What does it mean to continue writing when language itself can feel insufficient? What does poetry ask of us in moments of grief, violence, and historical rupture? And what responsibility does the artist hold when words fail or falter?
These questions lingered throughout two evenings with poet and scholar Layli Long Soldier, whose visit to the Arts Research Center on April 1 and 2 marked both the beginning of National Poetry Month and a key moment in ARC’s 25th anniversary season. Across a public reading and a conversation with poet Solmaz Sharif and Geoffrey G. O'Brien, Layli Long Soldier invited audiences into a sustained meditation on the emotional, political, and spiritual demands of language: what it carries, what it obscures, and what remains possible through it.
Opening the first evening, ARC Director Beth Piatote situated the event within the Center’s anniversary programming, which this year explored the essential place of art in our spiritual, creative, political, and material lives. Few writers embody that inquiry more fully than Long Soldier, whose work persistently examines language as a terrain; something structured by power and shaped by history.
Long Soldier's reading moved between selections from her acclaimed collection Whereas, and new, unpublished work, including excerpts from 184X’s, a long-form poem engaging in the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie and the 184 tribal leaders whose signatures appear on the document as X- marks. Speaking on the piece, Long Soldier described it as an effort to honor those leaders and address “what our beloved leaders could not read and could not sign their names to with anything other than X’s.”
And yet, to hear Long Soldier read is to understand that her work expands beyond political response alone. Her poetry moves fluidly between the historical and the personal, between bureaucratic record and intimate memory, between structures of law and the rhythms of land, weather, ancestry, and relation. Even in its most politically incisive moments, she herself and her writing insist upon tenderness and care.
Throughout the evening, Long Soldier reflected on her evolving relationship to form, describing a process increasingly shaped by visual and material experimentation. Long Soldier also discussed the increasing visual and spatial dimensions of her artistic practice, sharing that many of her recent works begin outside the confines of the page: “Sometimes I start working off the page,” she explained:
“The poems find their form off their page before I bring them into that little, tiny, white rectangle.”
The shift suggests a poetic practice that continues to expand outward, seeking forms capacious enough to hold the complexity of what language alone cannot
The following evening, Long Soldier returned to the stage, joined by Solmaz Sharif, whose own body of work similarly interrogates the relationship between language and power. If Long Soldier's reading offered poetry as invocation, archive, and testimony, her conversation with Sharif offered something else: poetry as question. Moderated by Beth Piatote, the discussion returned to a question posed by June Jordan, that the role of the poet is to “deserve the trust of people who know that what you do is work with words.” But what happens when words themselves feel compromised
Sharif spoke openly about that fracture. Writing, she suggested, now carries a distinct kind of pressure, one that feels immediate, relentless. “The dead are being made in real time,” she said, describing a present that feels increasingly unbearable to witness, let alone translate into poetry. At one point, Sharif spoke candidly about the strain of writing in the present moment, describing a feeling that what is happening in the world:
"There's a distinct moment in writing that feels very present, in ways that feels increasingly unbearable. Like too much for poetry to bear, certainly too much for the self to bear. Something has to happen outside the poem"
The act of writing, she suggested, can require a kind of impossible turn; a conscious decision to face something unbearable and, at the same time, to step slightly away from it in order to render it into language. To write of it, with it, for it, while also moving toward something else. She lingered on the difficulty of doing this in English, a language already shaped by the very structures of power and violence the work seeks to confront.
Long Soldier responded from a different place, though not in opposition. She brought the conversation back to something more grounded. She spoke about writing not as an abstract responsibility, but as something grounded in love, for her family, her community, her people. Even when the work is engaged with histories of violence or loss, it does not begin there. It begins in connection. That orientation, she suggested, allows her to continue, even when the emotional weight of her work is heavy, even when the act of writing feels exhausting.
Together, the two poets spoke candidly about the strain of writing amid ongoing global violence and political despair, reflected on the emotional toll of being asked to continually transform suffering into language. Their exchange did not attempt easy answers or reaffirm ideas about poetry’s redemptive power. Instead, it lingered in uncertainty, asking what poetry can realistically do in the face of devastation, and what it means to continue writing when words alone cannot alter material conditions.
Long Soldier’s visit extended beyond the stage. Her presence lingered in the physical objects created around the event itself: in the limited-edition broadsides printed by Berkeley students during a two-day ARC workshop with the CODEX Foundation, in the screen-printed T-shirts and aprons bearing her words, in the books audience members carried home with them after the evening ended. Poetry moved off the page and into the hand, able to be held, worn, and exchanged.
This expansion of language into object and process speaks to a question that has shaped ARC’s 2025–2026 season: what happens when artistic research moves beyond the boundaries of a single medium? Long Soldier’s residency offered one answer, revealing how art begins as thought or feeling, takes shape in creative practice and continues to transform as it moves through different forms and through the hands of others. A poem first written on the page can become something spoken aloud, pressed into paper, carried home as a broadside, or worn across the body. In this way, the residency reflected ARC’s broader understanding of artistic research as a living process.
As ARC continues its 25th anniversary year, Long Soldier’s visit stands as a reminder of what has always defined the center’s work, not simply presenting art, but creating spaces where art can be encountered as process, as dialogue, and as shared inquiry.
Layli Long Soldier was a visiting writer for the Arts Research Center on April 1-2, 2026.
