Dear Reader—Reaching Toward Community in a Time of Winter

When I began to listen to poetry, it’s when I began to listen to the stones, and I began to listen to what the clouds had to say, and I began to listen to others. And I think, most importantly for all of us, then you begin to learn to listen to the soul, the soul of yourself in here, which is also the soul of everyone else. —Joy Harjo

Dear Reader,

I have said the above words by Joy Harjo so many times during my term as poet laureate of Maine—repeated them to others, repeated them to myself—that I now feel their impression against my heart and see them on the backs of my eyelids when I go to sleep.

Listening has been both my map and my passenger as I drive to poetry readings or school visits, navigating a state that spans both a vast geography and an extraordinary array of different lived experiences. Listening has guided me in my other work too. As a solo librarian in a small, rural public library, my work is predicated upon hearing the needs of my community. As a poet, I am always trying to listen for the words under the words. As a farmer, I listen to the seasons, to what the ground and sky tell me, to the earth’s natural cycles, and to the disruption of these cycles. All of these actions feel connected to me. 

Except we currently find ourselves in a moment when, for many of us, listening feels more fraught than it ever has before. There is so much anger, so much grief, so much uncertainty. So many signs by the side of the road, so many terrifying newspaper headlines, so much shouting online. It is difficult to know where to begin. We know winter is coming, but not yet how hard it will be or how long it will last. The vulnerability and trust required for true listening feel like they belong to another time. And yet I know that my ability to find hope resides in my ability to listen.

Now more than ever, I need to listen to the natural world, with its cacophony of spring peepers or burble of melt beneath ice. I need to listen to the past—to its ghosts and bones—as I stand in the present. They have things to tell me and, if I cannot hear them, how will I ever learn to listen to the future enough to discern within it more than just the buzz of my own fear?

And now more than ever, I need to listen to my poems. What are the poems that need me to write them now? And what do these poems need from me? How can I learn to listen so that I am listening even as I am speaking—my words reaching to hear a voice I am still trying to make out;a voice that often speaks to me through its silence. Aracelis Girmay once told me that it is the poet’s and the poem’s job to have a conversation with silence. I carry these words mapped behind my eyelids too.

Knowing I must learn to listen with my words, to write toward listening, there are two forms I always return to: the poem and the letter. And increasingly, I don’t know the difference between the two. I find myself writing epistolary poems to those who are no longer living. To those who have not yet been born. Even when my poems are not directly written as letters, I find them threaded through with direct addresses. Perhaps this is because the three qualities that I associate most deeply with a letter—urgency, intimacy, and ritual—are also qualities that first brought me to the page as a child and have kept me there ever since. And they are the qualities that I most associate with hope.

My poet laureate fellowship project, the Write ME Epistolary Poetry Project, is born from the hope that letter writing might offer some antidote to the polarization and isolation of our times. After a series of free public workshops to introduce the epistolary form, Mainers are paired with a stranger in another part of the state for a winterlong poetry pen pal exchange. The project asks participants to engage in a writing practice based on listening. It asks them to share a piece of themselves with another and to hold space for someone else to do the same. 

Over the years, my understanding of the page has shifted. What was once a private space for me has now become a connective one. I no longer see survival as a solitary act, but as a collective one. My project invites participants to renegotiate their relationships with the page as well—to tap into their own instincts toward urgency, intimacy, and ritual and extend them toward others.

Dear reader, I have written this essay as a letter because there is something I need to tell you. I am writing this essay in the form of a letter because I want you to write back, because there is something I need to learn from your reply. 

Dear reader, I am writing to you because I miss you. Because I want to give you a piece of myself to hold. Because when you write back, I will be able to hold a piece of you too. Your letter will carry the scent of your house, the sound of your voice. I know this because, in the drawer of the desk at which I am currently sitting to write, there are letters I wrote to my grandmother twenty years ago when I first moved to Maine, and there are letters she wrote back to me. And when I read her letters, I can still hear her, despite the ten years she’s been gone, can still picture the up and down of her body shaking in laughter.

Dear reader, it’s when I feel most alone that it’s hardest for me to reach out. Is it that way for you too? How after a long winter it’s almost painful to be turned back out of myself. I weep while the sugar maples let down their sap. But as I yield to the cycle, I yield to its beauty and greenness. I write to you, and you write to me. And with each letter sent, it gets easier to share myself with another. And with each letter sent, the days become longer, more light gets in. This is how so many of our ancestors survived the dark and cold. Perhaps, together, we can learn something from them.