Words to Live By
It was an epiphany prompted by her participation in the advanced poetry workshop led by Nathalie Anderson, a poet and librettist who retired from her role as an English professor in 2021.
Anderson, who is the Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor Emerita of English, directed the College’s program in creative writing for almost four decades, during which she nurtured an orchard of student poets who have gone on to win awards for their work. These alumni treasure their memories of workshops in which Anderson was a galvanizing and deeply enriching presence.
One of the things that Bouwsma learned was that poetry was not about retreating. It could be used to illuminate and intervene in the world in uniquely powerful ways.
“The workshops offered both antidote and oasis,” says Bouwsma. “A place where I was able to play and explore, to use language to feel first rather than to think or explain.”
Today, at a time of political and environmental crisis, many readers and writers are having a similar realization about poetry’s power.
“Poetry is a space of ethical intelligence,” says Betsy Bolton, the current Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor of English, whose new book of poetry, Mouth Art of the Bald-faced Hornet, published this year by Finishing Line Press, is a poetic exploration of the Crum Creek landscape. “Poetry is a space where we grapple with what really matters.”
And this most ancient of art forms seems to be having a resurgence.
“Poetry is having a moment right now, nationally, and perhaps internationally as well,” says Bolton. Last year, the National Endowment for the Arts’ Survey of Public Participation in the Arts reported that 11% of American adults had read or listened to poetry in the previous 12 months. That’s almost double the figure from a decade earlier. Sales of poetry collections are soaring.
A love of poetry started early in life
At just 20 years old, she has already been Youth Poet Laureate of the South, run her own nonprofit, and won “Best Young Actress” awards for her work in The Requiem Boogie at both the Madrid International Film Festival and the Rome International Film Festival.
Young is making her own major, called spoken word pedagogy, combining creative writing, English, and theater. Her path there began in seventh grade, when she won her first poetry competition. “It was my first experience being a performer, and I was like, ‘This is it. This is what I want to do. I love this,’” says Young.
Between eighth and ninth grade, she attended the Tennessee Young Writers’ Workshop, where she learned about the organization Southern Word. She volunteered, applied to their Youth Poet Laureate program, and was awarded the position.
Being Youth Poet Laureate of the South meant performing almost every week and doing community service in addition to high school. During her laureate year, she founded the nonprofit Above Ground, which worked with elementary schools in Nashville to teach environmentally at-risk students poetry and creative writing.
Young’s love for Halls, Tenn., where her family has lived for nine generations, pervades Walking Gentry Home: A Memoir of My Foremothers in Verse (Hogarth Press, 2022). The collection documents the lives of Young’s maternal ancestors from slavery through the present day.
“As you read about each person, you come down the family tree and you get closer and closer to me,” she says.
The title refers to Young’s great-grandmother, Gentry, who ran back to her childhood home, trying to escape the responsibilities of marriage and motherhood, only to be escorted back by her brother. Gentry was married at age 14. Black women forced to grow up too soon, without getting to fully experience girlhood, is a prevalent theme.
Young writes eloquently about colorism, anti-Blackness, and police violence in the poems focused on contemporary times. In writing, she not only adds her foremothers to the historical record and puts her hometown on the map, but reminds us that we are not alone.
“If you walk, you walk with everyone who walked before you,” says Young. “No matter how alone you think you are, there is always a mother who came before you, watching over you, who will be there for you in this life and the next.”
But ive never felt so light
This county ive come to and explored
Makes the world look bright
Ive discovered a new land and all of its best
A student of life at DIS
I cant deny how i have changed in these last four months
How the world opened to me suddenly and all at once.
