Dear friends,
This week, we released the second of our interviews with Kimberly Campanello. The first focused mostly on her reversioning of Dante’s Inferno. This second interview contains a lengthy discussion about her MOTHERBABYHOME project, a response to the discovery, in the town of Tuam in the west of Ireland, of the remains of 796 babies and children in a place that was meant for shelter.
These (so-called) Mother and Baby Homes were a scourge. In the early 20th century, Ireland — newly partitioned and partially independent — outsourced much of its social-care services to the property-rich and loyalty-high Catholic church. The terrors that unfolded are legion and are sadly not undone by the many generous, kind, brave Catholics — lay and religious and ordained — who gave their lives and energies in safe and good service.
One of these awful places was the home in Tuam, run by the Bon Secours order of nuns between the 1920s and early 1960s. In 2012, a local historian Catherine Corless published an article about the home, with investigations into the 796 death certificates issued during the time of the institution’s functioning. Through tireless scholarship, research (often unsupported by any authorities), and advocacy, she — and a growing group of others — brought pressure on the Irish government for investigations, acknowledgements, and exhumations.
Accepting The Bar of Ireland’s Human Rights award in 2017, Catherine Corless’ speech included these words:
I couldn’t get my mind around how the sisters could leave that home in 1961, close the gates when it closed down, with 796 children buried beneath in the tunnels in coffins, a lot of them in the sewage tank area as we now know. What kind of mentality would leave that place without acknowledging that so many burials were there, so many precious lives were lost?... My work campaigning on behalf of the survivors of mother and baby homes continues … With each and every testimony, the truth is uncovered further and our campaign for justice to prevail is strengthened. I share this award with the all survivors — this is for them.
In light of this, Kimberly Campanello wrote and performed MOTHERBABYHOME, a poetry performance with 796 entries, one to a page. I encountered her, and this work, when we both recited poetry in Belfast together. I was standing behind her as she read some of the pieces and I saw how, when she was done with a page, she’d let it drop to the floor, so that at the end of a 15-minute recital, she was surrounded by discard. The official copies of MOTHERBABYHOME are on vellum, a material that lasts for up to 5,000 years, whereas ordinary paper and ink tends to last only a few centuries.
I think of MOTHERBABYHOME in the same way as I think of the Oglala Lakota writer Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS. That work was another reckoning — through poetry — with an inept government statement which bears the title “Joint resolution to acknowledge a long history of official depredations and ill-conceived policies by the federal government regarding Indian tribes, and offer an apology to all Native peoples on behalf of the United States.” MOTHERBABYHOME takes the 796 children and gives a page to each. Long Soldier’s WHEREAS responds to each of the “Whereas” clauses of the long-titled resolution with a “Whereas” poem of her own.
Friends, I recommend my Kimberly Campanello interview to you. It is not always easy listening. It is — in a world sorely in need of it — part of a repository of language that believes in testimony, bearing witness, accountability, and truth. In this, politics, place, lament, rage, and change all find expression through poetry and art.
My question to you this week: Can you tell us a time when your objection prompted action — whether in language, art, form, protest, law, or another form? Tell us about your motivation, any obstacles you overcame, and what form you used for your witness.
I look forward to reading your responses of how you have shaped objection into art, action, and change.
PS: Friends, you can access the full online archive of MOTHERBABYHOME on Kimberly Campanello’s site (as well as see a performance of her reading it). Krista Tippett’s interview with Layli Long Soldier is another powerful conversation, and a number of years ago, we offered a poem from the WHEREAS series on Poetry Unbound.
Also, for fans of Toni Morrison, there’s a new eight-episode podcast on her work, presented by Manwali Serpell, that you can listen to 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; Cambridge and Stockbridge, MA) and England (Kettering)
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.)
October 1, Frenchtown, New Jersey
Join me at Frenchtown Bookshop for a conversation and book signing, beginning at 6:30 p.m. (For more 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.)
