Twenty years ago, Robert Wilson, then the editor of The American Scholar, invited me to join the magazine as poetry editor. With Sandra Costich, the assistant poetry editor then and now, we developed a new section. The idea was to feature a single poet, whose work I would introduce with a short essay. By now we’ve presented more than 70 poets in this way, a few of whom have made repeat appearances. The roster includes some of the leading English-language poets of the past 50 years as well as a few first-book authors. To celebrate them all, we’ve chosen eight poems to reprint.
Driving around town, I often notice a bumper sticker for our local alternative radio station. The station has a wonderfully deadpan slogan: “Some songs I like / some songs I don’t like.” In today’s grade-inflated culture of GOATs, breathless blurbs, and default four-and-a-half-star reviews, the slogan hardly amounts to an endorsement. But isn’t that what we want in a radio station? Not music curated by an algorithm that knows what we already approve, but a range of styles that stretch our taste, enlarge our experience, and in short, make us think, even if that means thinking we don’t like some songs, at least at first.
Confession: I have not instantly loved every poem I sent to Bob Wilson or Sudip Bose, our current editor, for publication. But no hesitation of mine has survived the process of writing one of these introductions. What is that process like? Before I write about a group of poems, I’ve read them more than a few times. I’ve done some googling and chased down references and quotations. I’ve emailed the poet with a question or two. Maybe I’ve read an interview. Now I’ve got a sense of the metaphors this poet is thinking with. Most important, I’ve begun to hear the poems in my head.
To read a new poet, or even new poems by a poet one knows (or thinks one knows), is like learning a language; or if not a language, then an idiom, a distinctive way of speaking. To “get it” is a matter less of what’s said than of how it’s being said. Deciding what’s a joke and what isn’t, for instance, requires “reading” a speaker’s tone, inflection, body language. When it comes to a poem, however, we don’t have any raised eyebrows, folded arms, or smirks to guide us. All we have to go on is an arrangement of words: sound, syntax, diction, rhythm, and (it matters, too) white space.
The few magazines that, like this one, publish poetry and are addressed to the general reader tend to print no more than one or two poems by any poet in a given issue. But to grasp what I’m calling a poet’s idiom, you need more than a page, and we give you that. The 500 words I write each quarter are not a review and still less an analysis of that issue’s poems. I’m sharing with you, in prose, how I hear those poems, which means how I’m making sense of them, and it’s an invitation for you to tune in and listen to them along with me. If I’ve done my job, there will be some you don’t like, some you do.
