It’s already showing in the magazine people aren’t looking in the same way. For those who’ve been unseen for so long, how do you tell them the magazine is working to gain their trust? Q: With the cultural shift, there’s also the building of trust. In the first issue, there’s going to be a folio of poet Carolyn Rodgers, who’s from Chicago, a phenomenal poet and was never in the magazine, and she’s part of the Black Arts Movement.
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One of the things I decided we were going to do as a magazine is instead of trying to figure out how to rectify all the omissions and erasures that have happened over the long history of the 110 years of this magazine, we’re going to focus on figuring out how to highlight the people that should have been there to start with. And who are we creating space for on those pages who haven’t been in there before? We’re committed to trying to have a third of each magazine be people who haven’t been published in it before, and this is an ongoing thing. Now we have to figure out what that change looks like.įor me, it starts with the magazine and how it’s positioned in the world, in the pages. It makes it a little bit easier to start to think about how to affect it when everyone is in agreement that we need to make some changes. I’m lucky because the staff with the foundation and magazine are all committed to that (change). Q: Can you share your goals for this position? We all know cultural change takes time. Michelle is here our staff is incredibly diverse and we’re all holding hands in common cause to make (the magazine) look more like what our community looks like.” It’s not how magazines work but now they do.
The good thing about a democracy is that if you have a lot of voters of color, they can vote for candidates of color, but that’s not how arts organizations work. “For a very long time, poetry - the art - was just highlighting white men, occasionally a white woman, an action that reflects our country’s resistance to diversity. There are long stretches between these acknowledgments and in between the institutions, they are catering to the people who cater to them,” Matejka said. “When Gwendolyn Brooks won the Pulitzer in poetry in 1950, there wasn’t another Black Pulitzer Prize winner until Rita Dove in 1987. “It’s such a central institution to the work that poets do and at the same time, for a long time, it was incredibly homogenistic.” He said it’s not that dissimilar to the laureateship in Indiana in the sense of a bigger arts organization/entity not really thinking about diversity or how to be representative in these communities until the past 10 years. to be the first editor of color at all, it’s a wonderful honor and also points to the complicated legacy of this magazine,” Matejka said. Since then, the foundation issued a plan to work toward long-term equity and expanded grant funding.
In June 2020, Poetry Foundation President Henry Bienen resigned after more than 1,800 people signed an open letter denouncing the foundation for failing to do more to support marginalized artists. Matejka takes the editorship after the Poetry Foundation came under fire for its initial response to protests following George Floyd’s death in 2020 and what some perceived as a slow response in providing financial aid to artists during the pandemic. She is the first woman and person of color to lead the institution. His arrival comes after Michelle Boone in 2021 became president of the nonprofit Poetry Foundation, which oversees the magazine. Now, the Indiana University at Bloomington Ruth Lilly professor in English is also Poetry magazine’s first Black editor in its 110-year history. The Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine announced Adrian Matejka will join Poetry as the new editor.
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