Guest Essay: The Poet Lives in Us, No Matter the Genre by Sam SlupskiToday’s guest essay is written by THOI alumni Sam Slupski (they/them). Sam first attended THOI in 2018, was a part of the alumni cohort in 2023 and 2024, and was a Duo Residency participant in 2024. I have often found that poems can’t always hold everything I need them to. Sometimes, I need to say something directly and resist the urge to camouflage the truth in figurative imagery. Sometimes, I need to flesh out more nuance and have spaciousness to explore a topic, story, or idea. When I wove prose into my first book of poetry, I felt this spaciousness begin to unfold. I felt I could dig deeper into vulnerability and creativity–but I often felt I was abandoning poetry in the process. After not writing a poem for months, I thought my poet identity had officially retired. Then I picked up Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar and finished the book in jaw-dropping awe. Akbar’s novel uses a poetic lens to explore biculturalism, sobriety, grief, and queerness, with a heart-wrenching twist that reminded me that poetry isn’t just a genre—it’s a way of looking at, noticing, and interacting with the world. It’s feeling emotions deeper, noticing small things, absorbing everything as research, and attaching visceral images to experiences. Reading PRETTY by KB Brookins deepened my understanding of how genres can blend and transcend. Brookins sprinkles poems throughout the memoir as a driving literary device. In one chapter, they use a poem, “How to Identify Yourself with a Wound (2018),” as a prelude to an essay. Lines from this poem later reappear as subheadings, which draw readers deeper into a reflective, nuanced narrative about trauma, Blackness in America, and transness. The poetry provides striking clarity, while the essay offers a more detailed, layered exploration of experience. Brookins’ approach affirmed for me that sometimes, poetry alone is not enough, and prose can complement it in ways that reinforce the narrative. In my own writing, I am constantly considering where the poet lives. Where do I let metaphor tell the story, and where do I say it how it is? What if the metaphor is saying it how it is? How do I hold onto poetic honesty while writing a memoir about taking care of my disabled, aging parents amidst reparenting and healing from my own childhood trauma? How do I step into the bravery needed to sit in a topic for the length of an essay? When I can’t find my own answers, I turn to Hanif Abdurraqib. In They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, he crafts essays that seamlessly weave concrete imagery with cultural critique, such as his memory of watching his grandmother smoke cigarettes while exploring the violence Black women endure in America. His essays show how memories can become the backbone of a broader narrative, blending the personal and the universal with poetic precision. An example in my own work is using poetics to give the reader a tour of my childhood conditions—the house I grew up in and how disability justice informs my understanding of how much of my trauma came from coming from a deeply under-resourced people impacted by poverty and the psychiatric industrial complex. In my essays, I trust my lived experience as a primary source, and I use poetic devices to create a more visceral experience for the reader. Poetry lets me look at my memory almost as if it’s a museum. I tour my history, taking my lineage and stories and placing them in a new narrative that sometimes needs the breadth of an essay to be fully realized. I will never be able to divorce the poet from my writing—or from myself. While attending The Heart of It this last year, I felt like a fraud working on a memoir in a space full of poets. A few days in, I found myself in workshops writing poems that ended up serving my memoir. I wrote a poem that was a door to a bigger story I wanted to tell. If you’re interested in stepping outside of poetry or blending genres, start with a poem you’ve already written. Go through it and ask yourself: is there a story, nuance, or connection you can dig deeper into? Can you use a poem as a doorway to give a tour of the whole story or a different part of the story? Ask yourself: where does the poet live inside of you? Can you see poetry as more than a genre—a lens that synthesizes the world? And where can you begin to play, to forget the rules? Writing prose has allowed me to find new ways to tell stories and to inhabit them. Poetry offers moments of clarity and emotional weight, while essaying lets me unfold the layers lying beneath. Together, these forms support each other in expressing truths that are too big or too intricate for any single structure. Consider your voice as a poet, to recognize it not as a genre but as a perspective that can enrich narrative and history-telling. Write in fragments, then string them together. Let one form spill into another. Approach your experiences with the reverence of a poet and the patience of an essayist. Together, they can capture the layered complexities of what it means to live, feel, and write in ways that honor both the small moments and the sweeping arcs of our stories. Perhaps the only “rule” worth keeping is staying open to what your story needs—and trusting that the forms you choose will rise to meet it. Where to find Sam: Newsletter | Instagram | Website | Book
|
