For this series, we asked Listener Poets to describe the “story beyond the story” — how they composed a poem and story after the listening session.
“To My Daughters, Who Will Need to Know”
Poem & article
by Listener Poet Yvette Perry
“I see…me reflected in you…”
This line in my poem from The Good Listening Podcast Episode 8 (“Racism: The Older Pandemic”) was from the perspective of the poemee talking about her young daughters. But the line could just as easily have been from my perspective reflecting about the poemee. Like the poemee, I am a Black woman working in a majority White medical/medical education environment. Like the poemee, I am a mother raising two daughters in a society that often devalues African American women and girls. Like the poemee, a huge part of my adult development has involved unlearning self-destructive patterns of some female relatives and ancestors while simultaneously learning from a diverse network of Black female friends. Like the poemee, the first pandemic year often left me feeling exhausted–not because of COVID-19, but because of the ongoing assaults on Black bodies as well as the outrage of some friends and colleagues who saw these assaults as surprising or new.
“But the line could just as easily have been from my perspective reflecting about the Poemee.”
However, in order to live my responsibility as a Listener Poet, I felt I had to separate myself from this sense of affinity in order to truly listen to the poemee. For example, she told me about midway through our listening session that at one point during the last year she “hit a brick wall.” I could see my own brick walls immediately. They were the external facing sides of two row houses in East Chicago, Indiana–one house inhabited by my late paternal grandparents and the other, a few feet away, their neighbors. When we’d visit up north, I was the suburban kid who couldn’t conquer the task of scaling these walls to reach the top of the two-story buildings. My city cousins could do this with ease, vertically crab-walking with gangly arms and legs, fearless even as they got farther and farther from the ground. These brick walls are my metaphor for every challenge that I have faced since those childhood summers, as well as my metaphor for every effort I’ve ever made to successfully “scale” those challenges.
I had to erase my own brick walls from my mind and ask her to clarify what hers looked like. Her wall had to do with the full weight of trying to do everything at once and be everything to everybody. The pandemic created additional challenges during a time of great transition. But it also meant unexpected benefits, such as the ability to have an extended maternity leave that she would not have otherwise had. All of this was not necessarily something that needed to be–or even could be–overcome. These things did, for her, need to be managed. Ah ha... Her explanation let me see that her brick walls were not ones that needed to be climbed. They were ones that needed just enough of an opening to be gotten through somehow. The metaphor that best captured the poemee’s truth was a door.
“I had to erase my own brick walls from my mind and ask her to clarify what hers looked like.”
As a Listener Poet, I strive to fully listen to and tell poemees’ truths. This is not just my responsibility, but a sacred one that I take very seriously. Although our sessions are only 15 or 20 minutes, the poemee has put a lot of trust in me that I will faithfully listen to them specifically…to their stories…to their experiences…to their emotions. And yet, when I carefully listen to the poemee and transform their stories, experiences, and emotions into a poem I find I have quite a bit of artistic license to use poemees’ words to tell universal Truths. I’m not sure if this happens because of or in spite of the level of connection I may feel towards a poemee. It could be that the connection is less about being able to dredge up my own childhood imagery to correspond to that of another person, and more a matter of simply being able to see me (human) reflected in them (human).