I know it’s a cliché to ask “How did I get so lucky?” But a global pandemic will spark self-reflection, and as I look back, I can’t help but be filled with wonder and gratitude at the good fortune I’ve found in this universe during my aimless, semi-spastic stumble through it. How did I land in James Dickey’s poetry workshop in 1993? And how did my path weave toward Fred Chappell’s seven years later? How did I arrive here in this life of full, daily joy with my wife, Holley Tankersley? And how did the two of us find the world’s two most perfect dogs (not open for debate), now sleeping at my feet?
And how, how, how did I get so lucky as to land that three-year, non-tenure-line instructorship at Auburn University in the fall of 1997 after a third failed search for a tenure-track position? You might doubt that last one as a stroke of great fortune—until I tell you that also arriving at Auburn that fall was a new Assistant Professor in Poetry named Natasha Trethewey and that two years later another poet would join me in the instructor ranks—a young man named Jake Adam York.
Reader, perhaps you know me as a poet, as the author of The Boatloads or Millennial Teeth or Of Air and Earth. I can assure you that you would not if it were not for Natasha and Jake. In our short time together in Auburn, those two beautiful human beings encouraged and nurtured my love of poetry—and a confidence in my own capacity to make it. I arrived at Auburn as a Romanticist PhD who dabbled in writing his own poetry. I left three years later as a man who had fully committed his life to the art.
In the subsequent years, Natasha and Jake continued to be my mentors from afar, and our friendship grew even over the distance between us. We reunited at writers’ conferences and in visits to each other’s universities, and we carried on our deepening conversations about the art we loved. In 2010, each of them read a poem at my wedding. And then two years later—inconceivably—Jake was gone.
Though he’s not really gone, of course. Jake lives in many legacies. Certainly, the first is his incredibly important poems, held in his magnificent four books. But he also lives in the literary journals that he helped found—Copper Nickel at the University of Colorado Denver and, several years earlier, the groundbreaking online journal you’re reading now, storySouth. When he co-founded this journal with Jason Sanford in the fall of 2001, Jake invited me to contribute two poems to the first issue. Soon after, he welcomed me to the masthead to assist editing poetry before handing me the Poetry Editor reins in 2006 as he turned his attention to Copper Nickel. (How did I get so lucky?) And a few years later, Jake and Jason entrusted the journal to Terry Kennedy (Best Man in the aforementioned wedding, and my best friend) and Spring Garden Press. So I feel a particularly personal connection to this living legacy of Jake’s. I am certain that he would be immensely proud of what it has become today.
Now 20 years old, storySouth continues to grow and to showcase some of the best poetry, fiction, and nonfiction being written anywhere—a capacious publishing venue open to established authors and newcomers alike. As anyone who ever encountered him even briefly at an AWP Conference knows, Jake was a tireless supporter of others finding their way in this art, even as he tirelessly worked on his own. Every time a young poet finds early publication in this journal, Jake is there helping that voice find ears. His legacy of support endures.
Jake called his grand poetic project Inscriptions for Air—a lifetime’s work elegizing the martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement. He understood that words can be indelibly inscribed not only on paper or marble, but in the living heart and breath of others. He built monuments with a seemingly ephemeral material. storySouth is one of those monuments—I encourage you to read each issue’s poems aloud and, as you do, to feel one of the legacies of Jake Adam York in your breath.
