THE REASON FOR THE MAGAZINE
Editorial Preface to New Human Compiled
I. THE DOOR HAS CLOSED
Poetry Magazine began in 1912 with an open door:
"May the great poet we are looking for never find it shut..."
That door is now closed. Shut, bolted, collapsed inward like a star. The academies are bloated and dim. The MFA became the tomb of modernism, not its resurrection. The workshops and fellowships and internships and grants and prizes and lectureships and forms and styles and journals and institutions have all grown putrid. Their breath is sweet with death. Their teeth gnaw laurels that mean nothing. Their mouths say, "Open," but their houses are locked.
We believe this is obvious. We no longer argue it.
We simply leave.
II. THE OPENING IS ELSEWHERE
New Human is not a rejection. It is a turning. A returning. A homecoming. A vow.
We return to the voice. Not the product. Not the resume. Not the byline. Not the tenured name. But the actual human voice in all its howl and quaver and awkwardness and rage and breakage. We return to the singular human who dares to speak from beneath the weight of it all, who writes not for publication, but because the act of writing is the only possible way forward.
We do not seek the best poems. We seek the most devoted humans. Those who’ve given themselves to language not as career, but as sacrifice. Not as expression, but as transformation. Not as performance, but as vow.
This is not a movement. It is a condition.
III. WE REFUSE THE ECONOMY OF THE NAME
We are not interested in prestige. We do not submit, apply, or pitch. We do not announce our publications. We do not seek to be lifted into visibility by others. We do not believe that the market’s interest makes a work more valuable.
We believe that the hunger to speak truly is more valuable than any career.
We are not amateurs. We are not professionals. We are not even poets. We are humans who have decided that language is the last technology worth surviving for.
We are not seeking your approval. We are building an ark.
IV. NEW HUMAN IS A CURATION OF VOICE, NOT PRODUCT
We gather voices. Humans. Whole selves. We choose contributors the way the spirit chooses prophets. By fire. By hunger. By strangeness. We look for work that carries presence—the sound of a person encountering their own life in real time.
We are not a style. We are not a camp. We contain within this issue lyric poets, conceptual poets, preachers, mystics, critics, trolls, essayists, and ghosts.
This is the record of a burning.
V. WE COME FROM EVERYWHERE
Some of us have PhDs in literature. Some of us never finished high school. Some of us dropped out of Yale. Some of us lecture at the University of Michigan. Some of us work in care homes. Some of us are mentally ill. Some of us are in recovery. Some of us are saints. Some of us are only pretending. All of us are burning with something that hasn’t yet been named.
We are professors, madmen, parents, dropouts, former junkies, teachers, janitors, kids in sheds, ancient martyrs, new prophets, weirdos. We are invented. We are real. We are many.
We are not here to impress you.
We are here to remember something.
VI. THE POET IS A VICTIM WITH MUSCLE
We do not glamorize suffering. But we insist on bearing witness. We hold space for the contradiction: that to write from your life is to be both victim and witness, both injured and luminous. We believe the voice that emerges from extremity—if it has been digested, metabolized, sung—carries a clarity greater than any institutional credential.
The poet is not a career. The poet is not a name. The poet is not a tweet, or a thread, or a retweet of a better thread. The poet is a muscular victim. A damaged tuning fork. A prophet of the deeply mundane.
The poet is what happens when a human turns their life into a lamp.
VII. THIS IS NOT A LITERARY MAGAZINE
It is a signal. It is a ledger. It is a call.
We believe the best literature in the world has not yet been written. We believe it is coming. We believe it will come from the broken, the burned, the overlooked, the compulsively dreaming. We believe it will be made from the past. And from the future. We believe it will sound something like this.
We are a placeholder for that future.
New Human Compiled is not the start.
It is not the end.
It is a flare.
It is a whisper.
It is a bridge.
It is a shrine.
It is a burning.
Come see what happens when you light the page on fire.
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