INTRODUCTION

​

​

“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
and what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me
As good belongs to you.”

​

The 51st Annual Poetry Festival held on May 12th, 2023, in Marian Anderson Theater, strengthened the message that we all have stories, and they are not dissimilar. If the physical self is a border, we are constantly crossing and recrossing that border in order to build bridges of understanding and dismantle walls. This resonates so powerfully in 2023, the year Venezuelan migrants were bused into New York City from states that closed doors to immigrants. This issue is complex and nuanced, so I am not going to tackle it, but simply say that when a person leaves another country under hazardous conditions to come to the United States, it is only because of challenging circumstances. Each and every individual has a story to tell in the home they left behind. These borders, then, are twofold—the borders
of personal space and the places left behind. As Salman Rushdie says in “Shalimar the Clown”:

 

“Our lives, our stories,
flowed in one another.
were no longer our own.
individual, discrete.”

​

Immigration is the quintessential story about stories—yours and mine. It is about finding a home, inside ourselves and in a new place. Many of our young poets write about a yearning for this place, this home. Yan Zhen Zhu, third prize winner from Brooklyn Technical High School recalls “Placelessness”: “You flew me seven thousand seven hundred miles to unwelcoming land—soil that doesn’t hold the imprint of my feet/ floating mouths that string myths into sentences for/ for children I was only a child struggling to/remember my sister’s face.....how airports are placeless We’re in Fuzhou and Sydney/and New York And this place whose
name/started with mei was my new home/with a father I never knew Teach me/with your Music box that played Mozart’s Turkish March on/ loop how the song is still the same...”

​

Indeed, the song is often the same. The ability to transform this sense of “placelessness” into poetry provides an anchor for young people, many of whom feel a sense of displacement. Even people who have lived in America their whole life can relate to feeling rootless. Amidala Barta-Zilles from Bronx Science, tells us in her foreign language award-winning poem “Sehnsucht” (Longing):

I look outside my window and wonder what the world will
show me
Santorini, maybe
Painted blue and white
The smaller the alley, the easier to forget....
Tokyo, when I’m feeling adventurous.
The foreign open new doors
Show me what I will never experience....
At least not in front of my window.

My window, however, somehow shows only one reality.
Home—
The walls of my personal prison and the actuality of life.
I’m always just here.

​

Amidala’s poem speaks of the body’s prison, another boundary of entrapment that must be crossed.

This world of blurred boundaries is intimately tied not to countries, but also to nature which has no borders. Avijeet Das writes: “I don’t belong to any man. I don’t belong to any woman. I don’t belong to any religion. I don’t belong to any country. I don’t believe in borders. I don’t believe in hate. I am as old as the mountains. I am as vast as the sky. I am as deep as the ocean.”

People in many parts of the world live surrounded by water, whether it be the Atlantic, Pacific, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean. We are that ocean and is shared among us. Maeve Gura, a fourth grader at P.S. 321 writes in “How to Hug an Ocean”:

​

....you have to hear its call.
You have to embrace it
the water
dancing through your body...

you have to pull it in tight.
The icy blue waves
don’t let them go
taste its saltiness
and you’ll feel reborn.
You’ll be glad
because you
hugged the ocean.

​

A hug for the ocean means love for the world: our diverse and rich cultural experiences, the practices we have left behind in our countries, and those we wish to imprint in our new homes—wherever they might be. Our poems are our bodies, our offering to the world.

This year, our Development Coordinator and Chief Mentor, Alyssa Yankwitt, went with a partnering organization, Writing Through, to learn their methodology of teaching poetry in Cambodia, with the explicit goal of what it means to write poetry across borders. One exercise required the children to write about bridges they dream about: “The Bridges” Lanh Manith, 13:

 

The bridge is white.
The bridge is on the water.
The bridge is high
and so far.
The bridge is beautiful.
I’m so excited.
We can go across.
We can go inside and outside.
To another country
to see new things.
I’m very happy.
The bridge is strong.

Another Cambodian poet, Lim Sopichnea, 13, tells us:

We built the bridge all together
Then we will cross with each other
Holding hands and feel it all over
This bridge is a reminder that we will be together, as
long as

You and I are here on the bridge.
It will last forever.

​

We must all cross that bridge with open eyes and hearts. The story of one immigrant is your story, my story, our story since we all have an ancestor who came from another country; hence, “every atom belonging to me as well belongs to you” (Whitman). Decency, integrity, principles—all this and more is required to embrace another’s perspective. “Principles don’t have borders” according to Alisa Raj from “Wrong You Need to Know.” Hence, it is really quite simple to embrace another’s narrative even if its history is different from your own. When we cross these bridges together, we learn to disregard borders and empathize with the plight of others. We learn to understand, for example, the misunderstanding of borders, that these borders are “those invented lines drawn with ash on maps and sewn into the ground with bullets” (Mosab Abu Toha, THINGS YOU MIGHT FIND HIDDEN IN MY EARS).

Gloria Mindock, our featured guest poet, has a deep understanding of this in her poem “Bandages,” originally published in IBBETSON STEET. Here is an excerpt. The full poem can be read in the book:

 

In a Russian prison, she could
hear the cries of Ukrainian men being raped.
She was pregnant. Her husband did not know.
All she wanted was her baby to be born in Ukraine.
Speaking to her stomach, urging. Wait little one.
In a prisoner exchange, her baby was born in Ukraine.....

In some villages, every heart stopped beating at once.
Can a village survive supported by the beating hearts of only
two?
Yet the women carry on the footprints stretched out before
them.
Walking the same path,
breathing a different story for a free Ukraine.

​

Empathy, compassion, understanding of our shared commonality allows us to view the world through a positive prism, as something more than “Perfect” ( Pip Patterson, PS 29):

​

Today I stand

here in this country
that is astray in perfectness
beaten, battered, but still we stand whole
like ripped paper?
Why!
Why not unite, why do we fight, togetherness.
It would make us stronger....
Why deny hot money and accept sadness.
This country, our country is ours

and we belong to it.
This union, our country
is not yet over the hill.

​

We will never be over the hill, since there are poems to write, stories to share, people to guide us. Thanks to President Vince Boudreau; Provost Tony Liss; Dee Dee Mozeleski, Vice President and Executive Director, The Foundation for City College, The Office of Institutional Advancement, Communications and External Relations and Senior Advisor to the President; Renata K. Miller, Dean of Humanities and the Arts; Elizabeth Mazzola, Chair of the English Department; Michelle Valladares, Director, MFA program; Gregory Schanck, Managing Director, CCCA and Aaron Davis Hall; Annika Luedke and Kelly Sullivan, The Office of Institutional Advancement and External Communications and the Foundation for City College; The Office of Support Services at City College with specials thanks to Taki; Axe-Houghton Foundation; Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation; The South Wind Foundation; David and Harianne Wallenstein; Gregory Crosby, Assistant Director; Alyssa Yankwitt, Development Coordinator and Chief Mentor; Michiel Meerleveld for taping the day’s event; Sue Guiney, Writing Through; American Academy of Poets and Barry Wallenstein, who birthed this whole, wonderful organization.

 

Remember “the sonars of the eyes/the windows they installed/beeping, glaring into my soul/my body and its movement/ the echoes of my ancestors screaming out in Soninke/ in spite of the French” (Omar Knoute, James Baldwin High School). As you write your next poem, be certain to embrace yourself as well as the voices of your ancestors and friends. We are all part of this giant mosaic we call poetry—no borders here.

 

See you next year for the 52nd anniversary of Outreach.

Pam Laskin, July 2023

​