LINE LEVEL #12 BEST OF LINE LEVEL
Welcome to LINE LEVEL: Craft Lessons from Poets of Color, a monthly column in which writer, editor, and educator Joanna Acevedo zooms in on an element of craft from the work of BIPOC poets. LINE LEVEL unfolds in three parts: an excerpt of a poem, followed by a contributor’s note, followed by Acevedo’s own exploration into the poet’s world of language. Guided by a curiosity that yields learning, we are invited to consider historical context, stylistic influences, and more, all the way down to the level of the line. This month, we are looking back at a year of Line Level.
For our 12th Line Level, we are going to look back on the year in Line Level—what was just an idea has grown into a wonderful place for poets to share insights about their craft and highlight their own techniques, sharing them and helping emerging writers to see it’s not just magic that makes a good poem, there are some tools in the toolbox, too!
Our January 2024 contributor Jiwon Choi wrote about braiding historical content into lyric poetry in her excerpted poem, “Vincent Chin, You Were Living the American Dream,” Her work now seems more relevant than ever. In her contributor’s note, Choi writes: “I…want to offer this as a critique on how the fantasy of the American Dream can be pernicious as not everyone gets to equally decide what version of the American Dream they will get.” Her technique of pairing symbols of Americana with the brutality of Industrialism brings a powerful tension into the poetic space.
The inaugural column, with our October 2023 contributor, had Sahar Muradi introducing us to the zuihitsu form with excerpted work from her collection, OCTOBERS. She is also handling these questions about America and what it means to be American, but from an entirely different angle. She tends toward lyric: All my life trying to name the thing without naming it.” The lucidity of her language and its boundless inventiveness brings a whirlwind energy to her work. The sparse and choppy way that Jessica Ram, our June 2024 contributor, cut her poem up into beats with slashes cutting them up, was a sharp contrast.
In August of 2024, Ayokunle Falomo gave us a bootcamp in confessional poetry and all the ways it could twist and turn into something totally new and special. It was Marianne Chan, however, our most recent contributor, who cleared the air, and showed us how autobiographical facts and very real fears could translate into prose poetry, with repetition creating the heartbeat of anxiety that phobia or irrational fear manifests. Lynne Thompson, in September, showed us the way that songs and other kinds of media can cross-pollinate and inspire poetry, and vice versa, drawing all kinds of connections between very different kinds of art, which might have very different styles but still come from the same heartfelt place.
May of 2024 brought us MJ Gomez, who showed us a ghazal—one of the only truly formal poems of the year—and then, Gomez’s explanation of their interest in the form and the boundaries that it created but also, the possibilities it opened up. The use of the second person in Khai Don’s poem in the March 2024 column allowed the readers to place themselves into the poem as Don manipulated time and brought us into flashbacks, and Joshua Garcia’s February 2024 poem, “lot’s wife shopping in a pandemic,” pushed the possibilities of how to treat a page, with regards to formatting, to its absolute limit.
Joanne McFarland’s July 2024 poem excerpt involved text reworked from a cookbook—and in her contributor’s note, she explains that cooking is the ultimate creative act, and hunger is the ultimate erotic impulse. The regimented nature of the excerpt allows for her ideas to flourish in the cracks of the repetitive structure. Kevin Madrigal Galindo’s work from December of 2023 shows the boundaries of language from an entirely different perspective as he writes in two languages, bringing Spanish into his poetry and commenting on bilingual poetry and its impact as well as its reach.
It’s been a good year! At Frontier we are grateful to have shared the words of so many amazing poets, read their poems and heard their thoughts. We are looking forward to much more community, collaboration, and poetry in the next year.
Joanna Acevedo
Joanna Acevedo is the Editor in Chief of Frontier Poetry. She is the author of three books and two chapbooks, and her writing in multiple genres can be found across the web and in print, most recently (or forthcoming) in The North American Review, Hunger Mountain, and Cream City Review. Nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart Prizes, she teaches workshops and creates resources for emerging writers on numerous platforms, receiving her MFA from NYU in 2021. She also holds degrees from Bard College and the New School. To learn more about her and her work, please visit her at https://www.joannaacevedo.net/.
