Poetry is the Work of Witnessing
Recently, I was in a class where I got to share intentionally about my background working in poetry both as a performer and teacher. Someone asked when it was that I first started doing this thing that brings stars to my eyes and I didn’t miss a beat when telling them where it all began.
As a transracial adoptee, I had spent my life in white spaces, against my consent. From a young age, I knew I wanted to work in cities. I knew that was where the Black and brown people were. I knew I wanted to write freedom into existence in the way only a relinquished child can conjure.
In the summer of 2010, I moved to Denver. It was my second big city I had lived in, after Washington D.C. I loved Denver immediately, there’s something about the mountains that always brings me new insight on my smallness and humanity. And did I ever learn that that summer as I drove twelve teens up and down mountainsides in the most hoopty van ever, also against my consent lol. The point is, it was there under the shadow of fourteeners that I began to teach poems to youth. I began by mimicking some of my favorite professors from the creative writing camp I went to in Northern Michigan. One of my favorite things to do is ekphrastic poetry, which is the act of writing poems that respond to art. When I first started doing this, I would buy cheap postcards at the local art museum of famous paintings and ask students to write stream of consciousness style poems on the back of the card. Now, almost 15 years later, I ask students to write poems based off of work created in response to Breonna Taylor or to create blackout poems from Claudia Rankine’s work.
There’s nothing I love more than showing other people my first and deepest love of writing. Poems have always been the string of lights illuminating my darkest moments. But they aren’t easy, it isn’t less work than being an engineer or whatever it is that makes the most money these days. It’s deep heart work, of knowing, of observing, of witnessing, of imagining.
Writing is often seen as a solitary act, one that requires intentional communion with your inner self. A passageway into understanding that many do not traverse. Growing up, I dealt with a strong relationship to sorrow. I did not know at the time that my position within whiteness was the tether to this sadness, I thought it came from me.
As I became an adult and dealt directly with my depression, despite my parent’s warnings against it. They were of the belief, and still are, that if you deal with depression you either must not be christian or be sinning. I don’t know what I was. But I knew I was drowning and the life boat was not coming from the house I grew up in. I had to lasso my sadness for myself. I had to ride it into a sunrise that would soon come. I had to write it out of existence. But this portal never fully opened, sometimes when the writing is done , the light still does not come on. And even when the light comes, it often flickers out.
Writing New Pathways Towards Radical Joy
Getting the light to stay on for me has always been an act of reaching towards my community or cultivating new ones when my community of (dis)origin was fractured. Being in community is like a mirror for me to catch my own gladness, a testimony that there is indeed joy stored in my beautiful body. Often it takes the knowing eyes of others to acknowledge that. And sometimes that does not mean just laughing with my people, though I love that and do that often. It means having tough conversations, repairing after a rupture and sojourning into the wells of sadness and oppression that we all have buried beneath.
In the revolutionary essay, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,”Audre Lorde said, “The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.”
This almost biblical quote, glory to the Lorde, is so stunning and poignant to what it is to be a poet. It reminds me of a conversation I had with my friend recently about whether poetry itself is enough to create revolutionary change. I told them that I believe that poetry is one way to be part of a larger conversation and action. I think there are many methods to approach movement and we are all called to bring our unique talents to disrupt the violence of capitalism and cause sustainable change. It can only feel like poetry itself is not enough because not enough people are using their voices and action alongside us in this fight. It must be a communal act, only the collective can create the liberation we all deserve. This isn’t to say that productivity is next to godliness, rest is also an act of resistance. We must figure out who we can call in beside us so that other folks can take a step back.
For me, right now (and all the time!), I am calling folks in with my poems. I am teaching abolitionist ideas through poem making, performing my heart out and encouraging others, especially those of us who don’t always look at ourselves as poets, to continue walking in their truth and using their voices.
In my bones, I know that poetry is the practice of the belief in what’s possible, the method by which we can be made whole.
“Yes, there will also be singing / About the dark times.”-Bertolt Brecht