Trust the Hours – A Poetry and Art Collaboration in Rochester

If someone asks why write? my answer is: it’s the poet’s job to discover the metaphors with which the universe speaks to us. It’s her job to make life, and the heaviness that comes with it, accessible.

A bonus is that sometimes this discovery is therapy. To work through a poem is to work through society’s collective and our own personal traumas.

This aesthetic philosophy—how do you see the world? what can you show me?—is what inspired my poet laureate fellowship project with the Academy of American Poets, which is a poetry and art exhibit centered on mental illness. I have commissioned a group of diverse poets and artists, including high school students, to create work that reflects their own mental illness that of a loved one. We will show at Rochester’s Historic Chateau Theatre for six weeks, opening with a reading, giveaways, and community art piece on Saturday, April 26th, at 6:00 pm. The exhibit will be free and open to the public until June 6th.

The show includes a poem from Minnesota’s poet laureate Gwen Westerman, who was named to the role in 2021, and I have been honored to collaborate with the Minnesota Humanities Center, who has inspired our interactive elements. This statewide support, especially during National Poetry Month, is important to Rochester as we grow and celebrate our arts and culture scene.

Another component moves beyond the exhibit: I’ve asked some of our participants to create broadsides, poem/art prints, which we will release at the show and then have for free, with magnets, around Rochester at participating small businesses. My hope is people will use the magnet to hang the broadside at home or work, or frame it, or give it to someone wonderful.

I named the exhibit Trust the Hours, borrowed from a Galway Kinnell poem written for a student who was considering suicide. “Wait,” is the poem. Kinnell writes, “Distrust everything, if you have to. / But trust the hours. Haven’t they / carried you everywhere, up to now?” There is a stinging optimism to this poem—not one of platitudes, but one of reason, one of what humans owe to each other. Kinnell’s speaker is who I want our poets and artists to be for Rochester’s community members: we hope to welcome people to expression and companionship in their vulnerability.

There are incredible poets and artists in our city doing this work already, and it was a challenge to narrow our talent to a small pool. As I assembled, I needed to include diverse representation so I could emphasize that mental illness presents differently depending on demographics. Similarly, it was important to be specific in defining mental illness: how we talk about it impacts stigma. That is, overgeneralization could be construed as talking around mental illness rather than about it, diminishing it, watering it down. This is poetry. Think of the differences between “bad day” vs. “mental health” vs. “mental illness” vs. “bipolar disorder.” How, as you say the next, there’s an opening. How there’s permission at the end.

Language, poetry, art: all allow this opening. We come to know our whole community just one single story at a time. A work of art or a poem is a moment—and a story, and a person, and then suddenly all of humanity. Sometimes my most personal experiences with a poem are in the middle of a reading, surrounded by people; yet other times, when I’m in a book at home, I feel surrounded by the world. I hope, with this project, we might be within ourselves, and without ourselves, all the same.