Spring 2025

As you may know, this year we’re celebrating 50 years of CV2, the brainchild and
passion project of Dorothy Livesay, which she resurrected from the then-defunct
Contemporary Verse, a reanimation from whence came our infamous, and to some
beguiling, “2.”

The CV2 staff recently braved our storage room (if you saw it, you’d understand)
and dug out the banker’s boxes that hold every extant issue of the magazine, going
all the way back to 1975 and Volume 1, Issue 1. A few issues are missing; a few volumes
were apparently truncated ones (that this issue you’re currently reading concludes
volume 47, rather than 50, doesn’t quite make sense, but when have poetry
and its containers ever made perfect sense?); and in looking at all those issues—all
those covers and all those poems, all those font choices and more than a few clichéd
metaphors—we found much at which to cringe, and much at which to laugh.

But, of course, the overwhelming emotions were ones of awe and appreciation. In
CV2’s very first editorial note, in Volume 1, Issue 1, Livesay wrote, “The poetry we
want to praise and to print must have the authority of experience and action from
all levels of society. It must spring from all ethnic (and immigrant) sources, whose
roots will nourish us.” It’s a sentiment that ignited and propelled CV2 and its work
these past 50 years, one with which its current leadership still resonates deeply, and
one that was abundantly apparent as my coworkers and I thumbed through old issues,
reading poems and through them, encountering roots, meeting souls. Kneeling
in that dusty, cramped storage closet, knees aching, creaky shelving units overladen
with boxes threatening to squash us in a death-by-poetry that would have been too
meta for words, my coworkers and I probably needed, and received, a reminder as
to why we do this.

With this scene fresh in my mind as we finish up this issue and as I write this
editorial, it’s impossible not to imagine some person or people, 50 years from now,
picking up this issue, as my coworkers and I did those past ones. Taking in the cover,
opening and flipping through, thumb tip touching the edges of various lines, various
souls. “I always knew I’d have to cede control …” (Michaela Socolof) “When we
meet, / it’s been two generations …” (Jess Tran) “Jim / has failed both tests …” (Ben
Robinson) “If you could collect / an elephant’s tears / in a cauldron of acrylic …”
(Erika Luckert). How lucky we are, to get to encounter so much of one another in
this life; how lucky that future someone hopefully will be.

Another line from that very first editorial: “So be it. We have our poetry, pushing up
from every crack and cranny.”

We have our poetry, pushing up from every crack and cranny.
Take hold.

Chelsea Peters,

Editor