Thank you, poetry.
I’m writing this last blog post while looking out the window at my dad’s summer garden, thinking about all the animals and insects and leafy things making things work outside. I’m thinking, too, about all the people who write, read, and perform poems, and how they are everywhere in the world, feeding and tilling and fertilizing and germinating and creating harvest with their words. I hope these three issues of
Poetry have done one or all of those things for you, and I look forward to seeing the work of all other editors, guest and otherwise.
Every summer until this one, I looked forward to summer in Alabama in my dad’s backyard garden. Summer meant the end of the regular school year, the beginning of days spent watching vegetables and flowers grow, to smelling watermelons (which I don’t eat my parents do that all on their own) halved in the kitchen, to the slow spill of sunset over Birmingham.
That renewal each year also included poetry readings, books checked out from the library, the bubbling thrill of planning for new semesters filled with writing classes. Summer in Birmingham could find me in the audience of a local literary event, on stage at a reading, or just laughing with a poet-friend at a park. This year is different, of course, and although things are opening and moving toward what some folks call “normal,” it isn’t that way for me.
My maternal grandmother, Willie Lee Lipscomb, was a poet. She wrote no books she was not an academic; she worked with her hands and her body and made a way as a single parent to my mother and my aunts. I mean that she was a poet in the way she lived her life, in the inimitable balm of her laugh, in the way her words have lived on. My mother told me that she advised her children in this way: “Don’t start what you can’t hold out.” I think about all the things my grandmother held out, and, following her example, what my mother has held out: families reared and kept together, God poured through all of us, an appreciation for the value of a story well told. In our family, we do what we do in love and with Spirit guiding us.