Give these famous poems a read What jumps into your mind when you think of the most famous poems ever written? Shakespearean love poems? Something longer that you might find in a poetry book? Maybe something by Poe or Dickinson? Or perhaps you’re just taking your first steps into the world of poetry, so none of these ring a bell. That’s OK. The beauty of poetry is its universal appeal—the most famous poems ever written are just as enjoyable to newcomers as they are to aficionados. Still, I understand how intimidating it can be to try to navigate an ocean of poetry that you’ve only dipped your toes into, especially considering its breadth and diversity: There are more authors, publications, movements and subgenres than anybody can read in a lifetime. So where should you start for the best poems about life and all its ups and downs? Make your way through this list, and you’ll find yourself 20 poems richer. These aren’t just any poems either—they’re some of the most famous and influential lines ever written in the history of the literary form. With these relatively short poems, you’ll understand why poets are peerless when it comes to putting our deepest emotions into words. Read on for a dose of inspiration. Get Reader’s Digest’s Read Up newsletter for more poetry, humor, cleaning, travel, tech and fun facts all week long.

RD.COM, GETTY IMAGES 1. “Sonnet 18” by William Shakespeare Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;

Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee Naturally, our list had to start with the Bard. While it is tough to pick a favorite work of William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 18” is definitely a top contender. Not only is it one of the most famous poems ever written, but it’s also one of his most beautiful and iconic love poems. Want to express deep affection? Forget those funny roses-are-red poems and start with one of the English language’s literary giants. ⓘ

RD.COM, GETTY IMAGES 2. “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” by Emily Dickinson Because I could not stop for Death—

He kindly stopped for me—

The Carriage held but just Ourselves—

And Immortality. We slowly drove—He knew no haste

And I had put away

My labor and my leisure too,

For His Civility— We passed the School, where Children strove

At Recess—in the Ring—

We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain—

We passed the Setting Sun— Or rather—He passed Us—

The Dews drew quivering and Chill—

For only Gossamer, my Gown—

My Tippet—only Tulle— We paused before a House that seemed

A Swelling of the Ground—

The Roof was scarcely visible—

The Cornice—in the Ground— Since then—’tis Centuries—and yet

Feels shorter than the Day

I first surmised the Horses’ Heads

Were toward Eternity— Published posthumously in 1890, “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” is arguably one of Emily Dickinson’s most celebrated and most famous poems. In it, the speaker takes a carriage ride with personified death, who appears not as a menacing reaper but a “kindly” driver taking her to eternity. Like many funeral poems that give comfort to the grieving, Dickinson’s piece—and the final stanza, in particular—suggests the dead might live on in the afterlife.

RD.COM, GETTY IMAGES 3. “She Walks in Beauty” by Lord Byron She walks in beauty, like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

And all that’s best of dark and bright

Meet in her aspect and her eyes;

Thus mellowed to that tender light

Which heaven to gaudy day denies. One shade the more, one ray the less,

Had half impaired the nameless grace

Which waves in every raven tress,

Or softly lightens o’er her face;

Where thoughts serenely sweet express,

How pure, how dear their dwelling-place. And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,

So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,

The smiles that win, the tints that glow,

But tell of days in goodness spent,

A mind at peace with all below,

A heart whose love is innocent! An icon of his time, Lord Byron (aka George Gordon) is one of the best-known English poets of the early 19th-century Romantic Movement. He’s just as famous for his countless affairs with men and women as he is for his famous poems. It’s no surprise, then, that the poet not only inspired the Byronic hero character in fiction but also wrote some of the most romantic lines in poetry. If you’re hunting for the perfect love poem for a woman, look no further than Byron’s most famous lines. “She Walks in Beauty” praises a woman’s inner and outer beauty, complementing physical attributes as well as inner innocence and purity.

RD.COM, GETTY IMAGES 4. “O Captain! My Captain!” by Walt Whitman O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,

The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,

While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;

But O heart! heart! heart!

O the bleeding drops of red,

Where on the deck my Captain lies,

Fallen cold and dead. O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;

Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,

For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,

For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;

Here Captain! dear father!

This arm beneath your head!

It is some dream that on the deck,

You’ve fallen cold and dead. My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,

My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,

The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,

From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won; Exult O shores, and ring O bells!

But I with mournful tread,

Walk the deck my Captain lies,

Fallen cold and dead. This poem will be instantly recognizable to fans of the 1989 film Dead Poets Society—in fact, “O Captain! my Captain!” is one of the most memorable quotes from the movie. But even without its mention in the film, Walt Whitman’s poem deserves a spot on our list of the most famous poems ever written. Penned in 1865 as a tribute to Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated that year, “O Captain! My Captain!” is an ode to bravery and untimely death. And it continues to inspire readers centuries later.

RD.COM, GETTY IMAGES 5. “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference. On the surface, Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” is a beautiful account of the poet’s walk in the woods. But dig deeper, and you’ll find a lesson wrapped up in Frost’s metaphor of a fork in the road. This inspirational poem teaches about the importance of singularity and distinct personality. Instead of following the path countless others have taken, forge ahead on the road fewer have trod. It will, as the poet writes, make “all the difference” in life.

RD.COM, GETTY IMAGES 6. “Dreams” by Langston Hughes Hold fast to dreams

For if dreams die

Life is a broken-winged bird

That cannot fly. Hold fast to dreams

For when dreams go

Life is a barren field

Frozen with snow. Langston Hughes, a significant voice in American poetry, one of the most well-recognized Black poets of the 20th century and the leader of the Harlem Renaissance, writes about the importance of dreams and urges his readers to hold on to theirs. Without our dreams, Hughes says in this short yet powerful poem, our lives lose meaning and we are like birds that cannot fly.

RD.COM, GETTY IMAGES 7. “Happy Thought” by Robert Louis Stevenson The world is so full of a number of things

I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings. Feeling down about the state of the world? Give “Happy Thought” a read. Robert Louis Stevenson, author of the classic n0vel Treasure Island, needs only two lines to teach a valuable lesson about gratitude and life’s little joys.

RD.COM, GETTY IMAGES 8. “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

“‘Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—

Only this and nothing more.” Edgar Allan Poe’s famously dark tone is on full display in this iconic poem about a man’s struggle with grief as he descends into madness, captured with intricate symbolism and Poe’s Gothic horror themes. The opening above sets the stage for an 18-stanza poem full of despair and longing—and Poe’s characteristic eerie undertones. Want to read the full poem? Check out The Raven and Other Poems. It’s not the kind of comforting book that will help you grieve; it’s a haunting meditation on love and loss.

