#2: Craft · Community · Visibility
In his second quarterly reflection, DEW Scholar Isaiah Adepoju reflects on grief, joy and the ongoing conversation between mentor and poet.
Isaiah Adepoju
DEW Scholar
Spring Quarterly Reflection
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On this Reflection
Each DEW Scholar reflection traces a season of writing, reading and conversation. In this second reflection, Isaiah writes about grief, joy and the understanding that can emerge from both.
Three Tenets of the Work
I structure mentorship around three tenets: craft, community, and visibility.
Craft is the work beneath the work: attention, revision, precision.
Community is the ecosystem: peers, collaborators, readers, elders — the people who make the work possible.
Visibility asks how and where you want to be seen. It’s more nuanced than self-promotion and always on your own terms.
Below are Isaiah’s reflections from the past quarter, shared in his own words.
In Isaiah’s Words
The last quarter has been a turbulent one for me emotionally.
After our February meeting I wrote to you via email:
A few days ago, Wednesday I think, I started wondering about writing a poem about joy. I was in the middle of completing the edits of a chapbook about my father. There was a lot of sadness in the chapbook, although I tried as much as I can to be impersonal, and I wanted to close with a joyful poem. I couldn’t write any, at all.
In the end, I wrote: ‘In all this, I am. I take shape,’ which is not joy, in the same way that Lucille Clifton’s won’t you celebrate with me is not.
I also started reading Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard and have been thinking about the persona poems we talked about.
You wrote back to me:
Regarding your chapbook, I think there is no obligation to end on joy. You have to end where you feel most yourself and this — ‘In all this, I am. I take shape’ — is a beautifully evocative place to land.
I think that even in my manuscript where I end on my poem The Lost Stations, it is not possible to feel completely at peace with everything, but there is a sort of acceptance that as long as I am carrying these memories inside myself, then he is always with me in some way.
Native Guard is such a tough book, but what Trethewey does is so valuable in terms of using persona and historical distance. She lets history and form carry the weight of grief beside the emotion.
There is no one right way to write about grief. In the end, despite it being such a universal emotion, it is also deeply personal.
Anytime I thought of joy, I was thinking particularly of happiness. I am only now curious about their difference.
How joy may be the consequence of understanding which, in turn, may be a product of tragedy.
It is like the persona in Trethewey’s Genus Narcissus. She plucks a daffodil by the roadside and presents it to her mother. Years later, after her mother’s death and as an adult, she understands. She was already mourning her mother’s death. The daffodil, like her mother, has a short spring.
Yet this is hardly a sorrow for the persona. Now she has come back to the point her mother was, and she sees in the daffodils “some measure of myself.”
Trethewey writes poems like this that, with understanding, move past the fact of unhappiness. It seems to me that joy starts from there.
Much of writing about joy seems to be about inhabiting that space of knowledge.
This conclusion wouldn’t have been possible had you not paid attention to other parts of my life directly away from craft and helped me work through and with them.
Which is another reason I cherish this mentorship session so much — because it goes beyond talking about writing to talking about living.
Books Mentioned
Native Guard — Natasha Trethewey
Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, this collection moves between personal grief and historical memory, imagining the voices of Black Union soldiers and reflecting on Trethewey’s own family history in the American South.
Follow Isaiah’s writing
Isaiah Adepoju writes from Osogbo, where his attention moves easily between poems, books and the long conversation a writer keeps with the world.
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Afterword
This reflection continues the work of the Donald E. Waterfall Scholarship Fund, and the conversations that make it possible.
Thank you for being here.
With love and intention,
Cara
P.S.
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