Volume 117 Summer/Fall 2022 Guest Editor’s Note
Folio for Black Writers
I initially saw this collective whole as a montage, flashes of a collective experience. And then, as I recalled a conversation I’d had with friends recently about Beyoncé’s
Renaissance, my understanding of this project changed its shape. A few days before making the final decisions on these poems, I’d been in the car with my friends while the album played all the way through. One friend commented on the versatility of Beyoncé’s voice throughout the album, how she’d leaned into play in a way that she hadn’t in previous years. Another friend noted the importance of the transitions, how some of the songs didn’t feel as impactful if they were divorced from the outro of the song that came before it. This conversation played on a loop as I pored over these poems.
While curating, I came across Joy Priest’s poem “It’s Beyond Me,” where she writes, “It’s all blues / with him, stuck in the same stories / where the field was the world. Doesn’t he know another song?” I considered the publishing landscape, how Black writers are pressed to sing the same songs of oppression and hopelessness to be platformed. How even those opportunities are marked by disingenuous open calls for Black History Month or Juneteenth, editors throwing open the gates but drastically limiting the standing room inside. As my mind wandered back to the task at hand, I saw this act (and honor) of curating this space as an opportunity to play different songs about Blackness for the masses.
In an act of creative and editorial rebellion, I decided to begin this folio with the incredible piece by Vincente Perez, “Call for Poems!” This brilliant poem is a parody of the open calls I just discussed, the attempts to tokenize and capitalize on Black stories. And what follows Perez’s poem are other gorgeous songs; Black poets playing with their voices, showing us a different side of the expected. Curating this folio presented me with a gift—the joy of watching it become an album. And so I urge you to not only listen to the songs but to listen in between them, to spend time with their interludes and outtros. Notice how they speak—how these poets take us from one beat to another.
-Taylor Byas
Taylor Byas is a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she is now a PhD candidate and Yates scholar at the University of Cincinnati, and an Assistant Features Editor for The Rumpus. She is the 1st place winner of the 2020 Poetry Super Highway, the 2020 Frontier Poetry Award for New Poets Contests, the 2021 Adrienne Rich Poetry Prize, and a finalist for the 2020 Frontier OPEN Prize. She is the author of the chapbook Bloodwarm from Variant Lit, a second chapbook, Shutter, from Madhouse Press, and her debut full-length, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, forthcoming from Soft Skull Press in Spring of 2023. She is represented by Rena Rossner of the Deborah Harris Agency.
To purchase Volume 117 Summer/Fall 2022 featuring Taylor’s guest edited folio, click here.
