Forget everything you’ve ever known or heard about poetry. It may seem counterintuitive to say so, and sometimes poetry is considered relevant only for a particular group of people (spoiler alert: mainly, poets!), but it’s not. Some may be confounded by the distinctive style, sound, and rhythm of poetry, dismissing its nonlinear forms as esoteric and cryptic, or illogical, while others may simply relegate it to history as a genre of the past. Poetry is an art form that has edified culture from ancient times to the present day – from Enheduanna to Sarah Kay. For a moment, think of what poetry is at its core: it is language, language you already know, re-arranged, reshaped, molded into something new. One does not need to know any laws of physics to decipher it, or have a basic understanding of the human anatomy to enjoy it. Sometimes you don’t even need to speak the same language to be moved by it; it is a thing of its own. It can be filled with beauty, but also with truth, which it yields with audacity. Here, think also of what poetry can do for you; have you ever read something that was written centuries ago, and still found it to be relevant? Have you ever been amazed by a turn of phrase in a song, or a written piece – that such beauty can be constructed with words you already knew, that helps you see something in a different way and continues to resonate with you long after the author is gone? Poetry is timeless, and by being so, it connects us through time with those who may have not looked like us, or have had our same life experiences. In short, it sees us, it sees our humanity, sometimes before we are able to discover it for ourselves.
Poetry is an art form that has edified culture from ancient times to present day – from Enheduanna to Sarah Kay.
This sense of discovery, is what moves Gail Wronsky, who is the author, coauthor or translator of fifteen books of poetry and prose, including the poetry collections Imperfect Pastorals; Poems for Infidels; Dying for Beauty, and more. Her latest collection, a collaboration with the artist Gronk, entitled The Stranger You Are, will be published in October 2022 by Tia Chucha Press (she was awarded the Daum professorship at LMU to complete her work on the book). Gail has been teaching poetry and creative writing at Loyola Marymount University for over 30 years, and through her teaching, she has always found herself advocating for her students to develop a creative mindset.
When asked about the need for poetry, and the need for a poetic mindset, her eyes light up with joy and a sense of wonder; “Poetry is a way to discover things about ourselves we didn’t know were there,” she said, “And by doing so, we have a better understanding of the world around us.” This sense of discovery, and the sense of wonder, is one she brings when she teaches poetry and creative writing to her students; it’s one thing to be able to teach writing and the creative mindset, and it’s a whole other thing to show students the necessity of developing compassion and empathy at such a crucial moment when they’re trying to map out their entire futures. Wronsky speaks with a heightened excitement when she explains her class on poetry of witness, which incorporates elements of social justice to help students understand the importance of using their art for the service of others, something that students identify with completely.
One of her former students is Oliver de la Paz, an exceptional poet in his own stance, author of five poetry collections, including Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, Requiem for Orchard, and more. De la Paz remembers taking Gail Wronsky’s classes quite fondly when he attended LMU as an undergraduate. “The poem is in service of the people,” he said, “The poem is there to allow people to understand one another. It is about folding the gaps between us, so that we can occupy an understanding, a set of shared core beliefs, and understandings that are stemming from the body, and how we live in our bodies.” De la Paz was a biology and English double major at LMU, who had originally approached his two tracks of study in a separate way; but as he grew in his craft, and his thinking, he found himself marrying the two fields more and more. “My English brain and my biology brain occupy the same spaces now,” he clarified, saying that his biology brain, which is really interested in specificity, detail, and pattern, is still active when he writes, and engages the world through the poetic mindset. The impulse to observe and the impulse to document are still inherent to both fields; “The scientific practice, is also the poetic practice,” he said.
This is also true for alumna Kristen Tracy ’96, who took poetry classes from Gail Wronsky when she was an undergraduate student (she also started out as a biology major). Tracy is a bestselling author of fifteen books, and writes across different genres, including YA, middle grade, and children’s literature. Her first poetry collection was published in 2018 by Graywolf Press. However her journey to writing and publishing has been unusual, Tracy said she always followed her curiosities, and they lead her to becoming a writer.
The poem is always in service of the people; the poem is there to allow people to understand one another.
What does it really mean to inhabit the poetic mindset? How can one not be interested in becoming a poet, and still be able to inhabit its world, and hope to be transformed by it?
Poetry, like many forms of art, does not require us to have prior knowledge of its inner workings for us to enjoy it – you do not need to be an artist to enjoy art, but if you are open to it, there is a possibility of transformation, and transformation manifests when there’s an act of active listening.