RD.COM, GETTY IMAGES 9. “How Do I Love Thee?” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of being and ideal grace.

I love thee to the level of every day’s

Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

I love thee freely, as men strive for right;

I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death. It’s no surprise that many of the most famous poems ever written tackle the joy and heartbreak that comes with love, and if you want a love poem for men, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s work is a fantastic choice. “How Do I Love Thee” describes a love so pure and so strong that it remains unwavering in the face of time and stretches beyond the grave.

RD.COM, GETTY IMAGES 10. “I’m Nobody! Who Are You?” by Emily Dickinson I’m nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody, too?

Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell!

They’d banish us, you know. How dreary to be somebody!

How public, like a frog

To tell your name the livelong day

To an admiring bog! As one of America’s most well-regarded poets, Emily Dickinson has more than a few famous poems to her name. In this one, she explores themes of anonymity and humility, noting how much better it is to avoid the constant need for recognition, a draining effort she dubs “dreary.” These valuable quotes about life are even more significant in a modern world focused on fame, where everyone can be someone with the right social media account.

RD.COM, GETTY IMAGES 11. “The Wasteland” by T.S. Eliot April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee

With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,

And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,

And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.

And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,

My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,

And I was frightened. He said, Marie,

Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.

In the mountains, there you feel free.

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. One of the most famous poems ever written and arguably the most significant 20th-century work of poetry, “The Wasteland” is T.S. Eliot’s 1922 masterpiece. It’s one of the longer poems on our list—the above is simply the opening snippet; you can read the full 434-line poem in one of Eliot’s poetry collections—and a bleak exploration of modern life. It’s a powerful work that changes locations, speakers and time to draw upon the dread of living in the era of World War I.

RD.COM, GETTY IMAGES 12. “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe. “Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

The frumious Bandersnatch!” He took his vorpal sword in hand;

Long time the manxome foe he sought—

So rested he by the Tumtum tree

And stood awhile in thought. If you know Lewis Carroll only through Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, you’re missing out on some wonderfully whimsical words. True, Alice in Wonderland quotes are full of seemingly nonsense phrases. But in this funny poem, which appears in Through the Looking-Glass, Carroll outdid himself. It includes many made-up words that were later explained in the novel—and even one, chortle, that later made it into the American lexicon.

RD.COM, GETTY IMAGES 13. “I Have a Rendezvous with Death” by Alan Seeger I have a rendezvous with Death

At some disputed barricade,

When Spring comes back with rustling shade

And apple-blossoms fill the air—

I have a rendezvous with Death

When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

It may be he shall take my hand

And lead me into his dark land

And close my eyes and quench my breath— It may be I shall pass him still.

I have a rendezvous with Death

On some scarred slope of battered hill,

When Spring comes round again this year

And the first meadow-flowers appear. God knows ’twere better to be deep

Pillowed in silk and scented down,

Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep,

Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,

Where hushed awakenings are dear …

But I’ve a rendezvous with Death

At midnight in some flaming town,

When Spring trips north again this year,

And I to my pledged word am true,

I shall not fail that rendezvous. Alan Seeger died an untimely death during World War I but not before gifting the world with this beautiful poem. Published in 1917, “I Have a Rendezvous with Death” explores themes of mortality and ultimately leads to the poet’s acceptance of death as the final destination: poetic yet tragic. The death of a loved one is one of the hardest human experiences, but exploring grief through art and poetry can be transformative.

RD.COM, GETTY IMAGES 14. “Fire and Ice” by Robert Frost Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice. Robert Frost manages to do in nine lines what sagas cannot do in volumes: This simple and symbolic poem highlights the pitfalls of extremity. Fire here is linked to desire, while ice is linked to hatred, and both emotions, according to Frost, can lead to destruction if left untamed.

RD.COM, GETTY IMAGES 15. “No Man Is an Island” by John Donne No man is an island,

Entire of itself;

Every man is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less,

As well as if a promontory were:

As well as if a manor of thy friend’s

Or of thine own were.

Any man’s death diminishes me,

Because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

It tolls for thee. John Donne, known as the founder of the Metaphysical Poets, is a 16th-century writer who presents an interesting contrast in his work: Although his background is religious, his poetry is often filled with eroticism, cynicism and themes usually not attributed to the divine. “No Man Is an Island” is an exploration of the power of unity and the downfalls of solitude. Donne’s poem is a timeless call for governments and individuals to focus on community.

RD.COM, GETTY IMAGES 16. “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed—and gazed—but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought: For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils. A prime example of the Romantic Movement, this poem is a celebration of nature. In it, William Wordsworth uses symbolism—clouds, stars, waves and the like—to explore themes of solitude and self-exploration.

RD.COM, GETTY IMAGES 17. “A Poison Tree” by William Blake I was angry with my friend;

I told my wrath, my wrath did end.

I was angry with my foe:

I told it not, my wrath did grow. And I waterd it in fears,

Night & morning with my tears:

And I sunned it with smiles,

And with soft deceitful wiles. And it grew both day and night.

Till it bore an apple bright.

And my foe beheld it shine,

And he knew that it was mine. And into my garden stole,

When the night had veild the pole;

In the morning glad I see;

My foe outstretched beneath the tree. Our list of the most famous poems ever written would not be complete without the work of William Blake, one of the most iconic poets of the English language. “A Poison Tree” explores the destruction of unchecked anger. When we don’t deal with our negative emotions but instead nurture them, they can grow out of control. The solution, the poem implies, is to resolve issues before they do harm.

RD.COM, GETTY IMAGES 18. “Don Juan” by Lord Byron When Bishop Berkeley said “there was no matter,”

And proved it—’twas no matter what he said:

They say his system ’tis in vain to batter,

Too subtle for the airiest human head;

And yet who can believe it! I would shatter

Gladly all matters down to stone or lead,

Or adamant, to find the World a spirit,

And wear my head, denying that I wear it. Anybody slightly familiar with English poetry will instantly recognize the name Lord Byron—and for good reason. As one of the leaders of the Romantic Movement, Byron wrote many poems that have since been engraved in history. One of his most well-known works, “Don Juan” is a poem of epic proportions filled with adventure and sensuality. At 16,000 lines (divided into 17 cantos), it’s also one of the longest poems on this list, and it’s worth reading the full story. If you’re a fan of sweeping fiction or romance novels, this epic poem is for you.

RD.COM, GETTY IMAGES 19. “For the Fallen” by Laurence Binyon With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,

England mourns for her dead across the sea.

Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,

Fallen in the cause of the free. Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal

Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,

There is music in the midst of desolation

And a glory that shines upon our tears. They went with songs to the battle, they were young,

Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.

