PSA:
First of all Hi and Happy poetry day and first days of spring!! The poetry right now is loud in its expression. I wanted to announce something I’ve been brewing for a while.
This newsletter was given the name WAVES because I needed for this container to allow movement and change and reflect my emotional meanderings. I have loved the name since the beginning of it, and inside me there will always be waves which will determine every decision I make (plus I’m obsessed with the sea). But the truth is that this newsletter has always been about Antidotes, and as I hone in on the research and study of antidotes to these times, I think the name of this container should follow this direction.
So, WAVES is becoming Antidotes. BOOM!
Not because the water is gone, but because I finally have the right word for what this has always been. A poetic antidote is any gesture, artistic or cultural or intellectual, that interrupts despair and restores imagination. Every essay I’ve written here has been reaching for that. Now the name reaches with it.
Now, I leave you with an essay I wrote for advaya on poetry. May you find poetic gestures today, from nature, yourself or others — and if you feel like it, comment what you saw! x
I have to admit that it feels challenging to speak with grace to the times we are living in. Sometimes, I wonder if the work of finding relationality as revolutionary practice makes sense, if it arrives to the psyches and hearts of people as strong as the headlines that invade our social media, news channels, and televisions. I often wonder if this force is strong enough to counteract the fear that is so incredibly natural a reaction to what is going on.
This newsletter is not meant to provide answers but serve as balm, a place where we identify the cracks and find the light within them. James Baldwin once said “Perhaps the root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.” To search for beauty in the chaos is a revolutionary practice.
As March is Poetry month, I wanted to speak about the balms that poetry provides in a world that feels unstable.
The word poetry comes from the Greek word poiesis, which means to create, and in a broader sense to compose. But if we dig even deeper we arrive at the Sanskrit root pu which means to generate or procreate. Poetry as the continuation of life, as the statement that within the darkness we insist on beauty.
Poetry is not new to us, it has walked alongside humanity since the beginning. Before there were books, there were voices in squares. Before there were nations, there were chants. The Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh –one of the oldest surviving works of literature– sang of friendship and mortality. In ancient India, the hymns of the Rigveda were recited as sacred sound, carrying cosmology through breath. Homer’s epics travelled orally across the Aegean before they were ever written down. And the love poems attributed to Sappho still shake with intimacy across millennia. Poetry was both prayer and memory, seduction and protest.
In her infamous essay Poetry Is Not a Luxury, Audre Lorde reminds us that poetry is also the way we give name to the unnamed so that it can be thought, and therefore transformed. “It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change.” Poetry as infrastructure, blueprint, as rehearsal for a different future.
And perhaps this is why it feels revolutionary within systems built on fragmentation. Poetry requires slowness, presence, it asks us to enter the complexity of our interior landscapes and look in there for the truth. Minna Salami’s words arrive straight inside my heart when I read them: “Poetry is a language of the interior or the soul. Nature inhabits the interior of the earth”. In a culture that thrives on distraction, poetry is a refusal.
When poet and essayist June Jordan said “Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth,” she reminds me that this work is in search for truth.
I also believe that poetry is inevitable, because it is understood bodily and emotionally, not through the mind. In a world that thrives on the logical, poetry is a reminder that it is bodies that hold our truths, and through this truth we can truly relate to each other.
For example, in one of his poems, Rumi writes, “Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure.” Through metaphor many of us are able touch the emotions that this simple sentence wants to convey: the light is in the cracks – and then it opens the world.
Sometimes I think poetry is the language of the underworld: Persephone’s dialect. It teaches us how to descend without forgetting the possibility of return. It teaches us that grief and beauty can share the same breath.
I often speak about how language changes when it is allowed to move from the body rather than from performance. When we create from sensation, memory, or ancestral whisper, something shifts. The page becomes altar. The sentence becomes spell. We are no longer producing content; we are participating in creation.
And maybe this is what feels most urgent right now: to remember that we are creators. That even if we cannot control the headlines, we can choose the quality of our attention. We can choose to generate beauty amidst the chaos.
Poetry will not stop wars overnight. But it will keep the human heart from calcifying. It will keep imagination alive. And without imagination, no new world can be born.
Now in honour of this semi-new chapter I’d love to know what you love and don’t love about this newsletter. So I’ve created three short polls! If you have anything else you would like to add please do so in the comments!
My workshop for writers, artists, or non who want to unblock some creative juices is back. I will teach you a unique way of getting unstuck in your creativity. We will have movement, dialogue, and lots of creative reflections. Read more about it here. Paid subscribers get 50% off!
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