This is Joy Harjo’s greatest hope, the internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, and the first native Poet Laureate of the United States. When she talks about poetry and the poetic mindset, Harjo goes back to the reflective side of poetry; she says that if there is no act of listening, then the possibility of transformation fades away quickly. But Harjo goes even further than that, to say that we need poetry to survive, we need metaphor to make sense of the world around us. Think, for instance, of what metaphor can do to a conversation; it is really a way with which we can shapeshift language, to illustrate our points, to show a different perspective, to understand another worldview, to help us bridge any gaps of knowledge. If the languages we have learned cannot be expansive enough to contain the world in which we live, then metaphor has the capacity to build worlds within worlds for us to inhabit, slowly, and quietly, until we are ripe with understanding, with discovery, with a sense of wonder.
Metaphor, and the poetic mindset, then, are not just tools with which we can navigate the world; they are necessary survival skills through which we are able to see the world in a different way, and to be able to have this kind of seeing alone is a gift of its own.
Consider, for instance, the increased popularity in poetry during the pandemic. Suddenly being thwarted in a state of complete chaos, on top of everything that was already unfolding around the world, was deeply, deeply traumatic. How does one make sense of the world then? How does one navigate through grief and loss, especially when our sense of community was completely shattered?
Poetry is not here only to help us navigate the world; it offers a renewed sense of purpose, it speaks the truth, and provides a glimpse of hope. When Amanda Gorman read The Hill We Climb just a week after the violence in the nation’s capitol, everyone was still trying to make sense of the recent devastation that took place, and though her poem was not there to provide us with any answers, it was a recognition of our collective sense of loss, and a reassurance that we were not alone in our mourning.
Most of all, poetry has the capacity to transfix us with the beauty of a world that seems to have descended into chaos; it is the language of the prophets, as they say, a language filled with as much seeing as one can contain within the pages. It is music, it is art, it is persistence, the possibility of something new and exciting, the possibility of listening, the possibility of discovery; and, like Kristen Tracy said, there’s a poem for everybody; wouldn’t it be exciting to find out which one was made for you? –
Poetry Book Recommendations
Under the Capsized Boat We Fly: New & Selected Poems, Gail Wronsky
White Pine Press (2021)
This book collects over four decades of work by this unique and imaginative poet. Wronsky’s poems, informed by her reading of classical texts as well as contemporary poetics, explore feminism, environmentalism, and mortality in language that is both multi-layered and musical. At times dark and at times humorous, her poems speak to our strengths as well as our frailties.
The Boy in the Labyrinth, Oliver de la Paz
University of Akron Press (2019)
In a long sequence of prose poems, questionnaires, and standardized tests, The Boy in the Labyrinth interrogates the language of autism and the language barriers between parents, their children, and the fractured medium of science and school. Structured as a Greek play, the book opens with a parents’ earnest quest for answers, understanding, and doubt. The depth of the book is told in a series of episodic prose poems that parallel the parable of Theseus and the Minotaur. In these short clips of montage the unnamed “boy” explores his world and the world of perception, all the while hearing the rumblings of the Minotaur somewhere in the heart of an immense Labyrinth. Through the medium of this allusion, de la Paz meditates on failures, foundering, and the possibility of finding one’s way.
Half-Hazard, Kristen Tracy
Graywolf Press (2018)
Half-Hazard is a book of near misses, would-be tragedies, and luck. As Kristen Tracy writes in the title poem, “Dangers here. Perils there. It’ll go how it goes.” The collection follows her wide curiosity, from growing up in a small Mormon farming community to her exodus into the forbidden world, where she finds snakes, car accidents, adulterers, meteors, and death-marked mice. These wry, observant narratives are accompanied by a ringing lyricism, and Tracy’s knack for noticing what’s so funny about trouble and her natural impulse to want to put all the broken things back together. Full of wrong turns, false loves, quashed beliefs, and a menagerie of animals, Half-Hazard introduces a vibrant new voice in American poetry, one of resilience, faith, and joy.
The Carrying, Ada Limón
Milkweed Editions (2021)
Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance. A daughter tends to aging parents. A woman struggles with infertility―“What if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry grief?”―and a body seized by pain and vertigo as well as ecstasy. A nation convulses: “Every song of this country / has an unsung third stanza, something brutal.” And still Limón shows us, as ever, the persistence of hunger, love, and joy, the dizzying fullness of our too-short lives. “Fine then, / I’ll take it,” she writes. “I’ll take it all.”
Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, Carolyn Forché (ed.)