They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;

They fell with their faces to the foe. They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them. Originally published in The Times in 1914, “For the Fallen” is Laurence Binyon’s tribute to the English soldiers fighting for their country during World War I. The lines “They shall grow not old” and “We will remember them” continue to be some of the most famous lines of poetry ever written. The above excerpt is a testament to the poem’s power, but it’s worth reading the poem in its entirety.

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.

anna martin

Hey, everyone. It’s Anna. Before we start the show today, I want to share a fun update with you. We’ve decided to offer a little something extra for “New York Times” subscribers, who are also fans of the “Modern Love” column. Starting very soon, in addition to our regular episodes of the show, which will keep publishing every Wednesday, “New York Times” subscribers will also get the latest “Modern Love” essay read aloud in our podcast feed every Friday. This is something you’ve been reaching out and asking us for, and we’ve been listening to you. So this is our way of saying, thanks for listening to us. OK, on with the show.

archived recording 1 Love now and always. archived recording 2 Did you fall in love last night? archived recording 3 Just tell her I love her. archived recording 4 Love is stronger than anything you can feel. archived recording 5 [SIGHS]: For the love. archived recording 6 Love. archived recording 7 And I love you more than anything. archived recording 8 (SINGING) What is love? archived recording 9 Here’s to love. archived recording 10 Love. [MUSIC PLAYING]

anna martin

From “The New York Times,” I’m Anna Martin. This is “Modern Love.” As you probably know, our show is inspired by the “Modern Love” column, where it’s all about the personal essay. But today we’re talking about how poetry can also help us express our messiest feelings. My guest today is America’s official poet, our poet laureate, Ada Limón. During her time in the job, which comes to an end this month, Limón has shown us, poems aren’t just words we read in a quiet room somewhere. One of her big projects was having poems installed on picnic tables in several national parks. So this summer, you could be eating a sandwich on the shores of Cape Cod, enjoying a poem by Mary Oliver. Or if you’re going to the California redwoods or the Smoky Mountains, you can find poems there, too. And I have to tell you this, because it’s out of this world literally, Limón wrote a poem that’s engraved inside a NASA spacecraft that’s on its way to Jupiter. She spoke with me from her home in Sonoma, California, and it was clear that if her term wasn’t ending, she would just keep spreading poetry all over the place as a way to soothe the turmoil she sees in the present moment.

ada limón

I would put them everywhere, without littering, of course. This might sound like a cheesy thing to say, but I think we’d all be better off if we encountered poetry on a regular basis, because it reminds us to feel, that we’re not supposed to numb out, that the weeping and the rage and the grief leads to feeling alive. [MUSIC PLAYING]

anna martin

Limón’s work as poet laureate has been vast and far-reaching, but I wanted to talk to her about something much more intimate — being a writer in love. When we come back, Ada Limón tells me why poems about love are often the scariest for her to write. And she reads a “Modern Love” essay about a writer who catches feelings for a very sexy poet and can barely get herself to write at all. Stay with us. [MUSIC PLAYING] Ada Limón, welcome to “Modern Love.”

ada limón

Thank you so much for having me. It’s such a pleasure to be here.

anna martin

So I love that the essay you chose to read today is about crushing on a hot poet.

ada limón

Sometimes it happens.

anna martin

Sometimes it happens. I was going to say, have you found it easy to fall in love with other writers?

ada limón

Oh, yes. I think one of the reasons I loved this essay was because I think, going to a writer’s residency or being around other artists in general, there’s something that’s so visceral about that experience. And I was talking to my husband earlier this morning about this essay, and we were joking about how it’s sort of unlike any other experience, a writing residency and/or an artist residency. And it’s partly because people sit down, and whereas you might be at a bar in Brooklyn, and people make small talk — oh, what do you do? What do you — I do this, I do that, right? At an artist residency, what often happens is that people sit down next to each other and say, what are you working on? And someone says, oh, I just lost my stepmother, and I’m working on this novel that’s all about what it is to lose someone of cancer at a young age, and loss, and how it makes you more impermanent and permanent in the world at the same time.

anna martin

And this is like your first conversation with the person.

ada limón

Right. And then that person says, oh, I’m working on sculptures of the body that deal with the male torso and the vulnerability of the heart chakra. I’m just making this all up.

anna martin

No, I love it. I feel like I’m there.

ada limón

And meanwhile, you’re having drinks. You’re having intellectually stimulating conversation. And you start at this moment of vulnerable rawness that you just don’t have in other places. So I think it’s very easy. I’ve watched people fall in love. I’ve watched primarily great crushes happen.

anna martin

Oh, my god. I can only imagine, yeah.

ada limón

I’m a big fan of crushes. I think crushes are good for people, even though they can be torturous.

anna martin

This essay has a pretty epic crush. Is there anything else you want to say to tee up the essay before you read it for us?

ada limón

No, I think I’ll just add that I really related to the idea of crushes or desire as a way out of writing.

anna martin

Great. We’re going to talk about that.

ada limón

Yes. I think that as a writer — and anyone who makes things and creates things understands procrastination. And I think that there is a level in which sometimes we distract ourselves in order to prevent us from maybe finishing a project.

anna martin

Cannot wait to hear you speak on that. Ada, whenever you are ready, I would love for you to read this essay.

