Celebrate National Poetry Month with Emerson College Poets

Emersonians have been integral to the fabric of the poetry community for decades. There have been three poet laureates for Boston – all Emersonians, many more have won prestigious prizes, and too many to count have published their unique verses in journals, collections, and chapbooks.

In celebration of National Poetry Month, we invited numerous published Emerson College poets to provide a (short) poem of theirs, and share why they wrote it, and why they like writing poetry.

Annalisa Hansford ’25

Hansford’s chapbook Romanticization of Grief and Ghosts was recently published by Bottle Cap Press on March 4. Her poem “Garden Sonnet” was published in the literary journal petrichor, (which gave Emerson Today permission to republish the poem).

“[Writing poetry is] a way for me to immortalize people and memories from my life that are important to me. Poetry is a time capsule for the person I used to be. With my chapbook being out, it’s very exciting and I’m so grateful for it to be out in the world, but it’s also weird, because many of these poems are from my sophomore year of college. I’m a senior now. I’ve grown and changed a lot as both a person and a poet. The poems in my chapbook remind me of who I used to be.”

“Garden Sonnet”

I mistake ache for awe daily. Knew I was shattered since birth.
The hospital walls as white as the bone of my childhood best
friend. How only one of us would live past eighteen. In the maternity
ward, all my mother wanted to hear was silence. My father,
his favorite Sublime song. Instead their ears filled with the wailing
of a newborn. Some grow up to be a disappointment. Others arrive
in this world that way. I learned to dream of the future tense, memories
fresh like a bundle of lavender, girls with poems for faces. Once
I destroyed myself for a girl named after a flower. Now I can’t look
at gardens without thinking about the nightmare of my life that,
no matter what universe, every version of myself wants what
I can’t have. Like a rafflesia in a field waiting to be picked by a stranger
but never is. The stranger is me. I pick the daisy. Bears the name
of a girl that might love me in an alternate universe. But not this one.

Sandra Yannone, MFA ’91

Yannone is the Poet Laureate of Old Saybrook, Connecticut. She has published two books of poetry, Boats for Women and The Glass Studio with Salmon Poetry. In March 2020, she co-founded and started hosting the weekly reading series Cultivating Voices LIVE Poetry on Zoom via Facebook.

“My debut collection, Boats for Women, included maritime poems, most notably involving the1912 Titanic disaster. Captain Smith’s appearance in The Glass Studio reminds me that my obsessions do not have statute of limitations. Here Titanic meets glass, those ‘crystal stems’, in the collection’s only poem that does not contain the word glass, and I love how this sonnet uses couplets to mask the form.

“The Final Crossing of Captain Edward J. Smith”

His voice had never fallen hoarse
his whole career until on board tonight. He regrets

for a waterlogged moment the crystal stems, the five-course
meal, the toasting of names the headlines will never forget,

his first-class guests now merely occupants
of the same fate as all the others. A monsoon

of panic overtakes the calm. Chants
of “women and children first” swoon

through the Atlantic chill. How to captain when riven
with everything unsinkable sinking? Between

not enough time and too few lifeboats? He cuts the ribbon
between himself and April fourteenth.

Now two plus hours into the fifteenth, death
hovers an instant away. He resigns to a final breath. 

Hannah Bambach ’25

Bambach’s poem “Omen” was featured in the January/February edition of Poetry Magazine, and has had her work featured in The YoungArts Anthology, Anthropozine, and Lesbians Are Miracles Magazine.

“In my writing, I attempt to portray love as something alive and devoid of sterility. Mundanity is necessary to long-term connection, and finding pockets of normalcy that yield beauty is one of my greater goals as a poet. Poetry can reflect life, but poetry is also resistance and opposition—taboo and unusual topics can be inserted both allegorically and literally into poems, and finding avenues to explore peculiar subjects fuels my love for the craft.”

“Shift”

In the animal kingdom, 
it is easy to commit to mating season with the promise of hibernation. 

I think about this at the Dart station, by the flower pot outside your old office, in my kitchenette. 

You, standing with your feet 
too-turned out, facing away from me cruelly. 

Bears reach their breeding quota in early July, ready to bring new life after a rest. 

I wonder if there is rest for us 
if we cannot commit 
to reproduction. 

Do I get to cower after 
waving after you?

Ashley Abitz, MFA ’26

Since last fall, Abitz has had poems published in The Dewdrop and Beyond Words, with another forthcoming in The Sine Qua Non.

