I think a lot about censorship. I filter my thoughts through multiple lenses: as a man, a black man, an immigrant, a global southerner and an artist. I also think about the privilege I have as a cross-disciplinary artist: a poet, a performer, a playwright, a screen writer, an essayist, a graphic designer and an educator. I think about those who censor, have censored, or are trying to censor what I create in such spaces, and how then I fight; what it is to tuck in my elbows, push in, then spread them out. I also think about how I find permission — what I tell myself — to legitimise my right to fight, and how then I articulate this to those I hope will fight alongside me.

I think then about poetry, how it is the safest space in which I can fight — where I am often fighting myself — and whether I win or lose, I win and I lose. So it is for all poets and all poems, each one is this: a record of a battle, an internal struggle with oneself, and we come to the poem to relive the writer’s struggle, and inhabit its births and deaths with our own humanity, that its record might continue living through us.

When I was initially asked to edit Issue 10 of Propel, a magazine I have long admired, my initial response was to censor myself from the role: ‘No Inua, you’ve barely written poetry, for years now. You are not discerning enough to do this.’ But a day later, the permission came: ‘Perhaps this is exactly why you should edit this issue, you will come to reading open, and you might find the spark to write again’ and so I began reading.

I expected three hundred or so submissions, but had failed to register that each could contain multiple entries. Instead I found thousands of poems, which amplified the anxiety-inducing task of selecting only 20. My initial selection was 50 or so poems, and to pare them down I thought, again, of censorship and permission.

In my selection you will find – in Anna Shelton’s poem, the permission to illuminate a haunting, in Erin’s ‘blue corn moon’, the permission to discuss colonialism, in Lou’s ‘White Bread White Swans’, the permission to dramatise classism, in Colette’s ‘Old Simeon The Stylite’, the permission to deconstruct deification… the list of brave, exciting, talented, stretches to another 16 writers, and 16 poems.

I hope in reading them all, you find the permission to speak, to write, and to share, as I have.

— Inua Ellams
March 2024