ada limón

OK. “An Empty Heart is One That Can Be Filled” by Lily King. [MUSIC PLAYING] “I was 31 before I got my heart broken. It was spring, and I had quit my job and driven across country to an artist colony in New England, the kind of place that provides you with a cabin in the woods that is not within sight of any of the other cabins. My residency was for eight weeks. I hoped to finish my first novel there. The poet arrived a week after I did. He was too skinny, but his eyes were very blue. My first joke with the poet was about “Lolita.” We were sitting at dinner, and another writer was waxing on about the novel. The poet and I both said that the disturbing pedophilia canceled out the luscious prose, and we could not worship it the way we would like. Actually, we may have just caught eyes, not having to explain, love means never having to explain the misogynistic pedophilia of “Lolita.” And the other writer fought back. So the poet held up his napkin as a screen between the “Lolita” fans and us. Everyone laughed. I swooned. A few nights later, we watched short films made by other residents. There were no seats left, so we stood in the back. He was just behind me, breathing into my hair, our bodies seeming to speak to each other in the dark. When it was over, with hardly a word, we got into my car and drove out of town. We ended up in a small village that had been transported back to 1969 by a film crew, with thick wooden signs for the soda shop and beauty parlor and a huge advertisement for old-fashioned men’s shoes painted onto a brick building. On the village green was a gazebo. We weren’t sure if it was real or for the movie. We climbed its steps and played with cards that I had found in my glove compartment. On the way home, he pressed his lips to my neck. The memory of it made my stomach flip all night long. The spring unfurled like the fat ferns along the road to my cabin. May turned to June. I had grown up in New England, and so had the poet. The humid heat at noon, the cold rains on the roof, his accent, his humor, and his hands on my skin all felt like a home I had nearly forgotten. He was writing poems about bees, sex poems with pollen and stamens and pistils, bees sexing their flowers, sexing their queen, jelly and nectar and death in mid-air. He’d read them to me in his truck in the parking lot of the lake where we swam. Later, he wrote a poem about that, too, how the water turned our arms to amber. We fooled around in his cabin, careful to time it right so the guy delivering lunch to the doorstep wouldn’t catch us. I came away giddy, barely able to walk in a straight line. I fell for him so fast and as if through space. No planet in sight. He had said — or at least I thought he had said — that he and his girlfriend in New York had broken up. But later, he said they were taking a break, which was not at all the same thing, and not at all like my recent breakup with a man in California, which had been clean and permanent. He began saying that our strong physical connection was too intense, maybe even unnatural. He said, as if trying to translate his concern into fiction writer language I would understand, that our connection might be like an unreliable narrator. Stay away from him, my mother said to me when we spoke on the phone. You’re there to write, so write. I had been revising the same short chapter for weeks. The stress I felt at the colony had begun to transform the place for me from writer’s retreat to fitness camp. To keep all the anxiety at bay, I embraced a brutal workout regimen, running a 12-mile loop, swimming across the lake, and playing tennis in the late afternoon. This athletic schedule didn’t leave me much time to write. The poet left a week before I did. We said goodbye in the parking lot. He got into his truck, and as I leaned in the window, he touched his chest and said, you are deep in here. I tried to believe this was the way a poet says, I love you, but I know it was more like the way someone who is not in love dodges those words at the moment they are expected. After that, I wanted to leave, too. Finally, I did. My sister in Massachusetts took me in. She lived in a carriage house with her boyfriend, who had a friend who got me a job waiting tables at a fancy restaurant in Cambridge. In August, the poet came to visit, but he stayed with friends in Boston. We drove out to Walden Pond three days in a row. We talked and swam and pretended our arms were still amber, but they were not. On the last of those days, he dropped me off at the Sunoco station on Memorial Drive, where I had left my bike that morning. It was over. There were chrysanthemums planted along one edge of the parking lot, and every time I drove past those flowers that fall, I would sob and wail in my car. I was crying in public, too, crying as I wrote in my journal at Dunkin’ Donuts, crying as I put the heavy napkins and silverware on the tables at the fancy restaurant, crying as I biked home across the river at midnight. But I marveled, too. I marveled at the feeling of being heartbroken. I had loved and lost plenty of times, most of the time, really, because I seemed to fall for men who couldn’t love me back. But I had never let myself feel it. I numbed up, moved on. But this time, perhaps because it had happened so fast, I didn’t numb up. And I found this feeling, even through my tears, interesting. I ran on the paths along the Charles River, and I thought, this is what people and books and movies are talking about when they talk about losing love. People’s hearts break, and it feels like this. It feels like someone has beaten you up with brass knuckles. But it also felt, at the same time, like the universe was welcoming me in. I was heartbroken, but I felt less alone than I had in a long while. In November, I met a man I liked. He asked me out, then canceled on the morning of our first date, saying on my sister’s machine that he had to leave town unexpectedly. He wrote me a letter saying he would be back before New Year’s. The letter was postmarked New Mexico. He said I could write him there at his aunt’s, but I didn’t. I wrote him off. Another man who wasn’t ready, I thought. Not even ready for a first date. The poet came back on a cold night. We walked my sister’s dog. He played me a video of his father, who was mentally ill, that he had recorded that day. I watched and felt terrible for him. When I walked him to his truck that night, there was a defeated, restless charge between us, and I punched him in the stomach lightly. But he looked alarmed by something he saw in me — perhaps everything I wanted that he couldn’t give. A week later, the man in New Mexico came back east. We had our first date and many more, and I married him. My heart was ready for him, for his kindness and honesty, his easy, steady love for me, for that kind of love, the mutual kind. My heart was open because I had finally let it break. [MUSIC PLAYING]

anna martin

Thank you for that. While it’s fresh in your mind, what are your first reactions, your first thoughts? What is this essay bringing up for you?

ada limón

Oh, there are so many things that I love about this poem, but — this poem — about this essay.

anna martin

[LAUGHS]: A bit of a Freudian slip.

ada limón

Yes. I really love how when the world makes us vulnerable, whether it’s through loss or some kind of transformational event, it opens us up to the world again — if we let it, if we let it. Every time I’ve been hurt, I rage against it, I deny it, and then eventually, I soften and soften. And it feels like, oh, right, this is the world I’m supposed to be living in, the world where I am paying attention, the world where I feel connected, where I feel, the world where I feel. And I think when we’re in that state of receiving, we are more connected and more human, especially as artists, but really, for all of us. [MUSIC PLAYING]

anna martin

More with Ada Limón in just a moment. We’ll be right back. [MUSIC PLAYING] You’re talking about rage as a knee-jerk kind of instinct when something doesn’t go our way, when there’s loss experienced, and you say that has to soften and soften and soften. Can you give me advice on that softening? Because it’s really difficult to do.

ada limón

Yeah. I mean, I can only speak from my personal experience, but I think the first thing you have to do is feel it. I think you have to feel the rage.

anna martin

Yeah.

ada limón

And sometimes I have to write. I write in my journal every single day, and sometimes I have to write terrible things, really rageful, horrible poems, really rageful, horrible things I wish for people. And I think there is a level in which if we embrace that kind of anger, we can recognize that there’s some insanity in it, and that it also is not always telling you the truth. And I think we have to feel that rage, because I think on the other side of that rage is grief. And even in this wonderful essay, that’s where she’s crying all the time. I think the rage is actually protecting us, and it’s safer than grief.

anna martin

I love the scene in the essay where the author, Lily King, is running by the river, and she’s feeling heartbroken, but she’s also feeling so connected to humanity because of it. She’s like, oh, my gosh, this is it.

ada limón

This is it.

anna martin

I remember feeling that way my first heartbreak. There was such a pain in it and also like a, wow, I’ve arrived. People since the dawn of time have been feeling so sad like me.

ada limón

Yes.

