One of my best friends was taking a podcast class this term and did one of her final projects on ‘what Middlebury students think about during class’. She went around collecting funny tidbits from friends and acquaintances, putting together soundbytes of sexual fantasies and random phrases about the state of the world, and when she came to me I answered with perhaps the douchiest response, saying that I honestly felt I couldn’t for the life of me think of thoughts I was having in class that shouldn’t be there. My friend shut off her recorder with a huff, but it really was true. Not because while I was in class I was always thinking about form and internal rhymes, but because in this course it felt as though we were supposed to be thinking about everything that we could. No thought felt out of bounds because everything has to do with poetry, whether it is something a lover said to us the night before, our parent’s wedding and our grandparent’s tears, the loss in faith with the world, politics, the belief in home. All of these thoughts are going to lead us somewhere; we are going somewhere.
This January has been a month of movement. Nothing static: things happen intensely and fast-paced this term. Less class means a focus on relationships, on art, on the self and its place in the world. It was a month of marching, standing, shouting, singing, crying, walking. I walked for myself in Washington and for the others who were there, and for those who don’t know that their lives are half-formed, I finally understood what it was to be manipulated and gaslighted in my personal and political life, I asked one of my best friends for forgiveness again, I stopped asking a boy to stay, I stopped asking him for anything. Nothing static: everything has changed in four weeks, in a small scale and in the larger topography of the world.
It was a meditation to walk quietly in the woods with all of you. The group staggered and disjointed, all of us random and odd in our own way: all of us so very different, with different struggles, thoughts, aches. All connected too, perhaps just in the simple desire to make sense of the world, of ourselves, specifically in a time when sense and logic and truth feel unattainable. I have a confidence in art and poetry that I had gotten out of touch with, in the power there is just in allowing yourself the space and time to meditate on what matters, on what to do with our lives that can often feel inconsequential.
Most of all, what I have taken away from this month, from this course, is something so baseline and cliché, one of those things that you can know in some far off way, something you can know once and forget, something that you can remember in the kind of way like when the fever breaks, a snap back to reality: voice matters.
The world is very big; you are very big in it.
The Walk of the Poem 