By Mary Ann Zehr, contributor
A monthly column in 2025 by a local teacher and reader about connecting with books and taking in Harrisonburg’s literary scene.
“I want to take poetry outside the purview of academia,” says local poet Gbenga Adesina at the start of a spring workshop he is giving at Central Library, part of the programming for the Big Read 2025.
Adesina is a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in Black Global and Diasporic Poetry at the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University. He has published a chapbook, Painter of Water, and poems in notable literary magazines. In September, a collection of Adesina’s poetry, Death Does Not End at the Sea, will be published by the University of Nebraska Press.
Adesina characterizes the March 22 workshop–“Writing Parents, Family, and Family Ghosts”–as “a space of vulnerability and sharing.” When participant Wendy Kinyeki introduces herself, she puts into words what some of the rest of us may be wondering: “Can I write poetry? Or is poetry only for the few who can write in a particular way?”
We begin to exercise poetic thinking by writing five words to describe our families. We read aloud our lists, which contain words such as “grace,” “reserved,” “loving,” “flawed,” and “worker bees.” Then the poet-teacher challenges us to think of which word we left out. “That’s where the poetry comes out. What is the silence on the page? Go there.” When we add these missing words, the descriptions of our families contain contradictions. The poet-teacher encourages us that tensions, arising from human complexity, are the start of a story.
Adesina then prompts us to describe the face or hands of a person we love. I try to describe the face of my sister, but I falter. Are the frames of her glasses made of wire? Are they plastic? How can I not know this when I know her so well? The poet-teacher has experience with this kind of faltering. “When you write about family, one of the feelings you feel is inadequacy,” he says. It’s love that urges writers to overcome unreliable memories and dig deep, he assures us.
We read the poem “Girl,” by Jamaica Kincaid. The poem is a long list of specific instructions from an unnamed voice–possibly a mother to daughter–on how to live one’s life. Adesina asks us to write ten things that someone in our family said to us and to be aware of the emotions behind the words. In response, I have my most intense experience of the workshop recalling my deceased father’s advice to me, which often fell along the lines of “Don’t forget your values” or “Remember who you are.” One harsh instruction also emerges and startles me. Harshness in addition to loving concern occurs in the descriptions written by some of the other writers in the room.
The poet-teacher remarks that even if some of the voices of family members in our poems sound harsh, he doesn’t feel that anyone we wrote about is “a monster.” Instead, he had the thought, “That was an overwhelmed human being.” If we tell a complete story and are honest, we can trust the reader of the poem to understand the person we are writing about, he tells us.
Adesina reads aloud one of his own published poems, “I Carried My Father Across the Sea,” for which he won the 2020 Narrative Prize.
We speak back to the poet-teacher to note what lines stand out to us or to express what feelings the poem evokes. Participant Lori Mier says she connects with the idea that the death of the father in the poem is not silence. She shares that her parents died when she was only three years old. When she was young, she made up stories about them. Mier says she resonates with the image of the door in the poem: “He wore a door on his face.” She says: “The door speaks to me. I get to walk through. I get to decide whether [my parents] are proud of me.”
Participant Joy Versluis notices the physicality of the poem, and refers to the lines, “He was light to carry, / his burdens and vows had bled out of him. / He was heavy / with the responsibility of the dead.” Another workshop participant points out “visceral images” in the poem: “I put my nose to his nose. / I put my finger in his mouth.”
The poet-teacher explains how the poem is autobiographical. His father died weeks before he left his homeland of Nigeria to cross the ocean to the United States to take advantage of an opportunity. Adesina uses the poem to illustrate how poetry can transform reality and grief “to not allow silence to be the last word.” Examples of transformation are that the “gash the surgeon’s knife left” on his father’s head becomes a “halo” and I.V. tubes become a “human gill.” The poem reverses the roles of father and son. “My dad who carried me all of my life,” Adesina explains, “In my poem, I can carry him.”
In a written response to the poem, we try to answer a question posed by the poet-teacher, “What grief are you carrying?” We attempt to describe an embodiment of something we are grieving in some kind of tender and physical action, akin to how Adesina swims and carries his father in his poem.
As the workshop comes to a close, we students of poetry communicate our appreciation for the beauty–and humanness–of the lines we’ve written and shared.
Versluis marvels at the “real depth and vulnerability” of our writing.
Kinyeki says the prompts led her to “a discovery of things I didn’t know I could use” to create poetry.
Shaneen Upal says that she came to the workshop thinking she would write about a “family ghost,” her grandfather, who died before she was born and has been much talked about in her lifetime. Instead, she chose to write about her grandmother, with whom she has spent a lot of time.
I share my takeaway that if I’m honest in my portrayal of a family member, even if I include flaws of that person, the reader will give that person a fair shake.
Adesina says our work for the day is likely to be the start of poetry that is still to emerge in the coming weeks or even years.
“What I’ve come to do is bring you possibilities,” he says.
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