anna martin

That is the moment where I felt tapped into the whole history — this is going to sound insane, but of human feeling. And it was in a moment of sadness and in a moment of loss. And I guess, I wonder, is it easier to access that kind of connectedness in a moment of pain, I wonder?

ada limón

Through grief.

anna martin

Yeah.

ada limón

Yeah. And I think that’s a really astute point because I think that oftentimes, poetry does that, is that we write poems about grief and about pain more often than we do about gratitude and joy and contentedness. And partly because I think that when we’re happy, we’re not driven to the page.

anna martin

Oh, yeah.

ada limón

And when we’re heartbroken, there’s this, oh, my gosh, we need to write about this. We need to — it’s also a way of clinging to it, right? There’s that great meditation, which I find very useful, which is just recognizing that every single one of us will die. The human experience of being born and dying is not exceptional. We will all have that. And when I think about that, I can then widen my appreciation for this time in my body, this time on the planet. And I think heartbreak makes you feel that way. I think there’s a level in which — I remember exactly where I was when I realized that, oh, everyone’s going to die. I was on this New York City subway. My stepmother had just died about a month earlier. And I was looking at all these faces, and I thought, oh, I’m sure half the people here have already lost someone dear to them. And then they still are going to work, and some people have packed their lunches. Like, what?

anna martin

Lunches.

ada limón

They got up at 5:00 AM, and they packed their lunches? And even though their mother’s dead, they’re still doing that?

anna martin

They’re combing their hair. They’re putting mascara on.

ada limón

What?

anna martin

Yeah, of course.

ada limón

I was weeping. I was like, this is incredible. How brave.

anna martin

Yeah.

ada limón

How courageous to go on in the world when your heart is broken or you’ve lost the person that you love the most, you know? This is life.

anna martin

Of course it happened on the New York City subway. These moments always happen, right, on the — how old were you when that happened? I’m curious. Just, like, when was this?

ada limón

34.

anna martin

Another thing that I’m curious about that you said before you read this essay was you resonate with the experience of distracting yourself from work through love or through crushes. Is there a moment that you’re able to share where the stuff of life got in the way?

ada limón

Yeah, I mean, I think that one of the — I mean, I love, love. It’s one of my favorite topics. I can talk about love all the time. And I also think it can serve as this way to not be in the self.

anna martin

Huh, yeah.

ada limón

And I remember my first writing residency. It was right after September 11, and I went out to Cape Cod to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. And I remember getting advice from this wonderful poet, Marie Howe, who said, have a wonderful time. Try not to fall in love with anyone —

anna martin

Wow.

ada limón

— because it’ll just distract you. And of course, day one, I was like, oh, I think I’m kind of interested in this person. And it was true. She was completely right. But I did write at the same time. And I do feel like I got a lot of beautiful work done, but — but I don’t know if it was beautiful. It was probably pretty sloppy at the time. But I do think there’s something about artists that’s like, how do we get out of this moment that isn’t through the page, you know? You kind of look around and go, oh. Oh.

anna martin

That person’s looking at you, yeah.

ada limón

We used to have this phrase that we used when I lived in Brooklyn with my dear girlfriends, who are still my closest best friends. If we were going through a hard time — let’s say, we were going through something with our parents, or we were going through something with our work — we would say, you know what? I think I need a shiny object.

anna martin

[LAUGHS]:

ada limón

And the shiny object would be a crutch.

anna martin

Yeah. I’m needing a lot of those these days.

ada limón

We even had — in Texas, we would say, SO, possible SO.

anna martin

That’s so exciting.

ada limón

Yeah. And so I really believe in the power of a crush to bring us out, sometimes, just to give us a little fun thing to think about that’s not the agony of our own failure.

anna martin

I have to circle back just because I have to know what happened to this writing retreat or this retreat crush. Did you ultimately confess your feelings? Was it a thing that you kept inside? What was the deal with that crush?

ada limón

Oh, no. Yeah, no, we ended up dating until the residency was over.

anna martin

Oh, wow. OK, so it’s very similar to this essay. Really? And —

ada limón

Yeah.

anna martin

OK. And you were able to write as much as you — I mean, did you find it distracting in the way that Lily King outlines and in the way your poet friend warned you about?

ada limón

Yeah. I think that it was a friendship, too. So I think that it was different. I don’t think it had the level of extreme desire that’s in this essay where you can almost feel that sort of obsession.

anna martin

Yeah.

ada limón

So it allowed for a little bit more space to think.

anna martin

When the retreat came to an end, was it sort of like, and this crush will remain here, and we will go our separate ways, or was it like a — with Lily King, in this essay, there’s multiple sort of stutter stops in terms at the end. What was your experience?

ada limón

We wrote letters.

anna martin

Oh, my gosh. Of course you did.

ada limón

We love letters. Poets love letters. We just — you know. It’s like the best thing. Write us a letter. We’re like, oh.

anna martin

Well, I was going to say, it makes me think of — Lily King talks about the poetry of the poet, the object of her desire in the essay. And he’s writing those sex poems about bees and pollen. And it’s a bit sounding cliché to me. It’s like, birds and the bees, you, know, tells all this time. I guess, I wonder, like, when you are writing love poems or love letters — I don’t know — how do you write a good one? How do you write one that sticks?

ada limón

Yeah. I do think that the hardest poems I’ve ever written have been love poems. And I think there was a risk to it. If you write a love poem to someone you are in love with at the moment, there is this fear, right, that oh, my god, I’m admitting this love. What if, God forbid, right, something happens, and then someday I’m going to have to read this poem and think, that doesn’t exist anymore?

anna martin

Yeah. How do you keep yourself in the moment, then, when you’re writing a love poem that you want to resonate to someone you’re in love with now?

ada limón

Yeah. I mean, I’ve written lots of love poems to my husband. And I just have to go with the joy of it and really trying to get that love right and not to be hokey about it, right? I want the love poem to be, really, for him. That’s how I stay in the moment, is I really focus on him, and how can I make it — like, this is us. It’s not love with a capital L. It’s our love, which is with a little lowercase love that is daily and needy and beautiful in its own way. It’s epic in its own way. But it’s not shouting on a mountain top. It’s whispering, and it’s the breeze in the curtains, as opposed to the storms.

anna martin

Yeah. I mean, this is really making me think of one of my favorite poems of yours. It’s called “Love Poem with Apologies for My Appearance.”

ada limón

I actually marked that.

anna martin

Really?

ada limón

I marked that.

anna martin

Oh, can you read it?

ada limón

Yes.

anna martin

I love this one.

