To kick off its 25th anniversary and the start of National Poetry Month, the UC Berkeley Arts Research Center invited renowned poet Layli Long Soldier to a conversation with another master of poetry, UC Berkeley\u2019s very own professor Solmaz Sharif.<\/p>\n
Long Soldier is known for her award-winning 2017 poetry collection \u201cWhereas,\u201d which directly engages with the duplicitous language of the United States government in its apologies and policies toward Indigenous people. National Book Award finalist Sharif tackles similar themes in her books \u201cCustoms\u201d and \u201cLook,\u201d which contend with war, immigration, the nation-state and the violent language used to propagate these forces of disenfranchisement. Putting their works and lives in conversation revealed the emotional labor of political poetry, questioning its role in an increasingly fraught world.<\/p>\n
The director of the Arts Research Center, Beith Piatote, began the panel by posing the question of what they believed the role of a poet to be. Piatote opened the question by quoting iconic political poet and former UC Berkeley professor, June Jordan, that the role of the poet is to \u201cdeserve the trust of people who know that what you do is work with words.\u201d At first the conversation hit the regular literary beats: When did you first call yourself a poet? When do you feel compelled to write? However, in a turn of honesty from both Long Soldier and Sharif, more daring questions and hard truths rose to the surface.<\/p>\n
Sharif admitted that the pain of recent politics has led her to struggle with writing and language itself: Language serves as a constant reminder of its violent ends in a dark world, of the exhaustion of speaking up. She went into detail about the dissonance of writing about the dead and for the dead. Sharif said \u201cthe dead are being made in real time,\u201d which seems to be \u201ctoo much for poetry to bear.\u201d According to Sharif, something has to change outside of the poem, and poetry has begun to feel incapable of creating material change. She pointed to her belief that poetry is an act of faith, an act of writing for a distant future that she may never see, but how that faith has been shrinking.<\/p>\n
Long Soldier responded compassionately, agreeing that writing about the devastation of one\u2019s own people and of oneself in such a public way is emotionally laborious. To her, it is the responsibility of a poet to tap into that deeper plane of grief, despite one\u2019s own exhaustion, a \u201cresponsibility to feel.\u201d She offered hope in her ability to infuse her own poetry with \u201cmedicine\u201d that \u201ckeeps (her) head above water.\u201d For Long Soldier, images of the land and her child are grounding, as is the pride that new generations of Indigenous children are now taking in their culture. Long Soldier also gave advice to young poets of color on how to instill boundaries with the publishing world, touching on how carefully she chooses where her voice is heard, now only writing where she is explicitly invited.<\/p>\n
The air was thick with palpable emotion as the poets shared their challenges with writing among tragedy. It can feel too uncomfortable, too meta, for respected poets to discuss whether or not poetry has a point. However, it was refreshingly honest to hear Long Soldier and Sharif address how debilitatingly heavy the weight of feeling and writing is in a world that seems endlessly destructive.<\/p>\n
To write poetry, especially political poetry, is to lay both oneself and the grief of the modern world bare, and do it time and time again. If two poets of color don\u2019t address how tiring and challenging that is, to see violence normalized, then who will address it?<\/p>\n
Difficult conversations allow us to learn about ourselves and our craft, and this conversation between Long Soldier and Sharif showed that poetry can exist in questioning and in exhaustion. In Wheeler Hall that evening, poetry and conversations proved capable of creating community and catharsis. While this may not lead to immediate political change, it is a step toward regaining faith.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"To kick off its 25th anniversary and the start of National Poetry Month, the UC Berkeley Arts Research…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":255899,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[16530,113284,113278,23834,113283,143,145,144,2690,113279,149,113281,113280,72362,113282],"class_list":{"0":"post-255898","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-oakland","8":"tag-customs","9":"tag-june-jordan","10":"tag-layli-long-soldier","11":"tag-look","12":"tag-national-poetry-month","13":"tag-oakland","14":"tag-oakland-headlines","15":"tag-oakland-news","16":"tag-poetry","17":"tag-solmaz-sharif","18":"tag-uc-berkeley","19":"tag-uc-berkeley-arts-research-center","20":"tag-uc-berkeley-english","21":"tag-wheeler-hall","22":"tag-whereas"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=255898"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255898\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/255899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=255898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=255898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=255898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}