“Poetry Live!” is not just named as such — event co-host and Jones lecturer Hieu Minh Nguyen invited the audience to engage “not as readers or as listeners, but as active participants in poetry,” and the audience obeyed. Co-host and ITALIC lecturer Sam Sax thanked the audience throughout the event for their live presence and connection.
On March 6, the third annual “Poetry Live!” featured eight student poets from the Stanford Spoken Word Collective, along with renowned poets Safia Elhillo and Jamila Woods.
The evening began with Sax paying compliments to the Stanford Spoken Word Collective, the openers of the evening, by emphasizing both the “aesthetic and political” sides of their work.
As the eight student poets shared their work, themes of language, heritage and relationships emerged. The members’ delivery was rhythmic and impassioned, with lines like “I’m the victim” and “I sew flowers in my mouth” emphasizing the positionalities of Native American identity and womanhood.
After the eight collective members read, Nguyen introduced Safia Elhillo, reading from her formal biography. According to her biography, Elhillo is “Sudanese by way of Washington D.C.,” the author of three books and the recipient of multiple awards and fellowships.
Elhillo read several pieces from her body of work, most of which she wrote during her time as a Stegner Fellow at Stanford from 2019 to 2021. Her poetry centered experiences of loss and continued the focus on language, including lines like, “How dare I love a word without knowing it in Arabic?” Her verse made ample use of rhetorical questions left unanswered.
Another dealt with the war in Sudan, confronting the suffering of people there and making that suffering impossible to ignore. “How will I invite your care?” Elhillo asks the listener. The poem, “Ode to Sudanese Americans,” highlighted the simultaneous closeness and broadness of the Sudanese American community. Elhillo writes, “We do not date, because we are probably cousins.”
After Elhillo’s reading, Sam Sax took the stage. “I haven’t cried in years, and I just lost my whole self back there,” they said.
Sax proceeded to introduce Jamila Woods, who they described as a musician, former poetic competitor and someone “transformational to the history of American letters.”
Woods shared poetry that she is “trying to release into the world soon” — the audience that night received a sneak peek. Her poetry elicited laughter at some moments, and noises of resonance at others. Across poems, she honored “Black legends at the beauty shop,” the first Black woman astronaut and her grandparents’ struggles with dementia. One poem also delved into the pain of the COVID-19 pandemic, from “wishing for another week of weekends” to forgetting what day it is.
Woods’s final poem was about seeing a speech therapist after a lifetime of “trying too hard to sound perfect.” This meticulous facet of her experience was on display in her reading.
As soon as Woods’s reading ceased, the audience rose in a standing ovation and erupted in cheers for all 10 performers of the evening. Showcasing diverse experiences while also bringing many people together, “Poetry Live!” appeared a resounding success.