From athens to vienna
Copenhagen to berlin
All that happens in a semester
Every teacher every friend
I have grown as a person
I have changed in the end
And after this excursion
Ill never be the same again
I want to thank every teacher iwo,jan,michael and giga
For every lesson learned every classroom feature
You have been the kindest educators
i have learned lessons for now and later
In copenhagen i tried goulash
Someone i loved died
And i experienced true loss
And the world seemed too wide
I tried bubble tea and
Duck confit
I learned what fashion meant to me
I wanted to swim across the sea
But im not a very good swimmer
And america is too far
And i was tired of the winter
And every moment felt too hard
But In norway i saw new breeds of birds
I met a hacker with a way with words
Saw beauty in the rule of thirds
And tried gay candy so sweet
I fall in love with everyone we meet
In vienna i saw grand buildings
Ate schnitzel and icecream
Explored churches rich with gilding
And realized a life long dream
Stockholm was my home
My classmates were my family
I made life long friends
Made true amends
Witness wondrous white winters
And seasons ends
I survived the coldest season
In the coldest part of the world
I had burgers and meatballs
And cinnamon swirled
The land of 90000 lakes
Smorgasboards and princess cakes
Simmering stew pots and midnight suns
Scarsgards, stadion, and cardamom buns
Gamala stan gorgeous and grand
A teacup for fika cocophonous cakes
The peak of the season snow covers and shakes
Boiled potatoes old oktav grand grey tones
Pea soup marrow bones and the nobel prize
Sweet lingon berries folktales of fairies
Apothacaries and cool cloudy skies
My visiting host family were so thoughtful and kind
We went on boat rides and toured parlement
The fat tueseday semla were simply divine
And every moment was time well spent
I feel like odyssius on his grand odyssey
I tasted true independency
Everymorning the tunnelbana greeted me with a smile
Stockholm came with open arms and said stay for a wile
The rumble of the green line train from gulmarsplan to slussen
The city has its spirit and the people have their duty
it shines as scandinavias most brilliant beauty
Drink black coffee like communion my dream of the swede is proven
Stockholm is the vasa bridge with archways and golden light
Its Sturdy stone over gentle water warms the heart and gives great fodder
For the growth of a place that has become my second home
The streets i love to roam alone a kingdom with its throne
Do you all see how much weve grown?
Im so proud off the people we have become
That dis is one for all and all for one
The smell of rich gravy on lushious meats
The saccerine los godis the weekend treats
You can go to systemboglet to buy a drink for your friends
And to the party in our hotel lobby everyone attends
The public transportation is always on time
The city lights at night are the aurora borealis
The streetlights are stars that flutter and shine
Like midases golden chalice
The days grow from short to long
Stockholm sings an abba song
Tonight we are all dancing queens
Alive and young and only 17
We breathe life into the night
Grab a hold of the cold
We spin with the wind
We dont do as were told
We go to school and to the bar
and wonder where the day goes
We ride trains instead of fast cars
And problems are small potatoes
Like a bright red dala horse
We are brilliant things that stay the course
Were here for a blazing moment
Or until the end of time
We are the puzzle of the cities every component
We are golden and sublime
I see the life beaming from all of your eyes
As ingenious as the winners of the nobel prize
Minds sharp and glowing a fire alight
An explosion of wisdom like dynomite
We are ancient like the sami
We are young like the day
We are proud of who were becoming
We chase the dark away
Like cobblestone paths
The distinguished baltic sea
The castle of the kingdom
And Fabric quality
The awe inspiring vasa ship
Reindeer and elk
And aquavit to sip
In berlin we danced all night
Mexican food and turkish delight
We climbed the tallest flight of stairs
To the top of the highest tower
We painted tote bags and
Slayed drag hour
And our time here was well spent
Lagom just enough
We came with anxiety
Were leaving with love
Now my heart is blue and yellow
And though our story ends
Every friend and fellow
I will remember as sweden
Swarthmore is hardly exempt. Poetry is flourishing on campus. Students are finding ways to break down the wall between spoken word and written poetry. They take part in lively, diverse workshops, exemplifying a combination of generosity, sensitivity, and rigor that is a model for our wider society, says Peter Schmidt, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English Literature.
