Poetry & The Senses

The Arts Research Center was honored to have the opportunity to explore Poetry & the Senses, thanks to a generous multi-year grant from Engaging the Senses Foundation. ARC acted as a facilitator and connector between campus and the many flourishing regional poetry communities.

Modeled on the ARC Fellows Program, the core of the grant funded horizontal working groups that brought together Berkeley faculty, graduate students, undergraduate students, and Bay Area community poets into non-heirarchical cohorts. Each group convened over a semester to share creative work, research, discussion, and critique, organized around a wide-ranging theme. Community members were included to break the "gown and town" division that often happens in university environments. From 2020 - 2023, ARC was able to support 44 poets with semester to year-long fellowships. 

We supported poetry in its broadest definition; ARC’s programmatic model dissolved silos by recognizing and celebrating the presence of poetry in all of the arts, sciences and humanities. Beyond English and Comparative Literature, our poetry fellows had connections in African American Studies; Art Practice; Berkeley Center for New Media; Education; Electrical Engineering & Computer Science; Global Urban Humanities; Molecular Biology; Music; Native American Studies; Near Eastern Studies; Public Policy; Rhetoric; Spanish & Portuguese; Theater, Dance and Performance Studies; and Women & Gender Studies departments. The interdisciplinary intersection and richness of bridging 17 disciplines was a unique achievement and hallmark of the program. 

This program came into being during the pandemic. The lessons ARC learned in continuing and evolving the Poetry program in real time––helping people connect online, create community, and hold in depth discussions––led to an epiphany. Fellows no longer had to be on one single campus, a fact we learned when some flew home and we had to manage discussions across time zones. This led to an expanded option, with fellows (undergrads/grads/faculty/community members) at Berkeley, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, Arizona State University, and a Nez Perce community writing group luk'upsiimey all coming together for the final year. Cohort working group meetings were held on Zoom, across 6 different time zones. What started as a potential problem led to a beautiful opportunity. A unique and groundbreaking hallmark of the program. The interest was in creating a trans-Indigenous conversation, with indigenous-to- indigenous juxtapositions that decenter European thought and begin to translate an oceanic-to- desert-to- river-to-forest poetic imaginary. This bold expansion of our model created connections around Indigenous issues across four different western states and  explored poetry and the politics of language in a wider framework beyond the borders of California.

The grant funded events which offered fellows, the campus community, and the greater public (in-person and online) a chance to broaden the conversation, including a new Visiting Writer reading series. We were able to feature over 37 poets including Cameron Awkward-Rich, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Natalie Diaz, Camille Dungy, Cornelius Eady, Safia Elhillo, Ross Gay, Joy Harjo, Terrance Hayes, Lyn Hejenian, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Morgan Parker, Craig Santos Perez, Danez Smith, Patricia Smith, and Simone White. As well, we started a Flash Reading Series focused on Bay Area poets sharing one of their poems in relation to one of our themes, to further the conversation and support community. It grew into an online archive of over 50 local poets sharing their voices, including including Brenda Hillman, Jane Hirshfield, DA Powell, Juliana Spahr, and sam sax.

In direct relation and inspired by the Poetry & the Senses program, ARC developed a number of ancillary opportunities including: a collaboration with renowned program Lunch Poems for the 2022-2023 years, co-hosting Poetry & the Senses readings and craft talks; a partnership with the Queer Alliance Resource Center to host Calling the Elders, a writing workshop for queer and trans students and faculty, including building space on our website to host writing prompts. ARC created a landing spot on our website for poetry at Berkeley, since it was not collected in one place anywhere on campus. We tested a poetics lab at Point Reyes Field Station, a generative arts research retreat which hosted 8 grad students. And once people began to gather again, we created Submission Happy Hours with poetry themed mocktails, and helped writers submit poetry while hanging out with peers.

ETSF generously provided some funds toward a final in-person Gathering of 20 fellows and 3 facilitators at Berkeley around the theme of Reclamation, bringing together each individual river of the expanded program between Berkeley, Hawai'i, Arizona, and the dispersed Nez perce writers into a great body. While working group meetings happened with the incredible advent of technology, there is no replacement for the community that is built in daily conversation and the breaking of bread, including mentoring opportunities, off-topic discussions that ignite other possibilities, collaborations, readings, generative workshops, making new friends and colleagues – a rare and precious opportunity to develop creative and intellectual interlocutors for life, necessary for the arc of any writer’s development and career. The gathering was held in Feb 2024 at BAMPFA.