ada limón

It resonates with this essay, too, because of the moment where she talks about it’s the different kind of love, the mutual love at the very end, when she marries her husband. And this is very much for Lucas, my husband. “Love Poem with Apologies for My Appearance.” “Sometimes I think you get the worst of me. The much-loved loose forest-green sweatpants, the long bra-less days, hair knotted and uncivilized, a shadowed brow where the devilish thoughts do their hoofed dance on the brain. I’d like to say this means I love you, the stained white cotton T-shirt, the tears, pistachio shells, the mess of orange peels on my desk, but it’s different than that. I move in this house with you the way I move in my mind, unencumbered by beauty’s cage. I do like I do in the tall grass, more animal-me than much else. I’m wrong, it is that I love you, but it’s more that when you say it back, lights out, a cold wind through curtains, for maybe the first time in my life, I believe it.”

anna martin

I love that a love poem can have stained sweatpants in it. It feels so deeply real.

ada limón

Thank you.

anna martin

How does your husband, Lucas, react to a poem like this?

ada limón

So often, he’ll be — this became a true story, which was I would do all of these events and dress up and wear these suits and dresses and get your hair done and your nails done, you know, the whole thing that you do for all of this crowd. And he would see these pictures of me on Facebook or on Instagram, and he’d say, wow, you look really beautiful out there. And I sort of had this moment where I thought, oh, he hasn’t seen that me. He gets the writer me. And he loved it. He loves this poem.

anna martin

You said that love poems are the hardest to write, maybe the scariest to write. There’s so much at stake. But it sounds like you’re not as interested in writing safe poems right now. Is that fair to say?

ada limón

I think that’s true. I think that’s true. And I think that trying to write towards a happiness or towards gratitude, I think it’s really hard. It is easier to plummet into the bottomless pit of despair, and it is easier to write poems from there. It is harder to choose life, you know?

anna martin

Yeah.

ada limón

It is harder to say, I am going to fling my body back into the uncertain tornado of the world. I’m going to do it again. Here I go. Here I go again.

anna martin

I hear birds, beautiful birds in your background. That is so nice.

ada limón

The rain just stopped, so the birds are coming out.

anna martin

Oh. There’s a metaphor there a poet could plumb.

ada limón

Yeah. Yeah.

anna martin

Ada Limón, thank you so much for this conversation.

ada limón

Thank you. Thank you. It was a real pleasure to talk to you.

anna martin

One day last fall, Odesans woke up to find that the names of many streets on Google Maps no longer matched the names they knew, which were also, for the most part, the names that remained on street signs. Pushkin Street became Italian Street. Bunin Street had been renamed for Nina Strokata, a Ukrainian dissident, who was also from Odesa. Taya Naydenko’s street had once been called Nobility (Dvoryanskaya) Street; it changed names a half-dozen times over the course of the 20th century before reverting to Nobility. Now Naydenko discovered that her street had been renamed for Vsevolod Zmiienko. She searched the name: a military man who fought the Bolsheviks and died in exile. Naydenko wasn’t happy. “I may come from a police family,” she said — both of her parents were officers — “but I don’t think we should be naming streets for everybody in uniform.”

Admittedly, Naydenko was tired and irritable that day, as she is on many days. She seems always to be raising money and using it to buy supplies for her husband’s detachment. The soldiers, who spend weeks on end sheltering in damp and cold spaces, whose winter uniforms aren’t always as warm as they should be and whose food rations are sometimes lacking, often ask for medication: decongestants, pain relievers, digestive aids. Naydenko tries to buy about 20 packages at a time — not a bulk purchase, exactly, but more than any one or two pharmacies usually have in stock. She uses a website that searches drugstore supplies, then makes the rounds. The day the street names changed, Naydenko needed two dozen packs of cold medicine and found herself staring at a screen that was inscrutable to her. “I’m not much of a spatial thinker,” she said. “I need words.” Without familiar toponyms, she was lost in her own city.

We were having dinner at a pub called Sherlock on what used to be Bunin Street. A tweed cap of the sort that the fictional British detective wore hung in the corner. “And another reason I get irritated,” Naydenko said, “is that we know what’s at stake.” She smiled. She was quoting the first line of a 1942 poem by Anna Akhmatova, the great Russian poet who was born near Odesa. A lot happened in this moment, and most of it went unsaid. What made the act of quoting particularly poignant is the odd fact — I can’t overemphasize just how odd — that Naydenko, tall, thin, broad-shouldered and angular, with jet-black hair and a dramatic aquiline nose, looks like no one I’ve ever seen — except several iconic portraits of Akhmatova, who died more than a decade before Naydenko was born. Before I met Naydenko, I had been warned not to mention the resemblance.

The poem Naydenko quoted goes on to say, “And our courage will hold to the last. / … Through it all we will keep you alive, Russian word, / Mighty language of our Russian land.” (Translation by Nancy K. Anderson.) Naydenko’s choice of poem was no accident — but also not an invitation to me, a person raised on Russian poetry in Moscow, to join in lamenting the fate of the Russian language in Ukraine. If the poets of Odesa choose to preserve their use of Russian and their Russian-language literary history, it won’t be as a language or a history they share with the Russians, who have spent the last three years killing their people and destroying their cities.

Doing Life With… is a BellaNaija Features series that showcases how people live, work, travel, care for their families and… everything in between. We are documenting the lives of all people and ensuring everyone is well-represented at BN.

Did you miss our last conversation with Princess Adesile? You can catch up here.

Today, we’re doing life with Maureen Onwunali, a Dublin-born Nigerian poet. 22-year-old Onwunali is a two-time national slam champion and resident artist at The Roundhouse.

Enjoy the conversation!

Hey Maureen. Thanks for being here. How are you feeling?

Hi, Ahmad, thank you for having me! I’m honoured to be here.

Let’s start from here–do you have memories of Nigeria, either lived or inherited, that continue to shape your identity and your voice as a poet today?

I think it’s the plight of any parent to pack as much of their homeland into 23kg suitcases and emulate the culture as best they can, wherever they may be. I may have been born in Ireland, but in our home, it is Abia state. My Igbo identity is fundamental to who I am as a person.

Many of your poems carry weights, indescribable weights. When did poetry become the language you use to hold life complexities? In other words, when did you discover poetry?

Poetry first found me as a shy twelve-year-old in primary school. It was at that time I realised how everyday language often fails us, especially in our attempts to communicate our emotions. Poetry for me celebrates the beauty of sameness, drawing on mundane experiences we all share. Regardless of who you are or the life you live, we are all waking up under the same sun. We’re in this life together, and it’s through poetry that I try to remind people of that.

