POETRY CLINIC
GOT A PROBLEM? HAVE A YEARNING?
Ask us a question or describe your quandary. It could be a pain, a longing, a trouble, a wound. Or a life event, a celebration, a transition. Every month, our poet-in-residence will select a couple of letters and prescribe a poetic tonic.
this month's
POET-IN-RESIDENCE
Diana Khoi Nguyen A poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Root Fractures (2024) and Ghost Of (2018), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her video work has been exhibited at the Miller ICA. Nguyen is a MacDowell and Kundiman fellow, and a member of the Vietnamese artist collective, She Who Has No Master(s). She’s received an NEA fellowship and awards from the 92Y “Discovery” Poetry and 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery contests. She teaches in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
LETTERS
Asked by: dal boi, London, UK
Answered by: Diana Khoi Nguyen
POETS
Thomas Devaney is a poet, facilitator, and educator based in Philadelphia. He is a Pew Fellow in the Arts with a focus on city building and community engagement. He wrote and co-director the film Bicentennial City with Green House Media (2020). Devaney is the author of Getting to Philadelphia (Hanging Loose Press, 2019) and You Are the Battery (Black Square Editions, 2019). His work is featured in Best American Poetry 2019. He teaches creative writing at Haverford College and also works for the Lindy Institute for Urban Innovation at Drexel University.
Bhanu Kapil was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022. Her most recent book, How To Wash A Heart (Liverpool University Press), won the T.S. Eliot Prize and was a Poetry Book Society Choice. The recipient of a Windham- Campbell Prize and a Cholmondeley Award, both for poetry, Kapil is the author of six full-length collections. Two new editions of an Incubation: a space for monsters were published in 2023, by Kelsey Street Press in the United States and Prototype in the U.K. For twenty years, she taught creative writing, performance art and contemplative practice at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. Currently, she is based in Cambridge as a Fellow of Churchill College. She also teaches for the University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources.
Joseph Lease Joseph Lease’s critically acclaimed books of poetry include Fire Season (Chax Press, 2023), The Body Ghost (Coffee House Press, 2018), Testify (Coffee House Press, 2011), and Broken World (Coffee House Press, 2007). Lease’s poems “‘Broken World’ (For James Assatly)” and “Send My Roots Rain” were anthologized in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. Lease’s poem “‘Broken World’ (For James Assatly)” was anthologized in The Best American Poetry (Robert Creeley, Guest Editor). His poem “Free Again (Why don’t people)” was published in The New York Times. Lease is a Professor of Writing and Literature at California College of the Arts.
Kazim Ali is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and professor. His recent books include Inquisition (Wesleyan University Press, 2018) and All One’s Blue (Harper Collins India, 2016). His honors include an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. His poetry and essays have been featured in many literary journals and magazines including The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Barrow Street, Jubilat, The Iowa Review, West Branch and Massachusetts Review, and in anthologies including The Best American Poetry 2007.
Joan Naviyuk Kane is an Inupiaq American poet. Joan Kane is Inupiaq, and has family from King Island and Mary’s Igloo, Alaska. She graduated from Harvard College with a BA and earned an M.F.A from Columbia University. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her 2 children. In 2014, Kane was the Indigenous Writer-in-Residence at the School for Advanced Research. She was also a judge for the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize. Kane was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018.
K(Kristin)Prevallet (M.A., PhD) is a conceptual poet, performer and teacher. Her work both as an artist/writer and as a collaborator/practitioner (in healing arts) is informed by the syntaxes of permaculture, speculative ethnography, somatic experience, innovative poetics, and deep listening. She is the editor of A Helen Adam Reader, author of Everywhere Here and in Brooklyn, I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time, and Trance Poetics. Her most recent project, Trance Soma Ecology, is forthcoming in the Critical Climate Series, published by Routledge University Press. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies including Stained, The Body In Language, and is forthcoming in Other Influences: Essays on Feminist Avant-garde Poetic Lineages. She currently teaches for Bard College. More at: trancepoetics.com.
about
POETRY CLINIC
Poetry can liberate the imagination–and be a product of an imagination unhindered. Poetry is also communal, conjuring and singing voices together. In poetry, the world can become motion and play. Language slides into magic and back again into landscape, rocks, rivers, handshakes, and banisters. Into anything really. Its materials are free and everywhere. In poetry we make the world. And it’s in that grounded imagination where attention grows, new kin can be made, old kin re-found. One might very naturally also find solace, succor — or healing.
Living in a vulnerable body is often tough. It can also be a source of wonder and joy. Poetry Clinic provides a poetic response to the complex situation of being a human during this time of climate crisis and cascading conflicts, the ongoing pandemic, and other social and environmental upheavals. Poetry Clinic offers a remedy to cultivate new relationships among readers, poets, and poems in a time of profound uncertainty. It provides an online platform for poets to engage with readers looking for a poetic response to living, including rituals, losses, and wonder.
In short, Poetry Clinic serves as a portal for users to request poems that address specific life situations they’re facing.
More
We invite you to email us with your quandary, any experience or circumstance, for which a poem might be a balm — or a disruption, an opening of sorts. A poem might become a charm to keep in your pocket, or an apotropaic device to keep you safe. Submit a brief letter describing a particular predicament you’re facing – a pain, a longing, a trouble, a wound, anything at all that hurts. Or a life event, a celebration, a hope. Poetry Clinic is the online equivalent of an apothecary, but instead of dispensing herbs and potions, we offer up poems to help soothe a moment of your heartache or worry–or to join in celebrating births, marriages, love, transitions, the passionate transitory. We invite guest poets, writers and singers to offer a selection of texts or songs for you, depending on what you tell us in your letter.
We respect the vulnerability involved in sharing an aspect of your world with strangers. We promise to hold your words with the spirit of care and friendship. Every submission will be read, but only a few will receive a response from the poet-in-residence. Every month, with your consent, and with an option of anonymity, we will publish a handful of exchanges of queries and poetic prescriptions in the Letters section. Over time, our hope is that Poetry Clinic will build up a cabinet of divinations that bring moments of comfort, a dispensary of tonics and spells for you, and for you to share with the people you love.
ABOUT US
The project was imagined by two people who have served each other poetic prescriptions as a mode of friendship over years. Basically, we’ve been sending each other poems for a long, long time.
Poetry Clinic is an outgrowth of Uncertainty Academy, an experimental space for learning to live more creatively with uncertainty and part of the Education Ecologies Collective. Questions? thepoetryclinic@gmail.com
Suparna Choudhury is an interdisciplinary researcher and writer, working between cognitive neuroscience, transcultural psychiatry and creative writing. She is cofounder of Uncertainty Academy and a member of Educational Ecologies Collective.
Joshua Moses is a professor of anthropology and environmental studies, author of Anxious Experts: Disaster Response and Spiritual Care from 9/11 to the Climate Crisis, and cofounder of Education Ecologies Collective and the Uncertainty Academy.