“Editor’s Note” showcases the range of perspectives and curatorial expertise represented by our literary magazine members, and this month, we’re featuring the editor of Poetry Northwest from the Summer & Fall 2025 Issue.
FROM THE EDITOR
My attention is divided. I am here and I am not here. I am proofreading this issue of the magazine, cooking dinner, taking an evening walk—but also, I am not.
“Where is the enemy?” Jennifer Jean asks again and again in her poem about worries real and imagined.
For me, distraction is the enemy. The enemy is the device, the screen, the inability to tell the difference between the virtual world and the one I’m actually living in. It makes me short-tempered and irritable. It calls me away from any moment that doesn’t require the use of both my hands and my entire brain. It interrupts even my love. And, most importantly, it muddles my natural sense of what deserves my attention and what doesn’t.
What am I paying attention to? My wildfire tracking app. Photos of children being starved to death. How many likes my last post got. Whether or not Justin Bieber really is getting divorced. In this season, as Karen An-Hwei Lee puts it, “of long suffering,” not even the consequential things I appear to be clocking—climate devastation, genocide—are receiving my attention in a meaningful way.
Meaningful would mean that I am more than a tourist. That I am engaging actively with what I am observing. That my engagement produces something beyond a feeling of bottomless dread, pity, shame, or jealousy.
A poem is a way of paying attention. Martha Silano knew this. And before stepping out of this world last month after a battle with ALS, she was deeply in it. For her, this meant “taking the world’s slowest walk” while watching for birds—and damn if there weren’t so many of them just as soon as she started looking—birds that she’d later add to a poem with the loving care that can only be called attention.
Today I deleted the social media apps from my phone. Today I cooked a batch of beans. Today I bagged groceries at the food bank and potted four tomato plants. Today I watched a fawn get born. Today I had coffee with my dearest friend. Today I read fifty-some pages of the finest and most thrilling contemporary poetry out there, including work by the most recent winners of the James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poets and three beauties that Martha offered to share with our readers before saying goodbye to our pages forever. Today there might still be time—and the real attention it takes—for me to write one, too.
Keetje Kuipers, Editor in Chief
