Editor’s Note, January/February 2026

As many readers know, Poetry magazine was founded in Chicago, and despite our magazine’s international platform and global curiosities, we stay a uniquely Chicago endeavor. The editorial work we do is propelled by the sounds and architectures of the city because this city is inescapable. We can’t help but respond to the way streets like Superior, Halsted, Damen, Division, Lake Shore, and the lake itself are conduits for Chicago’s attitudes and expectations. This city, as icebound and frigid as it is this month, remains poetically in tune and undeniably hip despite the proliferation of puffers and parkas. The saxophonist Cannonball Adderley could have been talking about these area codes when he said, “Hipness isn’t a state of mind. It’s a fact of life. You don’t just decide you’re hip.” Chicago isn’t something you decide; it’s a fact of life, even if you aren’t originally from here.

I’m going on about Chicago because our editorial team has been thinking about what it means to be a magazine that has always been situated in the city of Gwendolyn Brooks. While we have offices in River North today, it wasn’t always that way. Poetry was housed at 543 Cass Street originally; it was later housed in an office on the South Side and in a one-room situation in the basement of the Newberry Library among other couch surfing, co-tenet locations. In honor of Poetry’s migratory past and its 115th anniversary, as well as the 190th anniversary of the city of Chicago, we are planning a series of Chicago-focused issues for 2027. There will be a call for submissions for those issues soon, and we hope you will join us in celebrating this incomparable city and the poets who versify here.

Whether for editors or writers, place and poetics are inextricable. The issue you are reading includes Chicago native and former Illinois poet laureate Angela Jackson, whose poems are thick with the city while not even mentioning it. The poetry of Frank X Walker and his founding of the Affrilachian Poets reflects, as Kelly Norman Ellis puts it in a folio curated by Megan Pillow, “the way land and place nourish memory.” Darrel Alejandro Holnes’s beautiful poem “My Hispanitude” begins “I speak in the fold of the map—/creased between empire and salt” which is also a location that many of us can imagine as our coordinates, wherever we may live in this part of the planet. What do the streets we cross, the buses and trains we take, the park monuments we ignore or embrace, the mostly mediocre sports teams we cheer for, and the accents we carry say about our respective homeplaces? We’ll leave it to the poets to answer for us.