We are in a golden age of anthologies, and Graywolf Press’s Raised by Wolves: Fifty Poets on Fifty Poems, which is also a celebration of its 50th anniversary, is a phenomenal addition to the mix. One of the leading independent publishers of contemporary poetry, ever since its beginnings in Port Townsend, Washington, Graywolf is much lauded for its range of award-winning offerings which span poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and books in translation. Now based in Minneapolis, Minnesota and incorporated as a non-profit forty years ago, the press’s Executive Director and Publisher Carmen Giménez joined in 2022, following the almost 30-year tenure of Fiona McCrae. One of many laudable statistics specifically related to poetry: over the past fifty years, Graywolf has published more than four hundred collections by hundreds of poets, each building upon the last, and adding a singular tile to the organization’s poetic mosaic. The next fifty years will surely build upon its vibrant history and considerable achievements.
The structure of Raised by Wolves is simple and gloriously executed: contributors were asked to select favorite poems by fellow Graywolf poets, and write distilled analyses. Democratically, each entry is organized alphabetically by writer, with expert and soulful marginalia to follow. This makes the reading experience even richer, doubling the delight—and one I suggest readers continue, perhaps adding their own close reads. The contributors are a who’s who of contemporary poets, and listing even dozens feels like a disservice to the rest.
In a set of online epistolary interactions, I had the opportunity to ask Executive Editor and Director of Poetry Jeff Shotts and Executive Director and Publisher Carmen Giménez, herself a Graywolf poet, about this anthology, poetry in general, and the mission of Graywolf Press.
Mandana Chaffa
I can’t imagine how impossible it must have been to determine what poets to include, but you did so ingeniously by prompting your poets to select others’ work, doubling the impact and pleasure for readers. Would you talk about the inception of the collection, and how you refined it along the way?
Jeff Shotts
The impossibility of it is, in part, what prompted us to let go of any preconceived notion toward a comprehensive anthology and any sense of editorial control. How could we conceive of fifty years of Graywolf poetry? And how could we create a book that is useful, that people actually want to read, that celebrates poetry without lapsing into deadening self-satisfaction? We knew we did not want to produce a massive doorstop anthology that essentially serves as a trophy to set on a bookshelf. Instead, we wanted to create an anthology that serves as a conversation, something that readers want to get into, overhear and turn through. From that notion, and from the beginning, we wanted to strive toward a more compact anthology and to turn the editorial selections of the book over to our poets, to the community of writers that has all along made Graywolf what it is. It was a wondrous surprise to discover what each poet selected and wrote about and connected with, and we wanted that experience of surprise and discovery and connection for the readers of Raised by Wolves.
Mandana Chaffa
When you were contemplating Graywolf’s 50th—and I know that planning for that likely started several years ago—what were your initial thoughts about what you wanted to celebrate, and how you would do that, across mediums and geographies? Graywolf certainly has a tradition, without necessarily being traditional, and milestone anniversaries are well-matched for a look back, and another one forward.
Carmen Giménez
Since I started at Graywolf in 2022, my planning came right on the cusp of the celebration, so I was really activated by the existing momentum, and also about the symbolism of my tenure starting at such a momentous time. For me, it was a combination of looking forward and looking back. Fundamentally, we wanted to celebrate the spirit of wildness and risk.
Mandana Chaffa
Especially with independent publishers, and those that offer a significant amount of poetry, one has the sense that the poets and collections speak together on some liminal level, they are complementing or building upon each other, and to some extent creating a personality for the booklist. Is this something you contemplate when planning your catalog, or is it something you notice after the fact?
Jeff Shotts
We have always wanted the poetry list to feel inclusive, to be broad and eclectic, while also encouraging readers to discover new poets if they’ve come to the list through long-established poets, and vice versa. I hope the poetry collections Graywolf publishes complement each other and also stand out individually. We deliberate carefully about what books fit a given season by attempting to offer the works of poets at various stages of career, and whose books are often doing very different things stylistically, and we spread them out across the season, across each year, with the thought that these books aren’t competing with each other, and that many different readers can find something exciting to them. I want as many various entry points into the list as possible, so that poets and readers find each other and can see themselves reflected in the Graywolf list, and sometimes to find themselves challenged by what is there too. We publish around ten poetry collections each year, and I hope that gives us the room to stretch out, to recognize our gaps and needs, to keep up with the ongoing works of our longtime poets while ensuring we are always introducing works by new poets too. I hope the list’s “personality,” as you nicely say, is that of care, which requires both a sense of welcome and disruption.
