Editor’s Note, March 2024

When I started as editor of Poetry in May 2022, the Poetry Foundation building had just reopened for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic. We were all masked and adjusting to wearing trousers with belts and shirts with buttons, while also trying to remember how to be in a space with one another. It wasn’t (and still isn’t) as organic as it felt pre-pandemic. It makes me think that, despite the fact humans are social animals, some of us now have a new appreciation for both the advantages and disadvantages of distance.

In my case, that distancing didn’t come from my generous new coworkers, but from the building itself—one that, while elegant, has been historically unwelcoming of people like me. The architect said the building was conceived to be a poem of modest materials—concrete, wood, and glass—but it feels like a poem that isn’t thinking about its reader. The two-story-high exterior is made of zinc and acts like a gray curtain for the building. The tall windows let in nourishing light while also allowing everyone to observe from outside, like a fishbowl. I felt the ambivalence of the architecture each morning as I walked past the unadorned white walls in the gallery and up the carpeted stairs to my office. Not unease, but unwelcome. Not austerity, but mostly aloneness.

That feeling finally dissipated in October 2022 thanks to an installation of photography by Diana Solís, which included some of the Chicano poetry movement’s iconic poets like Sandra Cisneros and Carlos Cumpián. The gallery space that was once vacant was now filled with poets of color, individually and in groups: reading, performing, hugging, mean mugging, and simply being—in service to each other, the community, and the art we love.

Solís’s photographs hanging on the walls were proof to me that a radical, cultural version of Harriet Monroe’s Open Door was in action in the building. Even better, the action started before walking in the front door: a gigantic portrait of the poet Salima Rivera was featured prominently on the glass facade, just inside the courtyard. In it, she’s got the daydreamy yet revolutionary look her poems and politics embody.

It’s easy to imagine her in the street stopping traffic, protesting with made-on-the-spot signs, amplifying those around her, and doing what needs to be done in support of the human cause, because that’s exactly how she lived. This issue includes many of her poems, as well as a moving reflection by Rivera’s daughter, Kayla González Huertas, in which she shares some of her early memories listening to her mother read poetry and accompanying her to protests all over Chicago. Poetry as heredity, activism as inheritance.

González Huertas also writes about her mother’s love of cooking (including some of her handwritten recipes) and it was in Rivera’s spirit that I spent a recent weekend attempting “Salima’s Fried Chicken” recipe, which, with Kayla’s permission, we’ve included in this issue. The act of following the recipe, the belief that something magnanimous waits on the other side, is in itself a poem if done with abandon. Like a poem, recipes often need improvisation to fit the palate.*

The recipe is one of the many unexpected offerings I’m grateful for in this issue. In conversation with inspiring poems from Beth Ann Fennelly, Alison C. Rollins, and Tomás Q. Morín, we also have a video poem from Petra Kuppers. It is, along with additional ephemera from Salima Rivera, one of our digital-only offerings this month and can be found in the web issue or in our app. Kupper’s piece is part art, part poetry, and part somatic exercise meant to stabilize both the heart and nervous system at a time when stability is a rare commodity.

This all comes together for me in that somatics, like recipes, are a gift of another’s actions. They are some of the small ways that we’re able to share dimensions of ourselves that are unaccessible in any other way than through the body. They are about connecting: opportunities to close or open spaces, and, as in the case of Diana Solís’s art, make a place—whether it’s a building in the world or in the architecture of the mind—more generous and available to those walking in the door.

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^{*I’m 97% vegetarian, so I used tofu instead of chicken and skipped the bacon grease, which I know would have really set things off. But when I tell you the fried tofu from her recipe was fire, it’s not a metaphor.}