ALEXANDRIA QUARTERLY

HOW DID I GET HERE? AN AQP ESSAY SERIES: HIRAM LAREW

In response to Editor Tamra Carraher's request, here's a note from Hiram Larew about his life travels as a poet. As you'll see, he has explored the nooks and crannies of poetry and is currently helping to guide socially-focused poetry programs that are attuned to our times.

I fledged.  I’ll never forget my first encounter with poetry’s wings.  As a kid, I’d tuned into nursery rhymes and, a bit later, to lyrics of popular songs.  But then, my goodness.  One day in high school, my adolescence met To a Waterfowl by William Cullen Bryant.  And all at once, in a mysterious whirl, I wanted to become whatever that poem was.  My teenage nubs so envied the wings that end, but really open, that poem. 
 
From such a perch and with teachers’ nudges, I dove into poetry.  To name a few of the wonders:  Those joyful, soulful musical sets of James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones.  And, Emily Dickinson’s transcendent dashes.  Or, Poe’s mesmerizing underworlds.  And then, oh then, I happened upon the terra incognita called e. e. cummings who, to this day, is my explorer of explorers.  I was lost…but all in a wonderfully found way.

Those discoveries accompanied me as I began to write.  Like you, I had no map or compass.  I slipped, fell, grappled – and still am stumbling through this landscape called a poet’s life.  But I also harked, gurgled, and snuck-wrote some poems back then that, even now, make me grin for their perkiness.  I kept (and keep) learning.

During the years since kidhood, I’ve not experienced a revelatory turning point or known a North Star.  I’ve just written to claim my own, to ask an all-abundance of questions and to rent time from the future.  Nothing comes close to being accurate in my poems.  They never look you straight in the eyes.  Instead, like those disappearing wings that Mr. Bryant described way back when, my poems are guided by an ever-watchful search and an over-arching hoped for.

My Mud Ajar.  If that story doesn’t make sense to you, my newest collection, Mud Ajar, will only make matters worse.  It is, as I say, a knapsack of wander and befuddled, almost inexpressible wonder.  Many of the poems in it were written during the COVID pandemic and, believe it or not, consequently reflect a boundless gratitude for the twigs and beaks of each given morning.  There are also poem-stories in the collection that draw from my ancestry, all with deep love and confusion.  And, there’s at least one poem included, Succotash, that withers over our nation’s present state of affairs (see below).    

I’ve Been Speaking Up.  The power of poetry is potent for all of its mysteries.  Of late, I’ve tapped into its rouse and magic to serve a couple of important causes.  For example, I’ve asked poets from near and far to Speak Back to Hunger.  The outpouring of amazing work that’s now posted on the Poetry X Hunger website isn’t just sitting quietly on the web.  Many of the poems are being used in Houses of Worship, by teachers and professors in classrooms, by anti-hunger leaders and organizations and by the United Nations.   Yes indeed, more and more poetry is being used as an anti-hunger tool. 

And, during a writer residency at an historic plantation estate in Northern Virginia, I asked three powerful African American poets to join me for a day.  What a day!  The resulting program called Voices of Woodlawn uses our poetry along with music and artwork to confront America’s tragic history of slavery at such plantations.  Viewed by worldwide online audiences, the Voices of Woodlawn program challenges each of us to reconcile a past that maliciously shadows us today.  

Here’s to Poetry!  What of the up-ahead?  Well, if you can predict your poetry’s future, please email me soonest.  Because, I can’t.  All I know is that poetry will continue to be my front door, my side door and surely my back door into this world of years I’m living.  And yes, I’m also convinced any poetry that’s coming will be footed in what has been.  It will also, like most birds, appear then disappear, swoop up then dive deeply down.  Yes! Here’s to such wings and their journey.

- Hiram Larew
www.HiramLarewPoetry.com
www.PoetryXHunger.com