Editor’s Note, April 2025

Last winter, I managed to get out of subzero Chicago for a minute, and as my friends were making the chilly rounds at holiday parties, I sat next to a warm and vibrant ocean scribbling in my poetry notebook. I feel as boastful as Super Bowl Kendrick talking about writing on a sunny beach when so many of us are demoralized, but there’s something simultaneously humbling and affirming about being near the water. The element’s existence—whether as pond, creek, estuary, or sea—is evidence of our significance, no matter how exhausted we might feel right now. It’s as Rumi reminds us, “You are not a drop in the ocean, you are the ocean in a drop.” 

Like poets, an ocean is never static or singular. If you’re up early enough, you can see the way the beach gets renovated with new shells and deepwater detritus every night. Rumi might agree there’s a pleasant metaphor in this about the ways poets work in their notebooks. Each page is the beach in the morning; each poem is discovering and uncovering the self all over again.

This issue is dedicated to poets who have not appeared in Poetry previously. Regardless of where they are in the creative journey, writers need to be in tune with their inspirational geography to daydream their poems. It might be the ocean for me, but these pages are full of other place-based discoveries. Yi Li’s lovely, cherry-silhouetted poem was shaped by a side street in Denver. Ashley Warner’s imaginative, ingredient-driven poems might have been found in a kitchen cupboard. Even when there’s no explicit mention of geography, worldly landscapes suffuse most of the poets’ work in this issue. Jamaica is everywhere in Shara McCallum’s work. Gaza is as essential to Nasser Rabah’s poems as air. 

We have two different, but equally place-driven folios in this issue. First, a collaboration documenting escaramuza, the Mexican tradition of women precision horse riding, with poems by ire’ne lara silva and Angelina Sáenz alongside photographs by Constance Jaeggi. We also offer a folio of haiku in English and Chinese by the great Chinese American novelist, memoirist, and poet Maxine Hong Kingston. It is accompanied by an essay about the art of translation by Chun Yu, a meditation on Kingston’s practice by Fred Marchant, and tributes from Marilyn Chin and John Whalen-Bridge.

The work of the escarmuzas and Maxine Hong Kingston shows us that tradition is a different, yet equally activating kind of cartography. And like poems, it can find us wherever we muse and write: dining room tables, library cubicles, riding arenas, even in coffee shops amid the sounds of oat milk being steamed and people catching up on their lives. Or by the ocean and its primordial, insistent self-revision. These spaces allow us to fully inhabit our “ocean in a drop” selves, no matter where we are in the maritime of our poetry practices.