Mandana Chaffa
How did you decide who would be suggesting poems, and how did the selection process work? As much as I loved all the poetry, there’s the gift of having another poet whispering in your ear about what they see and feel about these poems. I found myself absorbing more nuance about the poem in question, and, delightfully, learning something new about the poet who nominated it.
Jeff Shotts
We simply started inviting our poets to select a poem and write around 300 words on their selection, and whoever responded early got their first choice of what would go into the anthology. Which is to say, we wanted to keep the invitation very open for the poets, but we also insisted that we could only include one poem by any particular poet so that we had fifty different poems by fifty different poets. We wanted poets to really connect with what they were selecting and writing on, and I delighted in that aspect, to see the profound feelings of kinship, guidance, influence, mentorship, and admiration in each others’ poems—across time, voices, styles, cultures, languages, visions. I love your word “gift” here. That feels exactly to the spirit of the anthology. For me, it was a great gift to edit this anthology and to rediscover poems on the Graywolf list and to learn new things about all of these writers, almost all of them poets I have worked with over many years and, in many cases, over many books.
Mandana Chaffa
I also appreciated the decision to have the commentary after the poem, rather than before it, which pedestals the reader’s initial reaction, prior to that of the “experts.”’ That makes for an open invitation to the reader to experience the poem first, and then engage in dialogue with the individual who selected it afterward.
Jeff Shotts
Absolutely. We wanted the poems themselves to be the focal points of the anthology, with the commentaries being in service to the poems. The reader encounters the poems first on their own terms, which feels essential, and then that initial encounter is, I think, deepened, shifted, and widened by the commentaries. As you suggest, the reader also in many cases discovers something about the poet who selected the poem, why they selected it, what they focus on, and the anthology becomes a sort of kaleidoscopic work about how we might go about reading poems and how we might go about seeing the world. That is what I hope readers can find enjoyable and of use in Raised by Wolves, whether they are poets themselves or not—the opening up of language, vision, and world beyond any individual self.
Mandana Chaffa
If you could have included one additional poem, beyond the 50 already within the anthology, what would it have been?
Jeff Shotts
A very good but impossible question! To fit the book, it would have to be by a poet not already among the fifty in the anthology, and given the parameters of the compact book we wanted, unfortunately many had to be left out, out of which we could make many more anthologies: “Knowing You Could Is Better Than Knowing You Will” by Mark Bibbins. “Poem of 5 a.m.” by Stephanie Burt. “When It Comes” by Sophie Cabot Black. “There were trees…” by Martha Collins. “From the Nursery” by Katie Ford. “Self as Deep as Coma” by Carmen Giménez. “Pause” by Eamon Grennan. “Restored Mural for Orlando” by Roy G. Guzmán. “The Window” by Lynda Hull. “Mummy of a Lady Named Jemutesonekh” by Thomas James. “Dramatis Personae” by Pura Lopez-Colome, translated by Forrest Gander. “Sixteen” by Fred Marchant. “Love in the Ruins” by Jim Moore. “Poem of My Humiliations” by Erika L. Sánchez. “No, I Do Not Want to Connect with You on LinkedIn” by Emily Skaja. “Homage to Mary Hamilton” by Tom Sleigh. “Secret” by Dorothea Tanning. “Kelp” by Jeffrey Yang. And many more…
Mandana Chaffa
How was it for you as lovers of poetry to read the entries as they were coming in? How did you not fall into a rabbit hole of re-reading all the collections in question? Were there some bittersweet moments revisiting the work of poets no longer alive?