Your collection, Homegrown, what was the emotional or creative turning point that led you to put it together? Was there a particular poem that unlocked the rest of the collection?

“Blessed be our mothers’ bones – the backbone to our black homes.”

That was a line taken from a poem I had written previously. I think the collection Homegrown was grounded in the idea of home being more than the four walls around you, but also the flesh and bone that surrounds you. It’s about the feeling of comfort we find in others, but most importantly, making a home within yourself.

As someone with Nigerian roots, how do you navigate the in-between–that space of dual belonging–both on and off the page?

In my work, I often write about belonging and otherness. The feeling of being pulled in different directions by different identities. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. Writing within the diaspora, you realise that you’re living a hybrid of experiences, like speaking in your mother tongue with a European accent. I am the accumulation of all the places I’ve lived, and the people I’ve met–my work is a reflection of that. That’s the beauty of multiculturalism today: you’re constantly re/defining who you are.

Your live performances are always powerful. There is something about your voice that makes the delivery more moving. What changes for you when a poem leaves the page and enters a room full of people?

Thank you. I’m a firm believer that most poems should be spoken. It’s one thing to write a poem, but it’s another to breathe life into the words. No one will ever do it justice like the original author. When that poem enters a room full of people, it has taken on new life. It will go home and hopefully stay with them for as long as they can hold on to it.

Tell me, do you have a creative process? How would you describe it?

I wouldn’t say I have a process, per se, as my writing usually occurs in spontaneous bursts, often stopping me in my tracks, so I keep my phone on me to capture my thoughts. However, sometimes when I’m experiencing writer’s block, I just need to go live my life for a while: If you’re writing about the world, you need to be a part of it. Experience is the best teacher.

As a Roundhouse Resident, you’ve had the chance to develop your artistry in community with other creatives. What has that experience taught you about collaboration, growth, or even vulnerability?

The residency has reminded me that no man is an island, and no artist can be great by themself. A lot of creative practices, particularly poetry, can be very isolating if you close yourself off, so it’s very important to surround yourself with people very different to you/ your practice. Collaboration is essential

Beyond poetry, what do you do for fun? Tell me about your background, education and any part of your childhood that shaped who you are today?

I’m 22 years of age. I was born in Ireland, and my parents are Nigerian, from Aba, Abia State. I graduated from the University of Warwick with a degree in Politics and Sociology last summer. I’ve always been very passionate about politics, and that passion has certainly shaped what I deem important in life. My poetry reflects that.

I’ve moved around quite a bit, so I have gotten familiar with talking to/ understanding people (and myself by extension). Having to reintroduce oneself means finding out about what we hold dear. I always enjoy meeting new people and building connections. For fun, I like to keep hobbies that I’m not necessarily good at, but that keep my mind sharp. I also enjoy cooking.

What does a typical day look like for you?

A typical day will generally include travelling to a different city for a performance and sorting through personal admin – I find I spend most of my days staring out of train windows and writing. When I’m not writing, I’m thinking about writing. I usually end my evenings by giving thanks to God for the day I’ve had and plan ahead for the next one.

Thank you for being on Doing Life With, Maureen

Thank you for having me.

_____________________

Many thanks to Maureen Onwunali for having this conversation with us and answering all our questions – and swiftly too, we must add.

Do you love this content, have any feedback for us or want to be a BellaNaija Features contributor? We’d love to read from you. Shoot us an email: [email protected]. Join us on Saturday for the next episode!

Essays in the “Remembrances” series pay tribute to poets who have died in the past year.

Breyten started every class in a similar way: smiling, looking around, he’d say, “Hello everyone, good to see you. I was at an exhibition at the Met over the weekend and I saw…” or “I was talking to Lawrence Weschler at the launch of […] and it reminded me of […].” Then he’d read a poem, like Mahmoud Darwish’s “To Describe an Almond Blossom”:

Yet if a writer could manage in a fragment

to describe almond blossoms, fog would recede

from the hills, and a whole nation would say:

This is it!

These are the words of our national anthem.

At the time, I thought of these moments as mere preambles, but now I understand they were integral to his project. The poems he read out and the launches he mentioned were almost always by poets from outside the Anglosphere, or by English-speaking poets from marginalized communities. He talked about them to open our baby-poet eyes to the light of the wider world.

I remember the susurration of his South African accent, the extraordinary handsomeness of his youth still evident in his 70-year-old self, his leonine white hair combed back, the Nehru jackets with stand-up collars worn over T-shirts with the map of Africa behind a Pan-African slogan, his rainbow scarves. I was 38 at the time, easily 10 years older than most students. It was autumn 2010, and this was my first real workshop. I’d only attended community writing groups before. I was excited and insecure. Others had been through BFAs in the northeast and were already fluent: “The anaphora here is doing good work, but I wonder if you might look at your enjambment?”

Part of me dismissed the shop talk, but it also irked me that I didn’t know how to use it. At the time, poetry, for me, was already in danger of becoming a means to an end—the next fellowship, or university job, fulfillment of an inchoate desire to “be seen,” a salve for some wound or inner lack—whereas I sensed that for Breyten poetry was a way of being, an adventure. I respected his singlemindedness, a kind of purity, and felt drawn to that.

In the 15 years that have elapsed since Breyten’s class, I’ve learned that there’s no lasting satisfaction in the po-biz and that I have to keep fighting against my own ego to find the elusive duende that Breyten seemed to believe in. I suspect that Breyten wasn’t interested in formal poetry without heart or mystery. He was interested in risk, what might be called the “Dionysian,” or what Robert Graves described in The White Goddess as the way, “reading a poem, the hairs will bristle.”

After eight weeks of workshop, Breyten emailed about our last month of classes. His tone, as in many of his emails to us, was casual and affectionate:

24 November: No class. Preparing for the slaughter of the gobbler birds. 1 and 8 December: We go through the editing and putting together of Tongue of the World. I may also invite a young outside poet who is working on a website project of the same intention to come and join us, and perhaps as well a poet/painter from Tunisia who has just completed a book of texts and images.

Several weeks earlier, we’d started exchanging exemplary poems for Tongue of the World, Breyten’s idea for a kind of underground, universal anthology of poetry that might communicate to a wider public, beyond cleverness and shows of technique. Holding court at the head of the long table, he said, chuckling, “Imagine if you could have a kind of chapbook in airport lounges or hotel rooms—you know, on the nightstand beside that ubiquitous Bible, right?” Then he went on to imagine out loud, “the kind of person who has never read poetry, reading Lorca, Szymborska, Akhmatova, Aimé Césaire.” I didn’t realize at the time that he was riffing on Joseph Brodsky’s idea that “books should be brought to the doorstep […] like milk in England […]. At the very least, an anthology of American poetry should be found in the drawer of every room in every motel in the land, next to the Bible.”

