Eleven Legends

A poet’s work—whether in celebration or resistance—does not happen in the ether. Like all other arts, poetry relies on reinvention and reimagination as much as it does reaction to the unique pressures, crises, and historical mores that mark the moments of our lives we manage to remember. Poetry is built on pieces of the interior even as it is rendered for the public. It’s deeply communal even as it serves as a single trumpet amid the bandstand. The art of poetry is, at its heart, about elevating—language, sound, heroes, and myths—and the issue you are holding celebrates the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize recipients’ many different legacies of convening and uplift. In previous years, one poet was awarded this prize in recognition of a lifetime of resplendent and unparalleled poetics. This year, in honor of the 110th anniversary of Poetry, eleven poets were selected as a nod to the eleven decades of the magazine’s existence, and their work here is briefly introduced by friends and literary compatriots.

The living legends in these pages— CAConrad, Sandra Cisneros, Rita Dove, Nikki Giovanni, Juan Felipe Herrera, Angela Jackson, Haki R. Madhubuti, Sharon Olds, Sonia Sanchez, Patti Smith, and Arthur Sze—have been celebrating, protesting, emboldening, untangling, re-remembering, mythologizing, and stirring shit up their entire careers. They’ve been working for us and for our art symbiotically through a myriad of cultures and topographies. The word symbiosis comes from a Greek word that means “living together”—not living off one another, or next to one another, but in concert. So it’s not just the poets being honored in this issue; it’s the readers and all of us poets who have been transformed by their idiosyncratic wonders on and off the page.

Since my first issue as editor of Poetry, it’s not hyperbolic to say that every US poet we’ve published is somehow connected creatively to the eleven award recipients. This collection of poets has made it possible for the writers we’ve convened in the magazine to be brash, to be defiant in their lines, and to be loud in their vowels and consonants. To imagine or reimagine form and shape poetically. To demand acknowledgment of the culture and community fearlessly. The generosity of these Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize recipients over their writing careers (some of which span more than fifty years) has been its own kind of musicality, a new form of revelation, and the unexpected engine for contemporary poetics. Lucille Clifton once said, “Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language,” and these eleven poets are manifestations of that ethos. They are the keepers and tellers. Their lives are lived poetry.