Eighteen years is a long time to do anything, let alone publish a poetry journal. When we started diode, we made a few promises to ourselves and our writers: We would respond to every submission in thirty days or less. We would never charge a submission fee. And we would make diode a space for poetry that sings, haunts, unsettles, and electrifies. A space where voices in their many textures, histories, and urgencies could find a readership.
Eighteen years later, we have kept those promises, and it feels important now more than ever to mark this milestone.
Editing a journal for nearly two decades is a particular kind of devotion. It is a labor of love, yes, but also an act of persistence and faith. The work of curation often comes at the expense of one’s writing. Still, this trade, words for words, solitude for community, is one that editors make willingly and joyfully because editing is also writing in another way. The reward of helping a poem find its audience, knowing it has reached those who need it, who feel its current in their bones, is the reward that sustains.
The world in which diode began is not the world we find ourselves in now. What is the role of poetry when everything is burning? When so much of the world is unmade by genocide, by colonialism, by environmental catastrophe, by deepening and vicious inequalities? Maybe poetry is not about resolution. Perhaps it is not about fixing or mending. Maybe it is simply about presence, bearing witness, making space for grief, rage, hope, and joy to exist side by side. Audre Lorde reminds us that “poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.” This is the work of poetry, to articulate what is otherwise left unsaid, to bring into focus the injustices and the joys, the rage and the tenderness, that shape our existence. Poetry is both the question and the answer, exposing wounds and offering balms. It gives us a way to grieve, resist, become. Perhaps the most powerful thing poets and poetry can do now is not look away.
Looking back on eighteen years of diode, I am grateful to the poets who entrusted us with their work and the readers who return to these pages. Thank you. A million times. Thank you. As we step into our next chapter, we remain committed to the principle that has shaped us from the beginning: the unwavering belief that poetry is absolutely and utterly necessary.
