February 2025

"I lived / lonely. I lived crowded. I lived seeking"

Jeremy Reed
February 03, 2025

Hello!

This past month has been a lot. Let’s start with a poem:

A Poem on My Mind:

“Sleepless Pantoum” by Laurel Nakanishi

The ʻōlauniu breeze lifts voices from the night.
Dogs curl under their houses. The city
burns to the shore, red with distant industry.
Awake, my baby’s eyes are two dark moons.

Even the dogs curl into sleep. Even the city.
We watch the headlights swipe past our window.
Awake, my baby’s eyes are two dark moons
or their eclipse—night opening to night.

Headlights skirt across our window
trailing the scent of gas. Sometime past 2am,
I feel eclipsed. Night reaches out to night
drawing me back to the hospital room,

the scent of my baby’s matted hair. Past 2am,
I held his tiny body and we floated in a silence
that whirred and pinged. In the dark hospital,
in my exhaustion, I heard singing emerge.

I held his tiny body, floating through a silence
not silent, but a greeting from this other land,
this one long night where we’d emerged.
He opened his eyes and his gaze was steady—

a greeting, a land. I began to weep. His body
against mine was too small for the weight
of his gaze, his steady eyes—a doorway
between our nights, and through it, voices.

Originally published in Poem-A-Day

Laurel is a good friend and a genuinely good person who I met while living in Montana, a second home to her and, at the time, a new home to me. Thinking of her entering parenthood around the same time I’ve entered parenthood, and getting to read some of the poems that have come from the experience - this poem had a lot of reasons to stick with me when I read it in my inbox last month through the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. But the care and tenderness with which she sees hesitation and distance eclipsed by another’s careful and tender reach, that’s just a hallmark of Laurel’s writing.

If you haven’t yet read her debut full-length Ashore, winner of Tupelo Press’ Berkshire Prize, you should grab yourself a copy here (or get your local bookstore or library to order a copy for you): https://www.tupelopress.org/product/ashore/

And don’t miss out on Laurel’s community work, resources for writing with children, and her other incredible poems and essays at her website: https://www.laurelnakanishi.com/

Continuing to Try New Things while Teaching

At the beginning of the month, I took part in my second course through the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School (I’ll have to tell you about the first in a future letter). This one was on Building a BookLab and using book creation techniques and activities in our pedagogy generally.

An image from our teachers’ press set-up for the Rare Book School course.

It was a fascinating, quick online class, and it really got me engaging with some new ideas and others I just haven’t tried as I’m teaching my publishing class again this spring. So far, we’ve looked at metal type together, we’ll be handprinting some bookmarks soon, and I plan to have them doing some saddlestitching before too much longer passes. Excited to see where the conversations I had with my cohort will take my students, my plans for future campus events and spaces, and my own work on books, print projects, and editing.

A New Publication

I lived in the quiet room, waiting. I lived across the street, across from my uncle. I lived in the wake of a crash, in a house outside its century, twice over. I lived lonely. I lived crowded. I lived seeking without end. I lived at the time of the heart attack, in the before and the after. I lived next to a fire, in fear of a voice I’d forgotten, a voice I have. I lived in dialogue with silence, far from family but family followed, in the heat of summer, in the cold cold of winter, in the mountains, in the open prairie, at home along the river. I lived in the quiet room because I couldn’t speak another room into existence, into air, the materials and the measure weren’t there.

Thanks to like a field magazine and its editor Sloane Scott for giving this poem a home in their recent winter issue. This one came from a writing experiment done with my Intro to Creative Students last semester (see below!), and it quickly struck close to the heart of the poems I’ve been writing toward the last few years.

A Prompt

Part 1: Write a bunch of first lines that could start poems about who you are, where you come from, or other central aspects of what you’ve experienced. Use whatever relationship between imagination and reality works for you as you write them, but all of your first lines should begin with the same phrase (or variations of it), like for instance “I lived” or “I was born.”

Part 2: Then, reorder, realign, and collage them as you see fit to make them into a poem all their own.

I really appreciate all of you who’ve signed up, and I look forward to writing again soon. Please leave a comment, reply to this email, share it with people you think would enjoy it, or send me a note in some other way just to say hi (hi!)

Wishing you all the best things.

-Jeremy

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