“I’m drawn to poetry’s ability to excavate what’s hidden, to make meaning out of fracture, and to bear witness in ways that aren’t always linear or neat. It’s where I feel most honest and most curious. …Poetry helps me trace the emotional undercurrents of a moment or memory, and in doing so, it often reveals something I didn’t know I was looking for.” 

“Indoor Pastoral/Golden Pothos”

Hypnotic, the way these leaves twist and turn 
about the fabric of my home— 
savage points and curling ends cheer on 
maroon locutions of the waning sun. 

Their viridescent cascades find cause 
to out-coruscate even the golden 
map of Ireland, hung dashingly 
among the other comforts

of my sitting room. I touch their velvet 
visages, and met with sighs so radiant, 
it seems my very fingertips dole
the dwindling honeys of vitality

Jennah Figueroa, MFA ’26

Figueroa has been published in Rogue Agent, and on poets.org for the Academy of American Poets University and College prize.

“Poetry has always served as a means of exploration and understanding for me, and I take a great deal of comfort in its container. Whether it be that I am looking to entertain, dissect, or just simply talk, poetry has granted me access to a way of organizing my ideas that no other medium can provide the same way. Poetry forces you to be patient; it’s a challenge and a meditation—which is what I appreciate about this piece so much. Something about the sensibility behind ‘nothing extra’ feels so simple but has been a well needed reminder for me…

“Love is Poetry is Prayer in response to: Emily Dickinson’s #341″

“First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—”

Declarations—metaphors 
through 
absolutes. 
Nothing Extra.

Objectism—subject of soul, 
how can we present
this rumination
accurately? 

Taking it all one step further 
to let the inside 
out. 

Meditation (on grief 
among other things). Nothing 
extra.

Rumination—sit with this feeling, 
line to line. 
Capital “N” & “E” for 
emphasis. 

Slow, and even 
internal reeling. 

Pay attention to pacing,
interjection especially. 
Formality becomes less 
common. 

Using your time— 
in accordance to your
expression—

Nothing Extra

Angela Siew, MFA ’17

Siew was a Peter Taylor Fellow for the 2023 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and an Administrative Staff Scholar for the 2023 & 2024 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Salamander, Meridian, and LEON Literary Review, among others. Her chapbook, Coming Home, is available from Cut Bank.

“I love writing poetry because it allows me to think, feel, and use my senses all at the same time. It allows me to connect disparate ideas or feelings, to leap across spaces and time, and to imagine and enact what I didn’t know was possible.”

Siew wrote and revised her poem “The Gift” as an MFA student under the guidance of Professor Emeritus and former Ploughshares editor John Skoyles and Writing, Literature & Publishing Professor Dan Tobin, and also had the chance to workshop the poem with Claudia Rankine when she was a Distinguished Artist in Residence at Emerson.

“The Gift”

My nephew doesn’t know the strokes of his Chinese name.
He doesn’t know the beginning characters
like person, the first part falling from left to right
forming the torso and leg, the second finishing
the body. He doesn’t imagine the tiny marks
on either side as hands holding flames to make fire,
the hooks on moon as points of a slender crescent.

It is not his mother tongue, only the tongue
of his grandparents. To him, a box
doesn’t create the contours of country,
eight lucky strokes and a mouth neatly packed inside.
It is not my first tongue either.

I forget, sometimes, that mouth is in our surname,
that my brother and I share a mountain peak.
I am woman, and he is man. Together
we make the word for good.
My father is a poet in his first language.

I give my nephew the Boggle Junior from my childhood,
the cards with simple illustrations,
words spelled out three or four letters across.
Box! B-O-X! When my father asks him
what a box is, he says,
It’s something you use
to carry something else inside it.

(First published in Dialogist)

More Emerson College community poets

Porsha Olayiwola MFA ’22
Danielle Legros Georges ’86
Thomas Lux ’70
Denise Duhamel ’84
Anna Lena Phillips Dell, MFA ’07   
Kathleen Rooney, MFA ’05
Rage Hezekiah, MFA ’15
Linwood Rumney, MFA ’10
Wesley Rothman, MFA ’12
Maya Phillips ’12
Francine Rubin, MFA ’08
Joseph Noto, MFA ’23
Livia Meneghin, MFA ’21
Sarah Beckmann,  MFA ’23
Katie Mihalek, MFA ’24
Tatiana Johnson-Boiria, MFA ’21
Athena Nassar ’23
Fatima Jafar, MFA ’23
Brionne Janae, MFA ’15
Elisa Gabbert, MFA ’05
Kennedy McIntosh, MFA ’27

Which Emerson College poets did we not include? Email david_ertischek@emerson.edu.