Poetry in Communal and Transformative Action: A Festival & 89-Page Poem
By the end of the Poetic Justice Institute’s Festival, poems of gratitude flooded into the chat. The final poet guide of the program, Carolyn Forché, had instructed everyone to “write a poem of gratitude” beginning each line with the word “for.” Among all these lines of poetry was a gratitude for the space: a space to celebrate poetry, a space to think actively about social change, and a space to truly connect—albeit virtually. At the opening of the event, participants had seemed tired, reporting exhaustion with the negativity of the world and the lack of connection over Zoom. And yet something about this event made people take a chance, and the result was a testament to the power of poetry and communal gathering.
The poetry festival “All that you touch / you change / all that you change / changes you,” named for the words of Octavia Butler, was made for Zoom—this was not an event that we wished had been in person, but an event that could have only happened on Zoom. And for that reason, the Festival seemed to impact participants in deeply transformative and restorative ways.
The authors of this article, Shan Rao (Fordham, 2022) and Madison Forbes (Fordham, English PhD Candidate) thought that in the spirit of collaboration, we would engage in a collaborative writing form: a dialogue, to discuss the impact of the Poetic Justice Institute’s Festival and the possibilities that lie in intentional virtual gathering.
Shan: I think that it was really evident and important that the event didn’t feel like a pivot but like its own creation. To me, it was really powerful to help create an event that not only utilized the technology for online events but built itself around that platform and felt truly authentic in an online medium.
Madison: Right—because the event was never pretending to be an in-person event online. This event was made for Zoom and for the Zoom-fatigued, the lonely, the sick, the tired, the hurt. The festival was a space for us to address everything from loneliness because of COVID, death from COVID, death from police brutality, aching from racial violence and exhaustion from continuing to fight. One of the participants wrote an apology on behalf of COVID-19, at the prompt of Poet Guide, José Alvergue:
COVID 19 must apologize for the lives it has taken. For the homes it has ripped apart. For the incomes it has deflated. For the rupture of live arts. For the world it forced to stop. For the workers who have risked it all just to come into work each day. For the tears and empty seats at the dinner table. For those who have fallen to mental illness or complications. For those it has hurt. For the lack of clarity for the future. You must apologize as it is almost too late. We have taken the upper hand back from you.
Shan: I feel like so many people noticed this passage when it was put in the chat and it just feels so powerful to me. The way the author has expressed frustration here and so strongly asserted that COVID would owe us an apology… I mean, it really challenges a lot of the dialogue around frustrations with the pandemic. And “tears and empty seats at the dinner table”—you can feel the anger and also the love in the words here.
Madison: We all felt something that this author wrote and shared. And what did we do when we saw those empty seats—whether from COVID or police brutality—with tear-filled eyes looking towards a foggy future? A lot of people in Carolyn Forché’s prompt responded with an overwhelming gratitude for nature. When we couldn’t be with each other or were tired from zoom, we made the transcendentalist move to nature:
For the cardinal, blood red flicking across the late afternoon path / for the last slice of coconut bread on my mother’s kitchen counter / for the bones of my her knee knitting themselves back together / for the dandelion rising from the rock face / for the rock face steady / for the weighted sky that promises rain
Shan: This idea of gratitude was such a beautiful place to end, and I think it was crucial that it was at the end rather than early on. People had a chance to speak to their anger, to really reckon with a lot of hard emotions—and, ultimately, the idea of gratitude really resonated with everyone. Not a gratitude that ignores the bad things or the reasons for anger but a gratitude that notices the beauty in the smaller moments. That really sums up the atmosphere of the festival: in coming together and being so truly vulnerable, we were all able to experience a kind of rejuvenation and hope brought on by the power of poetry.
Madison: Each person in the room was able to realize what one author of the poem recognized, “I have stories and stories inside me, things I can’t touch or see.” We all showed up to the Festival with our own stories, our own poems, our own songs—but only when we would all press return at the same time in responding to the 6 prompts did we see how all of our individual poems wove together as a collective, unified poem. All we had to do was, as poet guide Tamiko Beyer said:
Listen. To the seed, and read what is stitched in thread. You are a weaver, you know how to bring something to life from the dirt. Once, you spent your days staring at the sky, as if a streetlight were a star. We’ve been listening. You are not alone. There is beauty in the rivers on the back of your hands. You still carry the spells, and you are afraid to use them. To own your own power.
