Since I last wrote to you, my life has entirely changed. There’s much I want to share, and much I don’t know yet how to say. I live alone for the first time. I’m back in the region of my childhood.
I’m not sure I know what devotion means. Not in practice.
I’ve avoided writing this newsletter; I’m not as consistent a person as I hope to be. Obsessed with the idea of devotion and with getting nearer to it, I’m an aspiring devotee. I want to love more deeply in every relationship and area of my life, and I’m trying to learn how to love better, more honestly. To show up to all that I do with both rigor and play. I think this is what devotion is about. But to think it is different than to live it.
I’m learning about rigor, play, and showing up in a Making Comics class with the legendary Lynda Barry. Lynda Barry is a cartoonist and teacher who devotes her life to a question shared also by many poets: “What is an image?”
Lynda believes she can teach anyone to make comics and it doesn’t matter if, like me, you don’t know how to draw. She is an extremely generous teacher—probably the best teacher I’ve ever had. Already I am drawing and seeing, noticing, differently. She laughs heartily, fills the room with perfect, enlivening playlists, feeds us candy (her only flaw might be intensifying my sugar addiction), and says deceivingly simple, brilliant things like, “The function of these things we call art is a biological one… art persists.” & “I don’t need to understand poetry because poetry understands me.” She has us draw with eyes closed, with our non-dominant hand, drawing ourselves as animals, vegetables, astronauts. She’s playful, but she’s for real—the class requires much, daily, work. This semester we call her Professor Capybara, largest rodent in the world!, and we’ve each taken on other names in her class. I go by Verve.
I’ve been contemplating the word verve for more than a few seasons—what feels to me an embodied, deep kind of enthusiasm. It’s visceral, and of the spirit. It’s got nerve. At the beginning of the year I wrote down: More tenderness, verve, grace, bite.
I’m a perpetual student in this life, of what it means to get more free. Together. In deep study, the embodied kind. I’m grateful for beloveds with nerve, heart, conscience, spine. For everyone getting into the streets, making calls to spineless representatives, saying a clear NO to genocide with our tax dollars, disrupting business as usual. In the words of Aracelis Girmay, “YOU ARE WHO I LOVE.”
I long for public spaces of grief, rage, celebration, refusal, imagination.
It’s hard to be a person. In office hours the other day, a student shared with me their fear of not knowing how to be a person. I decided not to pretend I had a solution. I told them—I’m not sure not sure how comforting or alarming it was—that I haven't figured out how to be a person either.
I can’t yet say when I’ll write to you next. I’m trying to only make promises I can keep. But I will share something I’ve drawn soon, as much as it mortifies me. It’s gorgeous to be a beginner.
“I often think that the responsibility of the poet is to strive to become the memory that people may possess in the future about what it means to be human: an ever-changing constant.”
—Fady Joudah, in this interview with Aria Aber.
A few writing things:
ICYMI, you’re invited to sit with the On Rivers folio I curated for The Seventh Wave:
Excerpt from my editor’s note for the issue:
“What rivers do you visit, on foot or in memory? What rivers do you invent?
The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote in ‘XV’ (translated by Antoon): ‘You said: I used to invent love when necessary. When I walked alone on the riverbank. Or whenever the level of salt would rise in my body, I would invent the river.’
In this issue, eight writers across genre take us to real and speculative rivers, where we are confronted with questions of lineage, longing, history, and the question of crossing. ‘There are so many prayers/ knifing through the blue,’ writes Laura Da’. What is on the other side?”
I’ve got a book of poems, We Contain Landscapes, coming out with Tin House in early 2025, in case you haven’t heard me geek out about that yet. More updates coming soon.
You can find a rotating list of targeted urgent fundraisers for Gazans HERE.
Til soon, <3
I love your topic: devotion. It’s such a multi-faceted thing. Probably you know the devotional poets? If not, you might like them. Your comment that you are always seeking ways to be more free especially made me think of John Donne. Good luck in your quest!