Editor’s Note, December 2025

According to the Oxford and just about any other dictionary you might consult, the word poetry is a noun. But if you ask poets—and we should always ask poets—many will say it is a verb and use it accordingly. Poetry is the world in action, enacted as images, rhymes, anapests, and anaphoras. It is inoculation against the inefficacy of language, whether private or public. I’m writing this note in September, shortly after Arthur Sze (whose dexterously enchanting poems begin the issue) was named the twenty-fifth United States Poet Laureate. Those who are familiar with Sze—whether it is through his bighearted and finely tuned lyricism or his long history of teaching and mentorship—know that his poetry comes from being simultaneously attuned to and in service to the world around him. He is the embodiment of poetry as a verb, and we at Poetry want to thank him for his poems as we celebrate what’s to come from his laureateship.

I cannot imagine a more perfect poet to remind readers of the necessity of poetry at a time when the idea of language is viewed with suspicion, where words are mostly used for self-celebration and aggrandizement rather than communion. Sze is not alone in this issue in his reminders of this necessity. Lesyk Panasiuk’s poems, translated from the Ukrainian by Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky, caution against complicity: “Silence is not golden./It’s paper money/that’s worth less than the paper.” Bianca Stone warns that “A metaphor no longer/holds like it used to.” Terrance Hayes exhorts us to “Say something that hangs/over the burial ground just between the boughs & bowing.” Writers are more sensitive to the pressures on language use than most, but at this moment poets are both linguistic barometers and harbingers, and we would be wise to listen.

As active as it is, poetry sometimes requires isolation to achieve the necessary verb wattage, finding solace in sometimes unlikely locales: a bargain pool in East LA, a spillway someplace in Arkansas, or in the canopy of a 300-year-old live oak. Diana Arterian, Austin Araujo, and Leonora Simonovis write about each of these things here as part of our mostly digital series “This Be the Place.” Whether essays or poems, the writings in this issue reveal how poets need to take part in the world as much as our unbending, but often vibrant world needs the presence of poets.