When the first COVID restrictions and stay-at-home order were declared in Vermont in late March, one of the things that happened in my family was that we began to make things together, often. We sat down at our big studio table and made drawings, paintings, collages, mini zines, comic books, poems, objects (and Meredith made hundreds of face masks, for us and for others who needed them in our community). These making sessions – usually in the evenings – helped us process what was going on in our world, from the fear and uncertainty of the pandemic to the absurdity of the spectacle of U.S. politics to the sadness of mundane things like finding a beautiful fox run over on the road near our house. We were making meaning. We laughed. We got angry. We gave thanks. We all cried, soaking each other’s sweaters with our tears. We held together.

Tell me not to think
make me thoughtless as I wake
dreamless as I sleep.

During this time, I found a medium that felt well suited to my mental state. I began to write poems more regularly, with more care and intention. Haiku – three lines containing five, seven, and five syllables respectively – have become my go-to form to loosen my mind and my pen, and my collection of these has grown. Some of these haiku gravitated toward each other, conversing unexpectedly as I placed them together in tiny zines with visual elements. Punching the words out with our lovely portable typewriter was physically therapeutic. I continue to write poems, wondering if “poet” could ever be added to my emerging and evolving identity. There are many threads, knotted and entangled; I try to sort them out. I try to remain ambivalent and unattached.

Collage has provided another entry point into crafting poems. Not having to face the tyranny of the blank page, or my blank mind, is liberating. Scouring magazines for words and phrases that ignite some unimagined trajectory of ideas, assembling one line after the next with more focus and intention, cutting and pasting delicate strips of soon-to-be sounds in the poem – this process is satisfying, sometimes tedious, usually rewarding. Here’s a poem constructed of pieces excised from a single article about the problem of space debris (it’s a thing!):

In space,
where gravity holds together
a hunk of debris hurtling toward
some odd number of seconds
so far about the surface of the Earth.

I was doing the math
with a flashlight in my mouth,
inspired in part by nineteenth-century
crews dressed in hazmat suit, working
in the calculation of collision probability.

Force analysts quickly updated
the only artifacts worth worrying about
the big bang and the autumn of 1957.

We live in a corona of trash
ghostly black-and-white
silvery undersea creature
the debris spiralled downward,
among them a titanium harpoon
packed with switches and knobs.

The universe may be infinite
just this magnificent
black body covered in spots
presumed dead.

Along with the writing, I have been reading a lot more poetry this year than I ever have. In reading – and hearing – so much poetry, I have learned about what grabs me, holds me still, helps me feel a small part of what others feel. I’ve found poems that slay me speechless, make me smile, shiver my nervous system. Poems that say things I’ve known and wanted to hear for a long time. This year, I mostly read Black and Indigenous poets. I am intentionally immersing myself in voices and perspectives very different from mine, straining my empathic muscles to expand my understanding of others and my relationship to them. And, yet, what poetry so often does is drill down with intensity to the elemental emotional life that binds people together in some common humanity, however fleeting and tenuous those connections may be.

I want you to read or hear “Wishing Well” by Gregory Pardlo (as read by Pádraig Ó Tuama, host of the excellent Poetry Unbound podcast). It captures a moment many of us who have spent time in a large city might find familiar, when a chance encounter between two strangers, brave enough to be vulnerable, creates connection and compresses so much within an instant. This poem changed me. What this poem does to me is what I want to do as a creator.

Joy Harjo’s recent book of poems, An American Sunrise, showed me how poetry can be a forceful and lyrical counter narrative to express what White people mostly choose to ignore or willfully deny when it comes to the experiences of Inidigenous people. A member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, she is the current Poet Laureate of the U.S., and the first Native American to hold this position. In An American Sunrise, Harjo weaves an historical account of the forced removal of her ancestors from their original lands east of the Mississippi to Indian Territory (now part of Oklahoma) with poems of sorrow, defiance, despair, joy, gratitude, exile, and belonging. Here’s the eponymous poem from the book:

We were running out of breath, as we ran out to meet ourselves. We 

Were surfacing the edge of our ancestors’ fights, and ready to Strike.

It was difficult to lose days in the Indian bar if you were Straight.

Easy if you played pool and drank to remember to forget. We

Made plans to be professional—and did. And some of us could Sing

When we drove to the edge of the mountains, with a drum. We

Made sense of our beautiful crazed lives under the starry stars. Sin

Was invented by the Christians, as was the Devil, we sang. We

Were the heathens, but needed to be saved from them: Thin

Chance. We knew we were all related in this story, a little Gin

Will clarify the dark, and make us all feel like dancing. We

Had something to do with the origins of blues and jazz

I argued with the music as I filled the jukebox with dimes in June,

Forty years later and we still want justice. We are still America. We.

One of Harjo’s poem in the book, “Mama and Papa Have the Going Home Shiprock Blues,” led me to investigate (thanks Inter Library Loan!) the work of T.C. Cannon, painter and writer from the Kiowa Tribe. The title of the poem as well as the individual sections are based on titles of Cannon’s paintings. As a recovering painter, I find Cannon’s paintings exciting to me like no other painter’s work has been in a long time. There is such a complex layering of different references in this work: saturated Post Impressionist color palettes, stereotypical depictions of Native Americans based on colonialist portrait photography, and traditional Inidigenous subject matter and imagery complicated by contemporary elements. These are images that I keep poring over because of their visual electricity as well as the somewhat ambiguous stories they seem to tell. The best survey of his work and life I found are in the exhibition catalog for a 2019 retrospective of his work, “T. C. Cannon: At the Edge of America.” Tragically, Cannon died in a car crash in 1978 at the age of 31.

Be well and stay safe as we enter 2021. There’s no going back.

Jeremy