Editor’s Note, May 2025

When I was a kid, my parents always had jazz on the record player. Before I could read I could recognize Dexter Gordon’s One Flight Up by its opening keys, Kenny Drew’s heavy hands setting the tone. In that apartment, saxophones arpeggioed and trumpets did their brass things from early afternoon until past my bedtime. Jazz was the soundtrack for everything—cleaning, napping, cooking, building Legos, it didn’t matter. The music was so ubiquitous that my biological father tried to name me “Yusef” after the great windsman Yusef Lateef. My mother had other ideas, and she won out.

My favorite jazz musician then (and now) was Miles Davis, whose brilliance and funky attitude was central to nearly every major jazz movement of the twentieth century. He moved through the world with the same swing as his trumpet lines and was always, as one of his record titles proclaimed, Miles Ahead. His music communicated something otherwise inexpressible to me. At the same time, the man himself was notoriously grouchy and difficult to work with. He was often misunderstood and he didn’t care, once telling a reporter “If you understood everything I said, you’d be me.”

“Miscommunication” has the Latin root “communicare,” which can mean either “common” or “shared,” and in poetry, I imagine “shared” speaks to everyone involved—both poet and reader offering their understandings and confusions in equal value. After all, a poem is not an argument or a debate. It’s more of a secular communion amplifying our common experiences like the back and forth between musicians and listeners. All art, but especially poetry, strives for communication and understanding, for a way—whether through image, music, or memory—to create a space where everyone involved becomes an individualized part of the collective.

Communication is central to the poets in this May issue, including Paisley Rekdal, whose poem “Ending Song” puzzles over the ways we reimagine words like luck and blessing to fit our own emotional schemas. Or Omotara James’s “On Intimacy,” where the “mutual and reciprocal disappointments” between two family members are beyond language. Or Dan Beachy-Quick’s “Orfeo” reimagining Orpheus’s underworld, where AM radio provides the soundtrack “As you sing along—.” He might as well have been talking about poetry’s necessary musicality.

It’s not easy to make English sound good with all of its harsh consonants and confusing cognates. But swing is as central to poetic communication as image or lyric. Like musicians, it is the obligation of poets to find the mystical arrangements of language that tune up both the ear and the heart. That’s where the real sharing and conversation happens. But it requires commitment. As the great Indianapolis poet Etheridge Knight wrote, “Making jazz swing in/Seventeen syllables ain’t/No square poet’s job.