An introduction to a special issue of Guesthouse: Poets on the Pandemic

Guest co-editor Diane Seuss

It is difficult to get the news from poems to introduce this special pandemic issue of Guesthouse without using some of my least favorite words. Blessing. Redemption. Light. Godsend. Though godsend is kind of cool. As a kid I pictured a giant God sticking a postcard in a massive mailbox. When I put out a casual call on old-school social media for “pandemic-y poems” for a project I was working on, my idea was hazy at best. I knew I wanted to see how poets were metabolizing the pandemic, how language was or was not expanding or contracting to hold it, and that I wanted to play a role in getting those poems out into the world. 

Then came the deluge. Poems poured in like Niagara brand purified water at a bottling factory Falls. They flew in like the doomed swallows of Capistrano. Like the flying monkeys in the Wizard of Oz, they scooped me up and carried me off to the witch’s castle of sublimity and smoke bombs. Some parachuted in like the seeds that fall from maple trees and do that spinny thing until they hit the ground. Others sliced the air like the laser beams cats chase. I was Tessie in “The Lottery,” but instead of being stoned, I was being poemed.

Mercifully, Jane Huffman, founder and editor of Guesthouse, for my money one of the most intelligent, brilliantly curated, impeccably designed literary magazines we’ve got, offered a home to my errant project. Little did I know what kind of work she was taking on by saying yes. This would be an unplanned issue of a magazine that requires a good deal of her time, energy, expertise, and cash. In the process of building it, I learned what it takes to be a great editor. Not only must the editor build pages and send out proofs and galleys and communicate respectfully with writers, she must read with discretion, consider the whole as a unified work of art, and learn how to say no to people whose work she admires and even loves. 

Although I believe that no is a useful, even beautiful word, I have trouble uttering it. I wished we could have a party with no bouncer at the door. Everybody in. Of course, poets have to say no to themselves all the time. No to a poem’s erroneous direction. No to a lifeless or goofy formal decision. No to blessing. No to light. No, sometimes, to godsend. The choices an editor makes, at best, are not so much judgments on the material as aesthetic choices about how to construct a final product that is both cohesive and diverse. An array of voices fanned out like a great poker hand, a representative exhibition in a gallery with only so much wall space. 

For me, reading all the submissions during quarantine and studying the emails that accompanied them replaced the intensity of fear with the intensity of connection. I saw that good work — work on behalf of — was the antidote to the abiding sense of helplessness I had sunk to. The support and love the poets expressed in their emails and the extraordinary range of feelings, ideas, and formal and tonal approaches they brought to their poems functioned as an inoculation to my bouts of hopelessness. Jane and I made our selections less by whether a submission was “good” than by whether it brought another facet to the thesis about survival that the issue was effectuating. What we ended up with were poems that in some way enacted this, from Audre Lorde: “It is important to share how I know survival is survival and not just a walk through the rain.” 

Jane would not want me to overdo it here. One trait of the magazine’s aesthetic is elegance. Compression. She would not want me to use the word genius in relation to her editorial work and her own poems, which are unlike any being written today. She would not want my mouth to hang open in awe at what she has accomplished in her less than three decades on the planet. Iowa MFA. Lilly Fellow. Founder and editor of a literary magazine with a clear critical and formal point of view. There are too many etceteras to count. If I mention how blessed I feel by this process, how it fills me with redemptive light, what a godsend it has been to drown in a deluge of poetry and come to the surface to breathe sweet air again, well, she’ll have to fire me.

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Diane Seuss is the author of five poetry collections, including Still Life With Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry, and Four-Legged Girl, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. frank: sonnets is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2021. She is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow. Seuss was raised by a single mother in rural Michigan, which she continues to call home.