Dear friends,
We finished recording for the next season of Poetry Unbound just recently, and the first episode airs on New Year’s Day. Sixteen episodes, over eight weeks. Your ears. Delicious poems from brilliant artists. Yes. The trailer is launching tomorrow — it’ll be in your podcast feed. Listening back to it, I thought, “I sound congested” (all recovered now). Someone else said “you sound husky.” (I’ll take the husky.)
Anyway…
I’m always moved by who listens to Poetry Unbound: poets, and those who love poetry, those who are surprised by liking poetry, those who have always wanted to love it, but perhaps were put off by previous experiences.
For me, poetry is like the Atlantic Ocean. There are many beaches and strands and cliffs, all looking over the vastness of that salty water mass. You can love the Atlantic Ocean simply by having one favourite beach. You can visit many beaches. You can ignore the beach and watch it from a cliff. You can look at it from Ghana, Trinidad, or Ireland. Iceland? Yes. Cabo Verde? Yes, too.
To know poetry might mean you’ve studied Emily Dickinson closely (“You cannot fold a Flood — and put it in a drawer —” she said), or it might mean you write every morning, or you plough through a favourite anthology, or you’re starting. Nobody will ever know all the poets, and while there are always going to be some considered to be canonical, there’s no compunction to have to read all of them. The point of it is to read — and, if you wish, to write.
As we near the end of 2023, I’d like to ask something that’ll help us as we continue into 2024.
I’d like to know what questions you have about poetry, or Poetry Unbound? Put one — a single, solitary question! — in the comments here, or email us at poetryunbound@onbeing.org, and we’ll compile them, and start some responses in 2024: whether here in the Substack or on Instagram. You can ask a personal question if you want... I mightn’t answer though! — not because I’m that private (boxer briefs, not boxer shorts), but because I’m looking for questions that are particularly about your connection to poetry and Poetry Unbound.
I am a fan of the single question. There are always ten — twenty, thirty — things that can be asked. But if you have to limit yourself to one question, it asks you to discern, to put your twenty or thirty questions together, and to ask what the thread of curiosity that holds those together is… and then to pose that single, solitary question. I’m always keen that our newsletter, and socials, are speaking with you, back to you, engaging your interest.
So, again, here’s the invitation:
What is a single question — a single question! — that you have about poetry, or Poetry Unbound?
I’ll leave you with gratitude for this year of conversation in the comments. And see you in the chat, and in the new year. I hope it’s a season of connection for you. I know that all of us are joined — across our political disparities and disagreements — in hoping for the cessation of war, violence, and threat in the many places where it is occurring. That’s what I want language to do: to be used in surprising ways by people in situations of power; in order to exact human potentiality, not casualties.
PS: I mentioned last week about the book I’d written in collaboration with The Church of the Heavenly Rest in New York City during the pandemic, Being Here. All proceeds go to The American Friends of the Parents Circle-Families Forum.
Poetry in the World
Launch of Being Here | New York City & online
I’ll be launching Being Here: Prayers for Curiosity, Justice, and Love on Tuesday, February 6 at 6pm, in person at The Church of the Heavenly Rest (if you’re in or around NYC, they’re at 1085 5th Avenue) and online. If you’re coming in person, you can RSVP here, and it’ll also be live streamed here.
what is the relationship between poetry and prayer?
Without set form (sonnet) or necessity of rhyme, what makes an otherwise elegantly written paragraph a poem?