“Telling new stories and having the freedom to explore dangerous topics without a lot of censorship,” says Schmidt, are key parts of “our students’ interest in making American democracy, which is pretty sick at the moment, healthier.”
This year, Madeline Clay ’24 won the College Poetry Contest run by The Lyric Magazine for a powerful sestina about her grandfather’s funeral and the women in her family. “Always, women own the work of the body,” writes Clay, in lines driven by a mesmerizing rhythm. “Always, my body remembers the river of its mother.”
Meanwhile, Hannah K. Zhang ’26, who was awarded honorable mention, found inspiration on campus.
“Sitting in the botanical gardens in the evening for just a second to catch your breath will give you a poem whether you like it or not,” says Zhang.
nobody out of town nobody tomorrow,
the kind of purple that blears white on your camera
and never happens again.
you know better than taking pictures
of the impossible now,
so you stare with your forehead to the window
and the white curtains touch your cheeks
and you promise the world that you see it
for just a second you feel it
cool against your brow,
warm and weighty on your eyes
like the prologue to a dream.
nobody out of town nobody tomorrow,
the kind of purple that blears white on your camera
and never happens again.
you know better than taking pictures
of the impossible now,
so you stare with your forehead to the window
and the white curtains touch your cheeks
and you promise the world that you see it
for just a second you feel it
cool against your brow,
warm and weighty on your eyes
like the prologue to a dream.
But it is only in the last few decades that the College has taught creative writing as part of the Honors Program. In the 1990s, Anderson helped design groundbreaking literature courses that combine critical analysis with creative writing.
“Students read and discuss works like Beowulf in a normal literary history context, but they can also write creative responses inspired by the poem,” says Schmidt.
In 2021, in collaboration with alumni poets, Swarthmore established the Nathalie Anderson Poetry Prize, an annual award for a student poem, named to honor Anderson’s almost four decades fostering poetry on campus.
Alumni poets are on a roll, too. This year, Mary Jean Chan ’12 was shortlisted for the prestigious Dylan Thomas Prize, run by Swansea University. Many other Swarthmore alumni have published poems, chapbooks, and collections of late, including Daisy Fried ’89, Jessica Fisher ’98, and Reuben Gelley Newman ’21.
“It’s an amazing moment,” says Anderson — but what might lie behind this poetic renaissance?
Turning over the question, Anderson’s mind flashes to Northern Ireland during the Troubles, a moment when poetry flourished amid seemingly interminable violence. “People were using art to bear witness,” she says, “and at the same time, to acknowledge complicity in a complicated circumstance, moving beyond blame into some kind of determination for peace.”
And while the political situation in the U.S. is different than Northern Ireland during the Troubles, conflicts in Europe and the Middle East combined with threats to democracy at home are making the world feel unusually unstable.
of strings that is my heart,
your hands pressed
to the keys. Strings stretched
like a silkworm’s thread:
steel whisper, octave buzz.
I do not know whether I am speaking
of the heart or the mind.
My harpsichord heart:
her nasal breath,
my heartmouth,
nose of my mind,
reside with me here,
in the larynx of the line.
but a struggle to translate
the weight of flesh against
bone into syllables that
sound the shape
of things:
leaf
light
tree
sky
the fact
of your face,
beautiful like breath.
The Titanic chose this month to sink, Hitler to be born
It was not a good time for Lincoln to attend the theatre
Nor Jesus to amble in the gardens of Gethsemane
Chernobyl, Amritsar, crumbling San Francisco, blazing Notre Dame
And this April indeed made Fools of us all
But let us spring cleanse and clasp our overwashed hands
And resolve to perceive the month half full:
Shakespeare graced it with his birth and reveled
In the uncertain glory of his April days
Perry reached the North Pole and Jackie Robinson the Major Leagues.
The Peloponnesian War closed and South Pacific opened
Washington took the oath of office as the first President
And the Beatles took five songs to the top of the charts.