Shan: It’s such a testament to the idea of community and collective identity. The poem that was written—and the power it holds—is both by and for everyone who was in that Zoom space. To me, that ties directly into the mission of the Poetic Justice Institute and the power of poetry to influence change. It’s the listening and community that bring that power. And by truly leaning into connection and collaboration, the writing and the empowerment belongs to more than just any individual but to a greater collective.
Madison: And that greater collective has an “inner circuity of our resonant sources” as Poet Guide Aracelis had us think about. Alone we are just individual stars—bright enough on our own, but even better as a constellation, and our collective poem, our communal act of linguistic power that transformed us, touched us, guided us was a “constellation of associations.”
Shan: Absolutely, it’s not a devaluing of the individual but a building up of something more. I could feel that in the chat as she was reading and people began to echo her words. We had people just repeating phrases that resonated with them: glory in the eyes of my father, glory in the eyes of my father; to live with parents after the death of your parents, to live with parents after the death of your parents. I feel like her prompt and reading really drew out that kind of collectivity and union of voices, a kind of diving deeper rather than branching out:
Think of a person/place/thing/element of nature that for you pulses with a quality of being (life, possibility, humility, courage) you want to keep your mind on. Imagine you can sense (see, hear, taste…) inside that thing and that you might find *anything* there. What is there? (Inside of the beach stone, for example, might be a cup of air, a name, the dreaming of our lost.) Now, as though you are opening nesting dolls, write down what is inside of the next thing and the next thing and on and on.
Madison: Aracelis’ exercise as the first prompt of the night let us all unpack everything we’ve been holding on to. It was such a cathartic exercise to empty something of its power. For one of the authors saw a “worry stone, and inside, there is a rock stratified with echoes, inside the echoes are memories, inside the memory is a girl resting on a bed, crying, inside her tears is the trauma of her mother’s childhood house flooding, inside the flooding was me, my sister, our lives.” Aracelis gave us a language and a structure to examine the palimpsests of our individual and collective trauma from this year and years past. And Tamiko gave us a prompt to think about how that past is speaking to us today and guiding our future: “What are your ancestors saying to you? What do the generations ahead want you to know?” We are living out our generational and systemic trauma, so how do we cope with that, and what do our ancestors want us to know going into the future?
Shan: I think that’s so important to think about as well. It makes me think about how we’re all built of histories that exist within us, expanding outward. Not only does this allow for the examining of trauma but also the examining of history and lineage, something that’s so much at the core of poetry, particularly—at least from my perspective—for writers of color who are examining and asserting their place in the world. That makes me think about how S. Brook Corfman urged everyone to “consider something that seems blank” and how that ties into the idea of writing ourselves into prominence.
My bedsheet is just there, in all it's rippling mass. An alien planet that is yet to be discovered. Perhaps it is more an alien planet that is not meant to be discovered. Only seen. Things can be pulled out of the flatness, once it becomes inhabited. The form of two lovers. The form of a single lover. A family. It takes on whatever it is with. Like chameleon, or Ditto the pokemon. I wish to become a permanent fixture. Could we live together? I'd like to always be covered but clear.
Madison: As the writer wrote “it takes on whatever it is with” also seems to speak to the Festival itself—like whatever everyone brought to this collaborative poem, to this Zoom-inspired poetry festival, was what we were left with. But we first had to start with the blank canvas, like this author imagining the potential for what she could uncover on her bedsheet.
Shan: It was so interesting to see what different people imagined as their blank canvases. As an undergraduate student, I just loved getting to be in a (virtual) room with so many different people. It’s easy to get used to being surrounded by the voices of people my own age or in a similar place in life, but this event was such a wonderful opportunity to write alongside people from so many different points in life. To me, that was such a great gift.
Madison: I agree—as a graduate student, life becomes so insular, that I often am locked away in an ivory tower. But this festival reminded me of the joys of poetry, of language, and of community. Poet Guide, Chen Chen’s prompt captured the kind of joy we can all share in when we come together to grieve our losses, our trauma, our violence but also to celebrate our daily triumphs:
Happy belt. Happy unbuckling. The stars, three loops. Pull slow, for there is no difference between what we love and what we fear. Pull slow. Uncoil. This belt is a snake into the night. The dark slow unzipping of night. When I gaze up I know there is something undressing itself in the sky for me. The belt and then the sword falls from the hip. The robes spool into cloud, into horizon. Every single one of us has stood beneath and known we were truly alone.
