Editor’s Note, September 2025

This past June, I got to ambulate differently than I usually do as part of the Poets House’s annual Bridge Walk fundraiser. Along with 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize recipient Rita Dove and previous Poetry contributors Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Patricia Spears Jones, and Brenda Shaughnessy, I joined a robust group of poets and poetry lovers on a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. The day was just warm enough for the stroll to be comfortable as we all paraded above the East River, occasionally stopping for side conversations, random hugs, and poetry recitations about bridges by luminaries like Joy Harjo, Yusef Komunyakaa, Frank O’Hara, and Walt Whitman.

There was something inspiring about that walk beyond watching the sun dip behind the Manhattan skyline from the middle of the spans. Part of it was communal: people from all backgrounds and ages collectively tying on their comfortable shoes to walk in pentameter. Part of it was political: poetry lovers from various socioeconomic backgrounds coming together as the metaphoric collection plate passed around to bolster one of our most vital poetry organizations at a time when resources for poets (and artists generally) are somehow getting even more threadbare.

The walk was followed by dinner, and as I sat listening to Dove’s luminous poetry, the bigger implications of bridging settled in. All the best poems are metaphoric bridges, but in that moment their abutments felt different: the poet and the reader; our old selves who experienced a thing and the new selves trying to articulate it; reality in stasis and possibility in action. “What is it then between us?” Whitman asked while intimating he already knew the answer.

The thing between us now is the September issue of Poetry. There are actual bridges here in exquisite poems by Rajiv Mohabir and Kira Alexis Tucker. The issue also offers a diasporic bridge shaped as a folio, “Freed Verse: A Reckoning of Black British Poets,” edited by Nick Makoha. His curation showcases the vibrancy of Black poetry in the UK, including work from Malika Booker, Inua Ellams, and many others. The folio is followed by a moving meditation from Alexis Pauline Gumbs on Cheryl Clarke, the magnificent Black poet and scholar whose foregrounded sexual identity is a model for so many queer poets who have followed after her.

To take all of this back to the start: every poem requires some kind of substructure and superstructure to do its work. It doesn’t have to be as extravagant as the Brooklyn Bridge, or even Whitman’s poem immortalizing that historic construction. It could be one of those covered bridges missing a few roof slats, or Chicago’s bascule bridges lifting skyward, or a log balancing over a creek in Indiana. Whatever its composition, it needs to be sturdy enough so that we can find each other someplace in the middle for a smile, a head nod, or, if we’re lucky, a long walk with a poet.