Poetry as Expansive Compassion

I applied to be poet laureate of my town, Wallingford, Connecticut, in February of 2020 when I was seven months pregnant—a month before Trump declared COVID a national emergency. For months I debated whether or not this was a good idea.

My first instinct, when I saw the open call for applications, was to lament what a shame it was. What poor timing! How could I possibly apply, with a baby on the way and a rambunctious four-year-old already, and a full-time job to boot? But I’d spent the last few years in this new town—we’d moved here from Brooklyn only two years prior—feeling on the periphery of our new life, since we’d moved here for my husband’s job and I was now working remotely. When I saw the position listed on the Wallingford Public Library’s website, then, I immediately saw not only an opportunity to meet and connect with new people but also a way to establish an independent identity for myself here in the best way I knew how—through poetry. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to do it. And the more I worried about how overloaded I’d be, the more I knew that the fear was telling me exactly what I wanted to do.

So I applied, working feverishly to present myself as a candidate no one in their right mind could not choose.

The world, of course, had other plans. Namely, lockdown. In early March, we pulled our daughter from her preschool and got ready to hunker down. When I told the director over the phone, she said, “It’s the right thing to do, since you’re pregnant and at higher risk.” Rather than reassure me that I was doing the right thing, though, her words served only to alarm me anew, as all I could hear reverberating was high risk, high risk, high risk. This new label made me want to hermetically seal myself in my house until my due date so I would be sure to not contract COVID, pass it on to my unborn child, and/or be separated from him at birth. Far more frightening at that juncture, though, were the hypothetical case models I kept seeing in the news, which showed the Northeast infection rate peaking—astronomically—right around my due date. Nobody knew—or wanted to find out—what would happen if the hospitals were inundated. The word “unprecedented” was used so often it lost its meaning.

Now, of course, the laureateship was the absolute last thing on my mind. I was too preoccupied with how my delivery was going to happen—if I would even have doctors and nurses, if they, in turn, would have PPE, and if my husband was going to be allowed to be present. Already I knew that my doulas would not be allowed in, which crushed me, after weeks of deliberate planning and preparation. At another point, in the blur of my anxiety, I misread a local news article saying that a library branch in our area had to shutter due to budget cuts and worried that my own town’s public library—the institution hosting the laureateship—would also be threatened. So I just assumed the laureateship would be canceled like everything else.

So, when I finally did get the happy call one very hot June evening, after a healthy, normal delivery that had gone as well as I could have hoped, I could hardly believe it. Poetry would go on.

And thank God it did. Because 2020 was too much. In every way it was too much. Too much darkness, too much gross cruelty, too much disinformation, too much staggering idiocy. Lost livelihoods, devastated families, working mothers, who were now also online schooling their children, on the brink of collapse.

In light of all this, I chose to see the new urgency of the laureateship and its singular power to calm, heal, and inspire. I began an Instagram account, @poetlaureate_walling, and posted new poems every week, particularly with the goal of amplifying the voices of BIPOC and LGBTQIA poets. I organized a Zoom reading and lecture series; this spring, among those invited to read, I was honored to be able to present National Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Arthur Sze. I selected new poetry books for the library to acquire. I read my own poems and talked about craft and process for National Poetry Month on the library’s podcast, The Bookmark. Next year I will read an original poem for Wallingford’s Jubilee, a celebration of its 350th year (two years delayed due to COVID-19). And I hope to do more—poetry readings for children, writing workshops.

In all this, I have viewed my unpaid laureateship as a service, a practice of care and compassion. While I fervently do believe that an artist should not work for free—not only because it hurts her, but also because it hurts other artists down the line—I applied and took the position when it was offered to me. I am truly sorry if this offends anyone, and I will do my best to petition for change after me. But this profoundly dark, uncertain, “unprecedented” year has taught me that, like everyone else, I have but one life to live. I listened to my gut, not my calculating brain, when I saw the laureate position advertised—I have wanted to do nothing more deeply in my life than to trumpet the richness and joy of poetry to others. I saw the laureateship as an opportunity not only to do exactly this, but also to challenge myself to give, even as I myself was fairly overloaded. In Buddhism, they say that there are two kinds of giving: one that exhausts because it comes from obligation and one that gives life and energy because it comes from love. I have found this to be true: true compassion is expansive. It enlarges the giver’s life, and it spreads that inspiration to others.

In this poem, “The Night After You Lose Your Job,” I wanted to celebrate in particular the working women who were stretched beyond their sanity this year, pushed out of the workforce, or among the first to be laid off when companies’ bottom lines were hard hit by the pandemic. We must finally start to recognize, after our long nightmare, the value of caregiving in our economy and in our society. President Biden has already proposed a $775 billion 10-year plan for doing so, part of his American Families Plan meant to support and bolster caregivers and expand access to childcare. So I remain cautiously hopeful that we are on the cusp of beginning to understand what true health really is—for us as human beings, for our society, for our economy, and for our planet.