Preparing for the shortlist, apart from exchanging poems by Monica Youn, Eavan Boland, Bob Kaufman, and others, we also emailed rengas to each other. I’m struck now by Breyten’s egalitarian spirit, as he joined in with one of his own, “The Goat Memory,” which ends: “Hear me bleat in the night / against the smoke / of distant places.”

In our penultimate class, Breyten had said, “Ja, bring something to drink for the last class. We won’t be workshopping. But, something stronger than that energy drink, that bloody ice tea, eh, Richard Prins?” His lips indulged in an attractive plosiveness as he said “Prins.” He side-eyed Richard, and grinned, and Richard cackled, his tall floral can of Arizona beside him.

At the start of the last class, Breyten took a magnum of red wine out of a tote bag and plonked it on the table among our normal-sized bottles. It was a Bordeaux, I like to think. The bottle was hilariously large, as if it had priapism, and he shared it round in paper cups, then went into full-on raconteur mode. He’d been kicking back for at least half an hour and was talking about his cottage in Catalonia, near Girona, when I interjected something about the Barri Gòtic in Barcelona, trying to assert that I also knew a lot about the locale. Breyten’s eyes slid over me. He gave the merest nod and continued his ramifying digression.

For three hours he ranged across the byways and walking trails linking poetry, Buddhism, politics, history. I realized that for the last 14 weeks he’d been listening carefully and sensitively, holding space, leaning forward, nodding. Now he seemed to be withdrawing from his teaching persona.

Though I didn’t know it then, Breyten’s contract as NYU Global Professor hadn’t been renewed and in mid-December he departed for Europe and Africa for good. We tried to keep the ball rolling on Tongue of the World, and got as far as voting on the contents of a chapbook, but it soon petered out only to resurface a year or two later as Tongue: A Journal of Writing and Art, edited by Breyten’s former students, the poets R. A. Villanueva, Adam Wiedewitsch, and Colin Cheney.

Looking back, Breyten had looser boundaries than the other professors, evident in the way he’d email some of us risqué jokes, and in his gentleness when a depressed student—a recent graduate who still hung out in the Lillian Vernon House—wandered into class, weeping quietly. He treated her arrival as natural, saying, “Here, Alice, sit here, beside me,” then went on with the class, periodically checking in with her. He reminded me of my Irish mentors, the poets James Liddy, John Liddy, and Pearse Hutchinson, whose most teachable moments took place anywhere but the classroom. But it was in that monumental monologue that I really saw Breyten detaching from officially sanctioned notions of what a teaching poet looks like. Breyten was going back into the wild—unless he had always been wilder and looser than I’d known. For the rest of the class, Breyten rode further and further into the sunset, riding very slowly.

I can’t imagine that the thought of getting slapped on the wrist for not teaching through our last class would have given him a second’s pause. After all, was he not the dissident who, living in Paris during the Vietnam War, had married Yolande, of Vietnamese descent, and been denied reentry to South Africa under the country’s Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act and the Immorality Act? This was also the same man who’d been imprisoned for high treason by the apartheid regime, after entering the country incognito to try and recruit white dissidents for a new branch of the ANC.

For Breyten, writing and activism were one. He helped organize the famous 1987 Dakar conference on Gorée island, one of the meetings that led to the end of apartheid. He also co-founded the Gorée Institute, whose literary arm, the Pirogue Collective, oversaw the three-volume anthology Imagine Africa (Archipelago, 2011, 2014, 2017).

Breyten wrote poetry in both his native languages, English and Afrikaans, and is celebrated for having wrestled the latter back from the oppressor, calling Afrikaans “A unique tongue that in many ways is a kind of expression, the sedimentation of several centuries of hybridization.” He also wrote several plays and works of nonfiction. While in prison, in addition to completing several volumes of poetry, Breyten wrote Mouroir, an experimental, genre-defying work that has been described as a docu-dream or dreamlike/nightmarish prose work. With its unusual landscape format, its thick brown paper cover bearing a crêpe-like, tactile quality and an appropriately dark Rothko image, Mouroir has a special resonance for me, because it was launched the winter I was in workshop with Breyten. The book’s opening sentence is an implicit statement of purpose: “Now, in retrospect, it is difficult to remember exactly how or precisely when it happened.” The “it” is never defined. Instead, the various sections of this “mirror novel” function like a series of fractals, with images of disquiet, strangeness, and beauty that are peeled back to reveal ever deeper and stranger landscapes with hallucinatory clarity:

There the transparent glimmer of coloured glass panes set into the door fell over him, the Rouault blue, the wine rosé, the evening ochre—and was reflected in his eyes so that, between the lashes, these seemed to have small windows.

Or, more sinister:

he stood there listening for something—perhaps the sound of […] the ping-ping and the clackety-clack of steel balls on a pin-table, or the slow tearing sound (like orgasm) of a mirror breaking with the likeness still captive in it.

I barely knew Breyten as a person, or a poet. What I did know was his teaching persona. I was confused by the way he taught. Where he facilitated, guided, left space, I wanted him to be prescriptive. In bowling terms, I wanted gutter guards while Breyten offered freedom. I wanted him to say more—and he certainly did talk, but he was more interested in us discovering our own thinking about poetry and how to critique it, than in telling us how to go about it.

One thing Breyten said frequently was: “You see, David [or Jan, Sarah, James, Eric, Ben, or Lizzie], the older I get, I feel that often it’s a case of not going far enough: with an image, a metaphor, or how a work in general is imagined.” Stroking his chin, he’d look down, intense. Then he’d meet your eye and conclude, “Ja, you could go further here.”

Not long ago, I found myself saying the same thing to a student. She had written a poem about taking the boat train from rural Ireland to London, as a little girl, when she’d thought that the train would transform into an amphibious vehicle at Rosslare port. There were sections of this track in her poem, but it wasn’t continuously laid, the child’s point of view interrupted by adult exposition. I told her: “Years ago, a teacher of mine used to say, ‘one of the problems is that we don’t go further.’ Why don’t you use the image of the train-boat all the way, do it in a kind of yellow submarine?” In the next draft, as the train took a deep breath and dived into the sea, I could see that my student had understood, and gone as far as she’d needed to go.

The way this idea has taken root inside me makes me realize what I owe Breyten, and reminds me of the ways that people persist in us—as if life were a caravan route along which the things we have learned are carried, so that the traces of those who have been important to us travel alongside us.