Editor’s Note, July/August 2023
When I moved to Chicago a year ago, I carried with me a list of poets from my private pantheon of heroes. These poets operated on the medians and grassy patches, the sidewalks and upward elevators of my imagination as a young poet. They all echo Federico García Lorca in their commitment to duende—that unknowable creative energy that is “not a question of skill, but of a style that’s truly alive: meaning, it’s in the veins: meaning, it’s of the most ancient culture of immediate creation.”
The list includes several poets who have yet to appear in Poetry but who I hope will one day soon be in our pages: Wanda Coleman, Melvin Dixon, Mari Evans, June Jordan, Bob Kaufman, Etheridge Knight, Adrian C. Louis, and Simon J. Ortiz, among others. These are poets who have buoyed me with their ballads, their hymns, and their protests, who inspired me when my creative self was most diminished. There is work in this issue from another poet who should have been on my list: the Swedish poet and Nobel Laureate Tomas Tranströmer.
In these pages you’ll find a suite of Tranströmer’s poems in the original Swedish alongside new English translations by Patty Crane. Her translations in Bright Scythe (2015) were my introduction to Tranströmer’s eclectic lyricism. After reading the collection—full of gentle keys, unbreakable glass houses, movable forests, and the long animals of spring—I spent a year lost in the reverberant sounds of his verse. I tried to stylize my personal music in the habits of his sonorousness, with a completely predictable lack of success. It is my hope that you, too, will be inspired to write about the unknowable after reading his poems here.
Because that’s how it goes with Tranströmer’s poems. That’s how it goes with the most effusive poets generally: they make us want to gesture in the ways they do, in hopes of finding our own glorious octaves. They make us want to puff up our best vocabularies so that we, like every poet in this issue, can uncover the impossible possibilities that vowels and consonants carry.
Adrian Matejka was born in Nuremberg, Germany and grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana. Matejka served as Poet Laureate of the state of Indiana in 2018–19, and he became the editor of Poetry magazine in 2022.
Matejka is the author of several collections of poetry, including: Somebody Else Sold the World (Penguin, 2021), a finalist for the 2022 UNT Rilke Prize; Map to the Stars (Penguin, 2017); The Big…