Editor’s Note, October 2023

Not long ago, on a breezy and overwhelmingly humid night in Miami, I had dinner with a longtime poet-friend. The music in Miami is always top shelf and the restaurant was playing the kind of disco funk that warmed my child-of-the-seventies heart. The music soundtracked one of those meandering catch-up talks about hoops, our shared love for Funkadelic, and other deep-bassed things before my editorship at Poetry came up.

My friend mentioned between bites that he enjoys reading the magazine even as he isn’t always able to identify my personal tastes in the poems. It was an offhand observation, but felt like the most generous compliment I’ve received lately. At that moment, it seemed as if all the work our editorial team had done over the past year was being received in the spirit it was given. Poems that fit my personal, aesthetic enthusiasms often appear in the magazine, but not all the time or on every page. Because Poetry isn’t my magazine; it’s our magazine. And because of that, the pages need to simultaneously reflect the past, present, and future of our art.

Because it’s October, this issue marks both the end of the 110th anniversary year of Poetry and my first year as lead editor. In that time, we have reshaped our editorial practices to make them more equitable, changed the way we approach the curatorial process to make it more egalitarian, and introduced new opportunities for poetic discourse, including the “Not Too Hard to Master” series about poetic form and “Hard Feelings,” an essay series in which poets write about complicated emotions. We also committed to presenting folios in nearly every issue to highlight individual poets, styles, and poetic movements that were not previously recognized in Poetry.

In these pages, we have the serendipity of offering a folio of poems and a “Not Too Hard to Master” essay by Kimiko Hahn, the 2023 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize recipient. Those familiar with Hahn’s work are most likely aware of her elegance in both form and imagistic action, as well as her commitment to community building and mentorship. We hope this offering of her innovative poetics alongside her essay about formal experimentation will showcase the work in the way it deserves. Hahn’s poetry is of its own making even as it celebrates and refracts the work of poets around her.

This issue moves in the confluence of Hahn’s reflective disco ball: each poem glimmering and spinning in the music-soaked space of similes and homilies. As my friend kindly offered, these poems don’t adhere to one style or school. They’re all out on the dance floor together, getting down and doing what they do best.