The Greeks named the month after the goddess Aphrodite
And admittedly the last one was a real beaut
But all bad things come to an end and we will again sing:
Oh, to be in Times Square now that April’s here.
with wax, the larval bodies hardening.
Are they scared in there, the children
want to know, does it hurt to change?
In the dark room, in the sealed cell.
How am I to know? When I think of their hive
I think of her lungs, honeycombed by illness.
That was the word she used for it, long ago.
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind,
Wyatt wrote, meaning he could not.
consider this feather I’ve found,
consider the sweetness of bare
young arms in sunlight, or the round
perfection of a ripe pear.
consider this feather I’ve found,
consider the sweetness of bare
young arms in sunlight, or the round
perfection of a ripe pear.
This is confirmed by recently published books. Earlier this year, the renowned poet Rowan Ricardo Phillips ’96 published Silver, his fourth collection, with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. The book meditates on poetry’s singular power to speak truths amid lies and violence.
And Daywork, a collection by the poet and Williams College professor Jessica Fisher ’98, published this year by Milkweed Editions, dwells on the relationship between beauty and violence, a connection that lies at the heart of poetry’s capacity to explicate painful moments in our collective life.
the dog races to my bed and presses his warm body to mine.
Storm labors, and we fall asleep,
breathing.
I am a breath against a feather or maybe
a fingernail tapping against glass,
by which I mean noticeable
and entirely temporary,
but in this time, loved.
Watch,
all around me are birds, millions
spilling and growing and
stretching their wings and I, with them
I, with them, stretch my love over an open mouth
From here I see my grandfather’s footsteps weathered
into floorboard.
He was a lightning struck oak,
he was a shape standing against the sky, which is to say,
monumental past recognition.
The birds
and I are a memory and a growing
age.
We block out the sun we bring
cool.
I know
the razor sharpness of hate,
the place where
despair finds you, but
in the dawning crescent, the shimmering
blue of our wings against the sun, there is
no darkness deeper than my love for this world. There is
no despair blacker than bird wing. There is
no hate which reaches deep enough to kill every seed.
This love spins against the end
breaks through and unspools
the thread I had mistaken
for a shroud.
as surgeons cut the cancer from her brain,
my first impulse is to descend into metaphor —
to imagine the plaintive cry of her violin as a singular
silvery thread that leads the surgeons — sublimely,
tremulously — through the Minotaur’s maze,
so they can extract the tumor abutting the lobe
that controls her left hand, so they can navigate
the fleshy labyrinthine folds and electric shocks
that make a human mind. When I watch her bow
graze the ventilator tube again and again,
I want to recollect the old story of Nero playing
as Rome burned, which is supposed to be a story
about callous cruelty and ineffectual leadership,
but which fails to hold up under historic scrutiny
for many reasons, including that the violin
was not invented until the 11th century.
Still, the fable lends him more humanity than not —
the notion that there was music inside him,
even if it took six days of burning to fan it out,
a music so powerful it forced itself to escape
his tyrant’s mouth. If art is only pleasure,
Nero’s act is selfish, loathsome, but if art is survival—
a violin’s siren might morph to beacon
against the smoky air. I keep asking my poems
what the world needs from me in these days
of quickening dread, of burgeoning conflagration,
what they want me to do. In the comments section
below the hospital video, no one can agree
on what they’re seeing: Creepy, incredible,
horrifying, beautiful. Afterward, the violinist recalls,
I kept thinking, Get out of my way. I need to play louder.
Gertrude Stein, Wars I Have seen.
When he deflates, horribly flat, with sticky crinkling noises, I peel his body from other parts of his body, probe with my pinky, squeeze with index and thumb, put my mouth to his valve-hole, breathe him fat again.
I punch. He hisses. He’s mine, and I sock him. He flops backward, jerks upright, ballasted by sand in his sack-bottom, filled with my breathed air.
