Dear Reader,
Welcome to Issue 90 of The Collagist!
As your quick look at the Table of Contents will have alreay revealed, we're celebrating National Poetry Month in this issue: Not only are there more poets represented than would usually be the case (and what poets!), but their poems are followed by lesson plans drafted by Poetry Editor Marielle Prince and Interviews Editor Elizabeth Deanna Morris Lakes.
(We are, by the way, doubly grateful to the poets included in this issue, not only for trusting us with their work, but also for providing us with their invaluable help in crafting these lesson plans.)
Because Marielle has put it better than I'm likely to, here's what she has to say:
National Poetry Month is a celebration put on every year by the Academy of American Poets and the American poetry community at large. One of the goals of National Poetry Month is to assist teachers in bringing poetry into their classrooms. With that in mind, The Collagist has created teaching guides to accompany the poems in this month’s issue in hopes that this work may be read and discussed and enjoyed by the up-and-coming poets in classrooms the world over.
These guides were written with undergraduate introductory poetry writing classes in mind, but we hope anyone looking to try a poetry lesson in their high school or college classroom will find them adaptable for their purposes. The guides are not sequenced but can be mixed and matched however you please.
When copying poems from the site for classroom use, we would appreciate it if you would include a note saying the poems were found in The Collagist, Issue 90.
To which I will only add—purely to better give context to the prose in this issue—Edward Hirsch's definition of poetry, "An inexplicable (though not incomprehensible) event in language; an experience through words." It is my hope that everything we publish, poetry and prose and the hybrids in between, meets those standards. If The Collagist has a mission statement, it is and has been that.
Thank you so much for reading,
Gabriel Blackwell