Editor’s Note, December 2023

Here we are, wrapping up 2023 in a red bow like one of the holiday presents in a TV commercial. It was a year full of poetic discoveries for our editorial team and especially for me. I encountered so many new-to-me poets, several of whom were also first-time contributors to the magazine. Diana Solís from the December 2022 issue and Joyce Mansour from the June 2023 issue are examples of this: poets with whom I was unfamiliar and who have now become part of my daily conversation. What a gift to learn, to be hipped up to new poetics like I’m still in the front row of Public School 113, trying to do my best.

Living in Chicago, I might have encountered Diana Solís some other way. She is an icon of revolutionary poetry and photography, with an especially pronounced presence in the city. Two truths I’ve learned about Chicago since moving here: Chicago is a city that holds things close and doesn’t need to brag about its riches. And there are riches abounding—great music all over the place, the best pizza (yeah, I said it), an embarrassment of architectures, and, of course, poetry on every corner. Gwendolyn Brooks said she never wanted to leave this majestic city. Nelson Algren said every great writer must spend time in Chicago. They were both right.

All of this Chicago love isn’t random; the final folio of 2023 is from a mighty Chicagoan, the poet and journalist Frank Marshall Davis. When I read his work for the first time, I was struck by the truth of the poems, his clear-eyed critique of America’s consistent failures of Black Americans. He was writing a few decades before the Black Arts Movement would offer similar critiques, which makes him an elder of the elders, a truth teller when no one wanted to listen.

This issue also includes parts of a cycle by another Chicago great, Li-Young Lee. This is where I’m going to take off my editor Kangol to say unabashedly that Rose and The City in Which I Love You are two of my all-time favorite poetry collections. Lee’s poems taught me how to think about romance as an engine for a poem rather than a familiar, flaccid subject. Multiple generations of poets have been using the man’s gestures in their love poems, often without realizing it, because even their teachers were borrowing from Li-Young Lee too.

So maybe that is why this issue has me in my holiday feels. It’s full of poets who give—whether it’s their bold politics, their romantic imaginary, or simply the sweet music of their words—without asking what’s in it for them. Every art, and maybe especially poetry, requires some kind of selfishness to manifest, but that doesn’t mean the art itself needs to be egocentric. Poems can be for the poet and the community concurrently, an offering of the self that signifies the care of the giver.