About Poetry Magazine

Poetry magazine has been a monthly gathering space for poets and readers for over a century. Based in Chicago since 1912, the magazine publishes contemporary work primarily in English and translation of poets from all over the United States and the world. In addition to its print publication, Poetry offers a digital app and a biweekly podcast, and makes its entire archive of poetry and prose available online for free.

In “The Motive of the Magazine,” published in Poetry’s first issue in October 1912, founding editor Harriet Monroe wrote: “Every sport, every little industry requires its own corner, its own voice, that it may find its friends, greet them, welcome them.” A century later, the corner Monroe spoke of is a large and vibrant ecosystem, of which Poetry is just one part, devoted to supporting poets and expanding the art form. With the assistance of the Poetry Foundation, Poetry seeks to connect the beautiful confluence of voices in contemporary poetry with readers of all kinds for the next hundred years.

Some of the most well-known poems of the twentieth century written in English were first published in Poetry’s pages: “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks, “anyone lived in a pretty how town” by E.E. Cummings, T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Trees” by Joyce Kilmer, “Chez Jane” by Frank O'Hara, Sylvia Plath’s “Fever 103°,” “Chicago” by Carl Sandburg, and Margaret Walker’s “For My People.”Poetry also championed the early works of H.D., Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, and Rabindranath Tagore.

Poetry has a long history of publishing new work by award-winning writers alongside poets early in their careers. Poets whose work has recently appeared in Poetry include: Kay Ulanday Barrett, KB Brookins, Victoria Chang, Anthony Cody, Tishani Doshi, Nikki Giovanni, torrin a. greathouse, Terrance Hayes, Ashley M. Jones, Ilya Kaminsky, Nam Le, Ada Limón, Pascale Petit, Carl Phillips, Omar Sakr, Jake Skeets, Arthur Sze, TC Tolbert, Allison Akootchook Warden, and many more.

Like the innovative poets gracing our pages, Poetry is invested in being as radically transformative as the original iteration was in 1912. One mission of the current iteration of the magazine is to convene conversations around the absences in Poetry’s own archive and elsewhere, starting with recent portfolios on Margaret Danner and Carolyn Marie Rodgers, as well as William J. Harris, Bert Meyers, Diana Solís, and more. The folios serve to both highlight poets whose work has not gotten the attention it deserves as well as helping to situate those poets in the contemporary poetic conversation As a slight remix of Monroe’s original motive: we want the magazine to question even as it provides respite, to be a space where every kind of poetry can be read, heard, and received with the curiosity and wonder it deserves.

+++

Read more about the history of Poetry magazine.