For this issue’s folio, we collected work that plays with “exploding the I,” drawing from Dorothea Lasky: “all poets harness a wildness in the I of our poems. An I in a poem contains so much ego—is so puffed up with its brute strength—that it is willing to shred itself in the space of the poem. Or, that is to say, it feels so strong and confident to be itself that it feels completely free not to be anything at all.” 

The poems in this folio explore the ‘I’ as a tense, a noun, a particle of language, as extension of form. Is ‘I’ a space of world building or a space of collapse? Where does ‘I’ expand and relax and open? When is ‘I’ untrue? Or is ‘I’ always true? 

The Wild I is open, permeable, but holds at its core an interrogation of the personal through an explosion of the I. Like the ‘I’ in the final stanza of O’Hara’s Mayakovsky, these are poems that purposefully mistake the ‘I’ for something beyond the self. We want to be surprised by what ‘I’ can hold, what it can’t, and where it slips away, or into something new.