Editor’s Note, June 2025

The writer Adam Bradley once said to me, “all rappers are poets” and I think he’s right. In the eighties, some of the great poet-emcees like Rakim and Chuck D introduced me to the concept of poetry. They showed me through their respective and eclectic bars that poetry’s habits are universal and transferable across mediums. Poetry can be offered and received aloud, written in script or in braille, signed or sung. It is malleable, transcending the strictures of its particular, versified container. Rhymes titillate the ear across languages; metaphor performs the same magic whether in Spanish or Vietnamese. Poetry belongs to all who write, read, sing, and sign it. It is “for the people,” as June Jordan taught us—despite the exclusionary positions of some critics. This communal posture is what makes poetry open to anyone who wants to engage with it as a writer or as a reader.

Because poetry is a wild and capacious art, anyone who might wish to pursue it beyond their own notebooks would do right to familiarize themselves with the mode. It’s important to gain poetic fluency whether the intent is to publish books, rhapsodize over a Beyoncé track, or rock the stage at Chicago’s legendary Green Mill. It’s important and necessary to honor various poetry genealogies as we move through the world as burgeoning writers.

Our editorial team at Poetry imagines each issue as a conversation that honors those genealogies while helping to create new ones. Poets from various generations and nations appear next to each other in our pages, revealing how voices chime most resonantly across time and place. In this issue, sculptural poems from CAConrad chat with Shizuka Omori’s tankas translated by Yuki Tanaka, which in turn converse with 2024 Poetry Ourselves winner Jessie Leitzel’s poem. The dialogue continues throughout: one poet’s form speaks to another poet’s narrative which then lends light to another poet’s lyricism. That’s how poetry works when at its most collective: each voice, style, and mode amplifies the excellence in another’s.

Poetry, no matter if it’s coming in sixteen bars or sixteen stanzas, insists on communing. It expects curiosity, too, like the poets in this issue—about words, about order, and about the ways we speak to others through our poems. These poets leave room in their words for those who might not know how to write a sestina but are surprised by the repetition. They invite those who are inspired by assonance and its attendant music. Improvisational as it can be, poetry is also beautifully inevitable, as available as the most convincing rhyme, whether it comes from an emcee’s microphone or a poet’s notebook.