Exploring the present with the past
and how conversations with centuries are contemporary
Dear friends,
What stories of living with — and after — dying you told last week. I was moved to read them and moved, as always, to see your interactions among the comments. Thank you.
We released an episode of Poetry Unbound in Conversation this week, featuring two poets — Rachel Mann and Yomi Ṣode — recorded at the StAnza festival in Scotland in 2024. Both poets use their recent books to explore characters from the past. Rachel Mann’s work, Eleanor Among the Saints, seeks to recover a trans woman, Eleanor Rykener, from obscurity, a woman who lived in the late Middle Ages, a seamstress, a sex worker. Rachel, a trans woman herself, feels enormous solidarity with Eleanor.
Yomi Ṣode’s book, Manorism charts the vulnerabilities and nuances of Black masculinity in Britain, in partnership with considering the historical painter Caravaggio. Caravaggio, an Italian painter who died a little more than 400 years ago at the age of 48, is renowned for his painting (such a “The Taking of Christ” in the National Gallery of Ireland). He also murdered a man during a brawl but was spared a prison sentence in exchange for a painting. “The graces and privilege that was offered to Caravaggio, which for me as a Black man, I don’t necessarily feel like I will be offered those graces,” Yomi says at one point during our conversation.
Both of these poets interrogate the present by looking at the past, noting the sophistication, complexity, brutality, and intelligence of history’s characters, and how the dynamics of power, permission, profession, safety, and threat occur in their lives. Rachel and Yomi offer lenses for today and today’s yesterdays; I recommend the episode to you, friends — I have thought about their approaches to the past and present a lot since our interview was recorded. And they have each looked to the past to amplify critical conversations for often-silenced stories of today.
So, here’s this week’s question: What characters of the past — whether known or repressed, family or not — do you turn to? Why?
I have access to some of the stories of my own family’s past: a great-great grandfather who was the sole survivor of An Gorta Mór, that brutal so-called famine that caused the death of a million Irish people from 1845-7, and the departure of a million more. (I say “so-called”, because there was plenty of food in Ireland). That past is blighted by colonialism and all that entails. And yet, I know that to even have access to that past is itself a richness; for many people, their family records were destroyed, the connection of future generations with their pasts was prevented by the undoing of the living and written generations. Whether through family trees or DNA testing, people are rightly keen to trace the way their past reveals something of their present — whether through relations or individuals with whom they find connection or disconnection.
To partially quote an Emily Dickinson poem I’ve quoted before:
The Past is such a curious Creature To look her in the Face A Transport may receipt us Or a Disgrace—
Of the many things I like here (“Transport”, “Disgrace”!) is the noun “Creature”. I think of the past as a beast, alive with interests and claws — claws for cutting, claws for carving, claws for showing, claws for grabbing a hold of willful ignorance.
May the past catch us well and create, not cull! See you in the comments, friends.
PS: My publisher, W.W. Norton, is offering a 70% discount on the audio version of my book 44 Poems on Being with Each Other through June 29, and you can access it here.
The Latest from Poetry Unbound
You can also listen at poetryunbound.org or wherever podcasts are found.
Poetry in the World
A list of my events: Online and in the U.S. (Santa Fe, NM) , Ireland (Borris), Scotland (Iona), and England (Kettering)
June 27–July 3, Iona, Scotland
Krista and I will be leading a week of conversation (with some musical guests) on Iona, an island off an island off the west coast of Scotland. It is filled, but if you want to be on the wait list, you can email the Saint Columba hotel by clicking on the title just above here. (For more info, click on the date heading.)
August 9–13, Santa Fe, New Mexico
I’m leading a four-day intensive workshop at Modern Elder Academy called “Poetry as a Common Language”. We’ll read, write, and discuss poems on finding and deepening connection. (For more information, click on the date heading.)
August 27-30, Kettering, England
I’m absolutely delighted to be returning to this year’s Greenbelt Festival, a gathering of arts, activism, and belief in England, beginning. (For registration info, click on the date heading.)
I’ll be leading evening worship alongside Nadia Bolz-Weber and Doug Gay as part of the Festival of Preaching, beginning at 5:30 p.m. (For registration info, click on the date heading.)
I’ll be leading a virtual craft intensive on poetry and desire through Poets House, beginning at 6 p.m. ET. (For more info, click on the date heading.)
Hello and happy Sunday to this wonderful group. Thank you, Pádraig. Isn't it delightful that every single week there is someone in the comments who says, what kismet, I was just thinking about this. Today that person is me.
Pádraig, that image of the past as a living Creature with claws is so apt a phrase for what I’m exploring, because for two years I sat on my yoga mat every morning and turned toward exactly that beast, thanking ancestors I couldn't yet picture, compelled by the recognition that I didn't come from a void. Resilience, creativity, perseverence, I had finally realized that none of it was self-invented. After two years of that daily practice, I found my birth mother. The ancestors, apparently, were waiting for me to say good morning first. Now the stories she and our family tell are soil I am actively growing in, feeding a large work I am deeply immersed in right now.
It can be overwhelming, sometimes, to reflect on all the negative weight of history, and the cycles of war, oppression and domination that seem to recur with depressing regularity. But then I read something written by another human centuries ago and I am reminded that there is so much more that connects us than divides us and that what I’m going through today was experienced by someone else in another time and place.
For example, I came across a phrase from Plato’s Symposium recently, where he talks about the feeling of meeting a soulmate. He describes the experience as one of “… an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy” and it just felt so real and true and beautiful, even two thousand years later.
I also love this perspective from James Baldwin on history and time and the importance of remembering those who have gone before us:
“For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”