, the preeminent journal of Black literature and culture in the US. College Station is a forlorn place, but that year we focused on the vibrant Black Caribbean, specifically Afro-Cuban poets still living in Cuba. As I learned, the US’s military interventions in Cuba along with its various embargoes were partially responsible for a near erasure of Afro-Cuban literature in the US. Among others, this absence included Nicolás Guillén and Nancy Morejón—brilliant poets who embodied resistance even as they grappled with its consequences.

To curate the issues, Callaloo’s editor Dr. Charles H. Rowell traveled all across the island, from Holguin to Havana, meeting both state-sanctioned and underground poets. He gathered poems for every occasion—party poems, wedding poems, Tuesday poems, lunch poems, poems for towns and cities. It was an abundance of verse written on notebook paper and cardboard, some typed, most handwritten, all in service of Cuba’s particular cadences.

I’m lingering on this past project because the issues we planned never made it to the printer. As we were translating all that incredible verse, George W. Bush changed the rules for intellectual exchange with countries his administration named additions to the “axis of evil.” Any collaboration with Cuban poets was suddenly considered a violation of national security. As far as I know, all those sheafs of poems are still in boxes in the Callaloo offices.

So here we are, twenty-one years later, and I’m grateful to honor in a small way that long-ago labor by featuring a folio of Nicolás Guillén’s work in Poetry, translated and curated by poet and scholar Aaron Coleman. Guillén is an incomparable writer of the Black diaspora whose subversive playfulness and attention to the ordinary offer an unexpected kind of liberation. He is a poet for all occasions as well as a poet deeply invested in place.

It seems fitting, too, that we also get to spotlight Chicago’s singular poet of place in this issue, the great Gwendolyn Brooks. Her second collection, Annie Allen, was published seventy-five years ago, and was the first book by a Black writer to win the Pulitzer Prize in any genre. Brooks’s ability to render Black curiosities and fascinations has become a template for contemporary poets who focus on the spaces of working folks, Black or otherwise.

Brooks and Guillén, along with many of the other poets in this issue, inspired me to rethink the poet’s relationship to place. Sometimes poets are cataloguers of their block, roll-calling neighbors and friends in verse like a guest list for a function. Other times, we’re responsible for affirming the larger politics of home, witnessing within our respective radiuses. But in the end, poets are always a part of their homeplace, their presence just as lasting as a revolutionary plaza or a cannon in the town square.