Editor’s Note

After I was invited to serve as guest editor for Poetry, I immediately began to dream up themes around which to organize one or all of my issues. I wanted to select an organizing principle that exemplified my editorial values—maximum inclusivity and simultaneity—while also offering a specificity of meaning and reach. I mulled it over for my first two months in the role, landing on theme after theme and dismissing each one. Something wasn’t right about X; Y seemed too narrow; Q not narrow enough.

I realized, upon reflection, that I had let my curatorial choices be guided by the pressure I felt, during this brief stint as guest editor, to make a meaningful contribution to our reading lives. I had imagined what our community of poets and readers might want, or need, to read; I had considered what I felt most compelled to communicate, editorially; and then I came to see that they were one and the same. Out went our “lineages and influence” call.

Notions of lineage and influence are complex and interwoven, and no single issue of a literary magazine can comprehensively treat the intricacies and nuance of those subjects. Even a year-long focus on this theme would only convey a small portion of the lineages, genealogies, and lateral influences we see in contemporary poetry. What’s contained in this issue, then, can only be a sample of the rich and varied work submitted in response to our call and the ways in which lineage and influence are made manifest, or unconsciously buried, inside our poems.

Here, we have poems that are for and after predecessors or contemporaries; poems that explore the influence on our lives and work of subjects as varied as friendship, Lorca, and lesbian porn; poems that place their makers’ work in a lineage marked, if not by poems, then by other forms of art, family, geography—from wherever the motivation to keep singing is sourced. And our issue closes with a special folio of work by June Jordan, curated and introduced by Solmaz Sharif, who studied and taught in Jordan’s Poetry for the People shortly after the poet’s death.

We are all indebted to the artistic and literary past, distant or near, however we personally feel about it, and to our fellow makers, who are, in turn, indebted to that past. And we write alongside one another, if anonymously much of the time, providing blueprints, motivation, and company. Thank you for taking the time to read this issue—and the previous two issues that I have offered you. I hope you feel inspired by this work, what it records, and, perhaps more importantly, what it makes possible. No poet sings without first having been sung to.