Editor’s Note, July/August 2025

Summer in Chicago is the season of porch and backyard kickbacks, lingering with family and friends alongside the joyous interruptions of neighborhood dogs and children big-wheeling in the driveway. It’s the time when storytelling uncles settle in with a beverage of their choosing to spin almost-true yarns that distract from the real troubles around us. I imagine the oldest known poem, The Epic of Gilgamesh, was a similar backyard distraction four thousand years ago. The poem follows Gilgamesh as he navigates natural disasters and mythical creatures on a quest for immortality. Gilgamesh himself is the front-porch uncle of future heroes like Odysseus, Coleridge’s ancient mariner, and Walcott’s Shabine.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is a narrative poem in the truest and most fantastic sense. It illustrates why humans rely on anecdotes, real or imagined, to hold on to our oldest histories in times of need. When I first encountered poetry in the nineties, narrative was the mode of most poets writing in the United States. Marilyn Chin, Rita Dove, Martin Espada, Robert Hass, Marilyn Nelson, and Ruth Stone, in concert with others, perfected the balance of plot, image, and rhythm necessary to push a poem out into the mythological waves.

I try to avoid sweeping statements about style in these editor’s notes, but in the later part of the twentieth century nearly all the winners of major prizes were poetic storytellers. Some, like Ai and Frank Bidart, leaned into dramatic monologue as a home for the narrative. Others, like William Matthews (whose “Mingus at the Showplace” remains in my poem pantheon) and Yusef Komunyakaa (whose “Slam, Dunk, & Hook” is still the best basketball poem I’ve read) hit their storytelling obligations directly: scene, character, and dialogue—Freytag’s Pyramid in lines that swing tough enough to make Ellington envious.

I am reminded of this perennial return to narrative now because the July/August issue of Poetry includes several anecdotal poems. We’re fortunate to share two unpublished poems from the great Stanley Plumly, whose posthumous Collected Poems is forthcoming in August. Ellen June Wright’s graceful poems detail the complexity of caring for an elderly mother. Though not explicitly narrative, the poems in this issue’s folio—“Wind Crossing Grasses: Poems from China’s Dragon Rivers,” curated and translated by Wang Ping—coalesce into a communal story of China’s Yellow and Yangtze Rivers. The poems throughout this issue highlight that, regardless of whether you sit on the porch or in the boat of your own odyssey, there’s a story asking to be told about it in tercets, trumpets, or the dusking light of a July evening.