Blackbird ArchiveThe Places We Inherit
It strikes me just how much place works its way into poetry—that often the images we keep coming back to were, or are, abundant in our specific landscapes—and that perhaps this feels inevitable. I, as a poet, don’t find this inevitability limiting as much as I find it mesmeric within the writing process. The landscape that raised me was one filled with empty factories, a polluted river, lakes, queerness, and trains that felt to me to be heading nowhere and yet still, a somewhere I didn’t quite have access to. These poems can responsibly enact the complications and consequences (bodily and environmentally) of industry in my rust belt Midwestern home, without the burden of judgment or finding resolve. I can look inward on my own world and in turn imagine a new one in poetry. I can document the truth of my home and my spot within it, without being beholden.
Yet, place has led me to seek out more documentary means within my poetry while also trying to maintain lyrical qualities. I feel just as strongly in the connections that can be found within the archive or within the historical as I do in the connections lyric movement can make within a poem. From this, setting my poems within the specificity of place—Lake Michigan, a factory, a moving train, or a queer bar in my hometown—allows me to slip freely through the realms of documentary and lyric, where they intersect and then depart. This dichotomy has been pushing me recently toward the types of poems I’ve been writing over the last year: poems dedicated to factory-working drag queens, a specific building, a ship, train, or archive. People and things I have found, lost within footnotes—things I believe poetry has overlooked.
Overlooked. This practice feels vital, even now as we are grappling with the continuously unfolding effects (again bodily and environmentally) of a train derailment, more industry, in Ohio. These horrifying and perplexing images are not new. To stop and consider these familiar images, footnotes, archives, even the lyric itself—that I might forever be coming back to them in many different forms—is meaningful and necessary on its own. It allows our world to expand, and in turn, expands our home. It allows for little understanding, and for that I’m sorry—yet in them the immense relationship of the landscape of place to that of the page is paramount. And how this has always been my inheritance.
Colin Bailes’s poetry has appeared in Best New Poets 2022 , Missouri Review , Narrative , and Subtropics , among other journals. A 2022 National Poetry Series finalist, he holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, where he served as the 2020–2021 Levis Reading Prize Fellow and was awarded the Catherine and Joan Byrne Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, and teaches writing at Santa Fe College and Virginia Commonwealth University. Photo by Lindsey Bat
Hayley Graffunder’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cincinnati Review , Beloit Poetry Journal , RHINO , Salt Hill , and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2020 Catherine and Joan Byrne Poetry Prize, sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, and the 2018 Lon Otto Prize for poetry. She is a graduate of the MFA program in poetry at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she served as the managing editor for Blackbird . She teaches poetry at Virginia Commonwealth University. Photo by Brandon Young
Danielle Kotrla’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the South Carolina Review , The Pinch , Moon City Review , and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2022 Catherine and Joan Byrne Poetry Prize, sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. She holds an MFA in poetry from Virginia Commonwealth University and is a PhD student in philosophy at the University of Georgia.
Rebecca Poynor’s work has appeared in Carve , Chestnut Review , Nashville Review , New York Quarterly , Ninth Letter , and elsewhere. She is an MFA candidate in creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University where she serves as Blackbird ’s managing editor emerita, lead copy editor, and lead social media editor. Photo by Waverley Vesely
Waverley Vesely’s poetry has appeared in Blackbird and Grub Street Literary Review . They are an MFA candidate in poetry at Virginia Commonwealth University where they serve as managing editor for Blackbird . Photo by Rebecca Poynor
Caitlin Wilson’s poetry has appeared in filling Station , Iron Horse Literary Review , McNeese Review , RHINO , Wildness , and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, where she received 2021 and 2020 Graduate Poetry Awards. She is the winner of the 2022 Enoch Pratt Free Library Poetry Contest and recipient of the 2019 AWP Intro Journals Project award and the 2018 Henrietta Spiegel Creative Writing Award. She previously served as the 2019–2020 managing editor of Blackbird . Photo by Lisa Wilson
Brandon Young’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Foglifter , Gulf Coast , The Journal , RHINO , Poet Lore , and elsewhere. He attended the 2021 Tin House Summer Writers Workshop and was a 2022 Tennessee Williams Scholar in poetry at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He is a PhD student in creative writing at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, where he serves as poetry editor of Quarterly West . He holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, where he served as the 2021–2022 Levis Reading Prize Fellow. Photo by Hayley Graffunder