I punch and I punch him. I dance on my toes like a boxer, lean to let him hit me in the face with his face—not hard. He crumples about the ears, tapping me. I swim in my make-believe anger. His sifty sand shifts when I shove my hands under him. Like Susie the color guard carrying her flag I rest him against my pelvis. Shove him out to tumble on his dumb head.
He rights himself the instant he hits. I dive at him, we fall together, roll, I lie full on the floor, load his weight on my belly.
Did you hear the wind last night punch our pear tree, beat and bend it till it thrashed its blossoms in white suds at the window, at the emptiness in the other direction? Marriage, inventory, what? You? America? Hello?
Fried’s next book My Destination will be published in 2026 simultaneously by Flood Editions in the U.S. and Carcanet Press in Great Britain.
Swarthmore poets have long been using verse to comprehend traumas — from the personal to the national and beyond.
For W.D. Ehrhart ’73, an award-winning poet and memoirist living in Pennsylvania, poetry allowed him to come to terms with his 13-month tour of duty in Vietnam at the end of the 1960s. “It was a cataclysmic, life-changing experience,” he says. “It destroyed everything I ever thought I understood about myself and the country I lived in.”
At Swarthmore, Ehrhart was still writing about all sorts of subjects — “geese in the autumn and brokenhearted love poems,” he says. But poetry “helped me figure out what I felt about the war and why I felt it.”
It is a kind of clarity that readers crave. At a time when our worlds are buzzing with digital noise, says Bouwsma, poetry can refocus us on our emotional lives and on the world around us.
“I think poetry both demands and teaches a sort of focused, attuned listening unlike anything we’re really used to,” she says. “We learn to pay attention to the words, of course. But more interestingly, we also learn to read behind and around the words. We learn to read silences.”
The tree: it was red. And the sky was gray.
Tomorrow ran off with today today.
I’d swallowed time just so I could get things
Right. I was a present to myself but went
Right past it. I called myself it and sat
With it, sad with it, and yet couldn’t find
The lie in it. It suited me to a
T. Without it, who would I be? I was
So tired but scared to say it: knowing
What tends to come after — I zipped it.
I parabolaed between parables,
Playing Bach’s Concerto in D-Minor,
BWV 974, for
The despair deep in it before
It falls towards the solution
Of its final chord. That’s when, in the great
Silver apogee of night, I stepped out
Into the warm air and stripped the rowan
That had been growing there bare until it
Was barely there, roots crowning its nadir,
And everywhere crowing beware beware.
It’s too short a distance from wonder to terror,
and blue eyes in a horse is something wonderous.
Like you, I’ve been found strange. Like you,
I’ve glowed in a field at night and had nowhere
to hide: my high laugh, that birthmark, so many
things others could see but which I’ve had to twist
myself to examine. Once, in a circle of rapt faces,
a boy pushed my girl-body against a wall
with such force his touch could not have been far
from wonder. You’ve known it, too, horse—
the sugar cubes and wick of razor wire. See
how that feels? he said, as if I’d pushed him first.
And perhaps something in me had.
When his work translating American films into European languages dried up in 2020, Jeff Davidson ’58 suddenly, and for the first time in his career, found himself with stretches of empty time.
“All of a sudden, nobody was making any films, and nobody was traveling,” he says.
Davidson thought about how he wanted to fill his days, and started to write poetry. He has recently assembled his first book-length manuscript.
While the tumult of the last several years may lie behind poetry’s increasing importance, the art would not be thriving at Swarthmore were it not for Anderson.
“Though I wasn’t an English major, I took as many of Nat’s classes as I possibly could,” says the poet Keetje Kuipers ’02, whose collection Lonely Women Make Good Lovers will be published by BOA Editions in spring 2025. “My path to becoming a poet was circuitous, but Nat was a faithful and galvanizing guide over the years it took me to get there.”
Anderson, for her part, has mixed feelings about poetry’s resurgence. “I’m sad to think that this is a moment when crisis is drawing this out of us,” she says. On the other hand, a rich career with poetry at its beating heart has convinced her that “poetry is one of our best defenses.”