As we think back to this event, we see it as a kind of being alone, together. In a world that often prioritizes individuality this festival reminded us that poetry is an art form that acknowledges our individual contributions to the poem in the creative act of a collaborative poem. Poetry has the potential to call each person out of themselves into the larger group. So when Amanda Gorman recites her inaugural poem, “The Hill We Climb,” it becomes an invitation for all people to engage not only with poetry also with the social activism that she calls for in her poem.
Poetry becomes a facility for empathy and understanding within people. We’ve seen that people not only want poetry but want a poetry that is socially charged beyond just being beautiful. At our Festival, audience members were asked to type where they were Zooming in from in the chat: cities across the United States popped up, but people we also had people attending from overseas. In this Zoom space, people from different places and backgrounds were able to come together to create a poem that could only exist in collaboration.
The Poetic Justice Institute looks to integrate diverse voices and experiences in poetry, so that poetry can be used as a powerful medium for social change and healing. The Festival and our poem is a testament to the Institute’s commitment to community, poetry, and social justice, so that poetry is no longer locked in its ivory tower but a part of the groundwork to heal, liberate, and reimagine a future that includes and values all voices.
FESTIVAL WRITING PROMPTS:
As far as we are concerned, the Festival continues. Write your own poems toward these prompts and join us.
Aracelis Girmay: In the spirit of translating some of the inner circuitry of our resonant sources into language, into ink: Think of a person/place/thing/element of nature that for you pulses with a quality of being (life, possibility, humility, courage) you want to keep your mind on. Imagine you can sense (see, hear, taste…) inside that thing and that you might find *anything* there. What is there? (Inside of the beach stone, for example, might be a cup of air, a name, the dreaming of our lost.) Now, as though you are opening nesting dolls, write down what is inside of the next thing and the next thing and on and on.
José Alvergue: Thinking of the last year of our national memory specifically, imagine the most challenging apology to negotiate––whether your own, or an apology you feel owed. Write out your apology, or the reasons why one is owed to you.
Tamiko Beyer: What are your ancestors saying to you? What do the generations ahead want you to know? If you have a tarot or oracle deck, you might want to pull a card now. If you don’t, that’s fine. Trust the truth of your body, your fingers, the messages waiting for your attention. Let your mind get quiet and listen for the truest sentences you can weave.
Chen Chen: What is a celestial body (or astronomical object, if you want to get more science-y about it) that makes you happy to look at or think about? This could be the moon, a star, a comet, a planet, a constellation, etc. Why does that celestial body bring you delight? How might that celestial body experience delight itself? How might it express that happiness? Start your writing with a title like this: "Happy [fill in with the celestial body]"
S. Brook Corfman: I invite you to consider something that seems blank: an empty surface of a wall or table: a piece of paper; the material quality of the mirror; the dark screen; the frame of air that hangs in front of you when you space out. Begin to describe that space. What are its associations? What happens as you begin to give it detail? Follow that space if it takes you somewhere, but start with its flatness, or its seeming emptiness. If you are stuck, ask it a question: “One question is…”. If you are stuck again, tell it about a wish you had: “I wished (to become)…”
Carolyn Forché: Write a poem of gratitude. You may make use of anaphora—beginning each line with the same word or phrase, as in Walt Whitman’s I celebrate myself and sing myself—with many lines opening with the words I sing. In this one, we will use the word “for” and each line will offer something for which we are grateful (the word grateful remains unspoken. You can be very playful, imagistic and mysterious about these things you are grateful for, or you can be very literal and specific. Write at least twenty lines!
Here are some of mine, for a poem titled "Gratitude":
for the scroll on my wall with its brush-stroke of awareness
for Pavlic’s image of light layings its eggs in my eyes
for the 14th century mystic poet who tells me that God is the breath inside the breath
for the blue roof tiles of the church below my window
for the taxi driver who spoke in holy sufi poems
for calm water beneath the ferry boat