Jeff Shotts
It was a steady stream of surprise, on one hand, and a sense of affirmation, on the other. In some cases, I did fall into the rabbit hole of rereading, and yes, that especially happened with the works of poets no longer with us. When Tracy K. Smith selected and wrote so beautifully on Linda Gregg’s title poem “Too Bright to See,” it was impossible not to go back into Linda’s phenomenal and seering first book. I was also moved to see Tess Gallagher select Jane Kenyon’s poem, and her piece on it is an insight into the poem and the sense of friendship those two poets had for each other. It felt less surprising and more affirming and right to have Elizabeth Alexander select a poem by the magnificent Christopher Gilbert and to have Sophie Cabot Black select a poem by Jason Shinder. I was surprised and fascinated that Harryette Mullen selected and wrote on the late Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo’s poem from his June Fourth Elegies sequence.
As the anthology was conceived and as we started to invite poets to contribute to it, Saskia Hamilton was in her last months of her life and finishing her final collection, All Souls. It meant so much to have Claudia Rankine immediately select and write about Saskia’s “Faring,” and that Saskia could read that piece. Saskia’s own contribution, her selection of Catherine Barnett’s “Accursed Questions, iv,” is both an homage to that poem and to the undying bond between these two poets. I believe Saskia’s piece about Catherine’s poem is the last thing Saskia wrote and published. We’re honored to have it in the anthology.
Mandana Chaffa
Graywolf Lab is an especially exciting venture as it marries a variety of media and multilevel conversations between creators who might not otherwise collaborate with each other. Might you talk about the origin of this new endeavor, and how you see it moving forward as a separate area and for Graywolf overall?
Carmen Giménez
Lab is Graywolf’s online platform for interdisciplinary conversations and new writing led by Executive Editor, Yuka Igarashi. Our idea for Lab started with two questions: What sorts of projects might we publish that don’t fit inside a book? How do we bring new writers and readers to the press? One of the simple guiding principles of Lab is being in conversation. We’re interested in artists (like the roundtable) and in collaborative practices (like Arthur Romo and Sesshu Foster’s work on the site, or any translation) and in work that finds new ways to interact with its audience (like Max Neely-Cohen and Katy Ilonko Gero’s invention). But even the essays and stories that have a single name attached to them are the result of and an act of relation, because every work of art is.
Mandana Chaffa
And finally, would you each talk about how you came to poetry and to Graywolf? What’s your favorite part of your work? What don’t you get enough time to do?
Jeff Shotts
I came to poetry first as an enjoyment and then as survival, growing up in the austerities of central Kansas. I loved the ancient-seeming qualities of poems I encountered in old tales, Arthurian legend, Tolkien, and later in Tennyson, given to me in an old secondhand volume by my grandfather. In high school, I clung to English classes with Mrs. Carole Ferguson, who opened up larger worlds of poetry across time. A group of us, still my greatest friends, would steal up to Coronado Heights at night, where we read to each other poems by Donne, Herbert, Shakespeare, Blake, and up to Hopkins, Frost, Yeats, Bishop, Plath, Stafford, Heaney. We called ourselves “The Hollow Men,” after the Eliot poem. We were fools, but in the face of everything, the confines of that time and place, the wheat fields and church steeples, it still feels like we saved each other’s lives. I came to Graywolf with the hope that others might find something that can help them survive too.
Carmen Giménez
I grew up in the Bay Area and my high school English teacher had grown up in North Beach, near City Lights, a young Beat poet, so he taught us Yeats and Ginsberg and Lowell and most importantly, taught us close reading. I loved reading and writing poetry, but overall I loved the rhetorical play and engagement, which is at the heart of what editorial work is. In college, I continued to read and write poetry and worked for the Center for Literary Arts, which kept me connected to the world of literary citizenship, so that shaped what I felt being an artist meant: much like those late 20th century movement poets who didn’t just write, but who also made space for the work of their contemporaries, and allies, and heroes. I came first to Graywolf, which is the great dream of all poets, and saw the avid engagement the whole staff brought to their work, and the possibility of participating in bringing these brilliant books into the world drew me in.
POETRY
Raised by Wolves: Fifty Poets on Fifty Poems
A Graywolf Anthology
Published January 23, 2024
