Editor’s Note, April 2024

April is Poetry Month, and for poets it feels less like the holidays and more like being in a prom-queen daze. For four weeks, as the tulips burst and little creatures venture out into new grass, poetry is available in ways and in places it usually isn’t—on billboards and buses, in mainstream newspapers. It’s even on the radio and TV, as newscasters and weather forecasters alike recite their favorite haiku. For a single month, poetry is part of the public firmament in the same way the art is part of the everyday for poets.

The rest of the year, poets’ expectations for attention are minimal, maybe because creating poetry is mostly lonely; it requires a soft-shoeing of the self to be brought into the world. It requires giving and expecting nothing back beyond the echo of your own voice. So we poets are especially grateful for April when those who are not in our immediate community recognize the constellation of joys revolving around the Earth’s oldest oral and textural art. That acknowledgment from the outside world can be considered a kind of gentle success.

The poet Richard Howard once said, “Being a successful poet is a lot like being a successful mushroom.” He was talking about the absurdity of being “famous” as a poet in the US. But his quote makes me laugh because I think mushrooms are determined and amazing—in taste and texture, in stubbornness and in their multiplicity. There are almost as many kinds of mushrooms as there are kinds of poems and every one is vital. If any thing deserves to be famous, it’s mushrooms. Think about how fungi synthesize the world’s leftovers to create something unique and exquisite. Think about how necessary they are to our existence—feeding the plants that make life on land possible. If someone gave me the choice to be famous or necessary, I’d pick necessary every time. I want to be like oxygen, denim, or salt. Or mushrooms.

Back in 1988, cosmonauts on the Mir space station discovered fungi covering the outside of one of their windows. I cannot imagine a more apt metaphor for poets. In honor of all those tenacious, cosmic wanderers, this Poetry Month issue highlights poets who have not previously appeared in Poetry. Among them is Melvin Dixon, whose poem “Heartbeats” was the first that brought me to tears. We also offer a visual folio by Kara Walker, whose silhouetted critiques of American slavery and imperialism redefined contemporary art. Her work serves as both inciter and muse for a series of ekphrastic verse. We have David Keplinger’s translations of Jan Wagner’s work here too—his poem “portrait of the rain” reminds me implicitly of April, “when mushrooms, mosses,/vineyard snails run rampant.” The change in weather, he writes, “makes the outlines visible: where rain ends,/we begin.” Where rain ends, we begin: poets and poems, their lines vibrant and successful by their own making, no matter what month it might be.