More than two decades ago, a poet named Martín Espada radically shifted the trajectory of my life when he visited my high school and read from his poetry collection, Imagine the Angels of Bread.
His words broke through the armor and scars of an angry, lost 17 year-old kid and laid bare the transcendent possibilities of a poem.
Perhaps most profound about what Martín Espada’s poetry taught my rabble-rousing younger self was how, as Ocean Vuong stated so beautifully last night (about the power of writing): “to disobey meaningfully, to be disobedient in order to preserve the self.”
Two weeks from today, I will be this year’s Visiting Poet at that high school I attended, Moses Brown School—like Martín Espada was all those years ago—and, hopefully, breaking through to another 17 year-old kid with his head down in the crowd who thinks he’s just a basketball player and not the artist who hides himself in pages and pages of poems he promises he’ll never show to anyone.
[PS: If you’re near Providence, RI & want to attend the event on Friday, April 29th, it’s free & open to the public: https://www.mosesbrown.org/spring-2022-visiting-poet/]