I’m delighted to be joining Ellen Bass’s wonderful Living Room Craft Talks Series for a discussion of the poetry of eros, beginning at 12 p.m. ET. (For more info, click on the date heading.)
November 2, Cambridge, Massachusetts
I’ll be reading alongside Susan Stewart as part of the Blacksmith House Poetry Series, beginning at 8 p.m. (For more info, click on the date heading.)
I’m leading a virtual course on lyric address through Arvon, beginning at 3:00 p.m. ET. (For registration info, click on the date heading.)
December 18-20, Stockbridge, Massachusetts
I’m leading a retreat on poetry and prayer at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health. (For more info, click on the date heading.)
Michelle Penn and I will be reading together in a virtual event with Café Writers, beginning at 7:30 p.m. ET. (For more info, click on the date heading.)
My sister is my oldest, closest friend—and right now they are recovering from an extensive, life-saving surgery. They are so on my heart in this moment that I think any prompt you offered, Pádraig, I would associate to them and my relationship with them. I can also see how my entire adult relationship with them is a kind of objection turned into art and language.
We have been collaborating together for sixteen years on art and writing. At the start, our art together was a loose experiment that was well received. As we kept at it, we confronted the way our childhood troubles shaped our relationship in ways that felt so bad. We grew up with the message that we had to be great. Attention was the currency, and it was fleeting. We had to try to catch it with our wit, talent, intelligence, or beauty. We had to compete. Our lives depended on this. We objected to this. We wanted our genius to be more mysterious than all that. We wanted to create because it was a joy and the soul’s necessity to do so. So we chose to center our artistic practice on the practice of loving each other better. We make calendars, so every year we revisit this intention. Protesting any occurrence that would leave us feeling splintered, we have faced so many interpersonal fires and have forged the most beautiful relationship
I feel the spirit of that protest now, too. We are deep in the process of making the calendar for 2027, even as the future feels so hard to see.
There was a hate crime murder of an undocumented 34 year old Latino man at the hands on seven local high school teenagers in Patchogue, Long Island in 2007. It took place while we were having a Peace Concert at my church a few blocks away. The murder was fable-ized by authorities who dismissed it as an aberration. A one-off. I presided at the funeral of Marcelo Lucero. It began two-year effort to face the truth and a fight to declare it a hate crime. At the Congregational Church of Patchogue, where I am pastor still, we hosted films, art exhibits, poetry readings, concerts, traditional Ecuadorean dance performances, and silence retreats. It was a national news story. My life was threatened many times (documented by police) because I “took their side” and was fanning the flames of a non-story. My own teenage son warned me not to eat at a restaurant on Main Street because I “would be eating spit.” We held an event where other victims (whose attacks were mislabeled by police to avoid scrutiny) were invited to tell their stories. I had an NPR reporter record their statements (names withheld). The hard drive was subpoenaed by the federal Justice Department and an investigation was opened. Over 100 police department violations and recommendations were in the final report. But now, almost 20 years later and after many positive changes occurred, ICE is back, Latinos are in hiding, Latino guests at our soup kitchen are down, and even attendance and artist participation at our upcoming Amazonian art exhibit and traditional dance performance is expected to be down. This, to me, is a sickening déjà vu. But I, and many others, will continue this struggle as long as I draw breath. Art, poetry, music, and dance helped keep the story real. The talking heads and make-it-look-better-than-it-is committees are trying and succeeding in many ways to deal with the past. But not so much to deal with the present and the future. I feel like we are going backward in many ways. The boards in the floor are warping. I feel I am sometimes sinking in quicksand. But stories like this, Padraig, lift me up and quicken my heart. It helps me to recommit. We remember. We lament. We change. We prevail. And now I finish my morning coffee and go to church where I will deliver a sermon on the Sower and the Seeds. May we cast our seeds on fertile soil. Peace When Possible, Dwight Lee Wolter