W.W. Norton & Company (1993)
Bearing witness to extremity―whether of war, torture, exile, or repression―the volume encompasses more than 140 poets from five continents, over the span of this century from the Armenian genocide to Tiananmen Square.
frank: sonnets, Diane Seuss
Graywolf Press (2021)
The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do / without,” Diane Seuss writes in this brilliant, candid work, her most personal collection to date. These poems tell the story of a life at risk of spilling over the edge of the page, from Seuss’s working-class childhood in rural Michigan to the dangerous allures of New York City and back again. With sheer virtuosity, Seuss moves nimbly across thought and time, poetry and punk, AIDS and addiction, Christ and motherhood, showing us what we can do, what we can do without, and what we offer to one another when we have nothing left to spare. Like a series of cels on a filmstrip, frank: sonnets captures the magnitude of a life lived honestly, a restless search for some kind of “beauty or relief.” Seuss is at the height of her powers, devastatingly astute, austere, and―in a word―frank.
An American Sunrise, Joy Harjo
Blackstone Publishing (2019)
In the early 1800s, the Mvskoke people were forcibly removed from their original lands east of the Mississippi to Indian Territory, which is now part of Oklahoma. Two hundred years later, Joy Harjo returns to her family’s lands and opens a dialogue with history. In An American Sunrise, Harjo finds blessings in the abundance of her homeland and confronts the site where her people, and other indigenous families, essentially disappeared. From her memory of her mother’s death, to her beginnings in the native rights movement, to the fresh road with her beloved, Harjo’s personal life intertwines with tribal histories to create a space for renewed beginnings. Her poems sing of beauty and survival, illuminating a spirituality that connects her to her ancestors and thrums with the quiet anger of living in the ruins of injustice. A descendent of storytellers and “one of our finest – and most complicated – poets” (Los Angeles Review of Books), Joy Harjo continues her legacy with this latest powerful collection.
Winter Recipes from The Collective, Luise Glück
Farrar, Straus & Giroux (2021)
Louise Glück’s thirteenth book is among her most haunting. Here as in the Wild Iris there is a chorus, but the speakers are entirely human, simultaneously spectral and ancient. Winter Recipes from the Collective is chamber music, an invitation into that privileged realm small enough for the individual instrument to make itself heard, dolente, its line sustained, carried, and then taken up by the next instrument, spirited, animoso, while at the same time being large enough to contain a whole lifetime, the inconceivable gifts and losses of old age, the little princesses rattling in the back of a car, an abandoned passport, the ingredients of an invigorating winter sandwich, a sister’s death, the joyful presence of the sun, its brightness measured by the darkness it casts.
Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Ocean Vuong
Copper Canyon Press (2016)
In his haunting and fearless debut, Ocean Vuong walks a tightrope of historic and personal violences, creating an interrogation of the American body as a borderless space of both failure and triumph. At once vulnerable and redemptive, dreamlike and visceral, compassionate and unforgiving, these poems seek a myriad existence without forgetting the prerequisite of self-preservation in a world bent on extinguishing its othered voices. Vuong’s poems show, through breath, cadence, and unrepentant enthrallment, that a gentle palm on a chest can calm the most necessary of hungers.
The Last Thing: New & Selected Poems, Patrick Rosal
Persea Books (2021)
For nearly two decades, Patrick Rosal has been one of the most beloved and admired poets in the United States, bringing together the most dynamic aspects of literary and performance poetry. The son of Filipino immigrants (his father was a lapsed Catholic priest), he has made a life of bridging worlds―literary, ethnic, national, spiritual―through his poetry, and has been recognized with some of the highest honors and countless devoted readers. The Last Thing: New & Selected Poems, gives us a substantial playlist of new work―hard-hitting and big-hearted―along with ample selections from his first four books. Bursting with music, infused with love and awe, this is essential reading from a poet of vigor and conscience.
The Naomi Letters, Rachel Mennies
BOA Editions Ltd. (2021)
Told through a time-honored epistolary narrative, The Naomi Letters chronicles the relationship between a woman speaker and Naomi, the woman she loves. Set mostly over the span of a single year encompassing the 2016 Presidential Election and its aftermath, their love story unfolds via correspondence, capturing the letters the speaker sends to Naomi―and occasionally Naomi’s responses, as filtered through the speaker’s retelling. These letter-poems form a braid, first from the use of found texts, next from the speaker’s personal observations about her bisexuality, Judaism, and mental illness, and lastly from her testimonies of past experiences.
American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, Terrance Hayes
Penguin Books (2018)
In seventy poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the country’s past and future eras and errors, its dreams and nightmares. Inventive, compassionate, hilarious, melancholy, and bewildered–the wonders of this new collection are irreducible and stunning.
Listen to Gail Wronky’s poem Let thought become your beautiful lover, from Imperfect Pastorals
