by Cindy Ellen Hill, PSOV President

In these interesting times, what is our task, our burden and our privilege as poets?

This question weighs heavily on my mind this month. With gratitude and humility, I’ve stepped into the role of president of the Poetry Society of Vermont, mindful of the impact that the line of PSOV presidents I’ve known in my tenure as a PSOV member – Robyn Joy, Bianca Zanella, George Longenecker – have had on my poetry and on finding a home in Vermont’s poetry community. My mind is full of logistical thoughts on stewarding our beloved organization, ensuring that it supports members in their poetry practices and is welcoming to poets who have not yet joined us.

At the same time, my soul is aching for a poet whose life was violently extinguished in the midst of the snow-covered mild-mannered heartland of our country. Then I fall down the rabbit hole of knowing her death has hit me so much harder than the many others which are occurring on the front lines of this political conflagration, because her identity resonates with me: white, female, middle aged, middle class, and a poet. I had read her award-winning poem on the Academy of American Poets website. I felt a connection. I remind myself of Immanuel Kant’s admonition that we should treat every person in the world – and feel every death – exactly the same. I strive to achieve this and, being human, I fail.

But hours and days tick by, and the future of everything – economics, politics, culture, our environment, our health – seems uncertain. I write this from northern Italy where my only daughter lives with her husband and child. Even here in Turin, the walls are covered with graffiti (Free Palestine, ICE Out) and the piazzas filled with weekly protests. Shopkeepers want to know what we think of Trump and these tariffs.

In Florence, I visited the home of Dante Alighieri, and saw the doorway of the church where he first spied his muse Beatrice. Dante also lived in interesting times of war, plague, and violent politics. He lived in exile for 30 years, wandering the countryside and sleeping on friend’s couches. From pain and injustice sprang arguably the greatest poem in the western canon, which we know as The Divine Comedy.

I cannot yet see what literary touchstones will arise from our own interesting times; what poem will emerge to inspire us all on a new path through the wildlands of human cruelty and indifference. But I do know that such a poem will not arise in isolation, but from a community of poets supporting and encouraging one another’s lyrical expression regardless of its form or subject matter.

We are poets. Let us, then, write, and write with all our hearts, for all we are worth, and hold one another’s poems in our hearts, knowing them as strong and precious things.

–Cindy Ellen Hill