How big is your voice?

Meeting Andrea Gibson for the first time, in a snowstorm.

In honor of Andrea Gibson’s passing this week, I am re-posting an essay I wrote fifteen years ago (15!) on my blog, 37days (2010). Three years later, they would keynote my Life is a Verb Camp for the first time.

---

I don't really do snow. Ask my family. It snows, I stay inside by a DeLonghi portable heater with tiny handwarmers stuck inside the twittens Laurie Foley knitted for me, my neck swathed in the wool/silk blend scarf made for me by Aurora Fox. I don't like to be cold. My limbs are cold-prone. I'M A COLD WEATHER WIMP. I am a fan of the apres-ski, not the ski.

There. I said it.

Given that aversion to cold, and particularly to blizzard-type cold, where cold=wet and cold, it might come as some significant surprise that last Friday night IN THE MIDDLE OF A BLIZZARD with impassable roads, I made Emma hike downtown with me to see poet/activist Andrea Gibson perform. Emma wanted to stay home watching M*A*S*H reruns, but finally bundled up to join me on the excellent adventure.

It would have been easier to stay home, warm, dry, poet-less. After all, I can watch Andrea Gibson on YouTube.

But I couldn't. I just knew I had to show up, go, hear.

So Emma and I walked from our house through empty downtown streets, looking for a place to have dinner. Chai Pani had just closed. We headed toward Lexington Avenue. Everything seemed closed down. All dark. Then lights shone in a small restaurant called Table. We walked in, shaking snow from our heads.

Warmed olives, a salad, gnocchi with kale, and conversation with your seventeen-year-old as an adult, not a child. Ah, the poignancy of that moment.

"We'd better go," I said, finally.

"I don't really like for people to sit and read poetry to me, Mama," Emma said. "Don't worry," I answered. "They won't be sitting and reading poetry to us."

And so we bundled back up and went out into the snow. We walked in the middle of the street because there were no cars out. Snow was over our boots. Up and down hills, to the small gallery where Andrea Gibson would perform.

Because of the storm, there were only 24 of us in the audience. What an intimate gathering, all the more special for that, the solidarity of making it there.

We walked in and sat on the back row, a wooden church pew. I looked over and saw the poet sitting beside us. They were tiny. I suddenly couldn't breathe; I couldn't look over at them. I sat very still.

At a little after 8pm, they were introduced, and they started. For an hour and a half, we listened and laughed and acknowledged and heard. They are a force to be reckoned with, this tiny strong bold human. A force.

We were there with the intrepid 24. Like poet-seeking missiles, we were there.

Their words were searing, passionate, fully formed out of desire and need and understanding. As their website says, Andrea Gibson is not gentle with their truths. They take prisoners, those words. They shock and thrill and surprise and embed themselves in you. This is what poetry is. This is what poetry can be.

They are a human being with a point of view and with a way of speaking that moves me. It was breathtaking. For me and for Emma. I felt changed by being there, fundamentally altered. There was a fantastic energy in the room. Electric air.

And then it was over. Emma had been sketching at times during it, capturing it in images. She closed her sketchbook, looked at me, and smiled.

I bought some of the poet's books and CDs afterward for friends, and was struck a bit mute by my proximity to them. What do you say to someone whose work so moves you, energizes you, makes you think? I could only think to say this: "Hi, my name is Patti. And this is my daughter, Emma. Thank you for your voice in the world." I didn't add the part about hiking barefoot uphill both ways for miles in a blizzard to get there, but I think they knew.

I asked if we could take a photo with them. Then Emma and I had a most extra-ordinary, enlivened walk home. I felt lighter, expansive.

Here's to a poetry that grabs us, shakes us, enlivens us.

Andrea’s voice is big. It is transforming. Is yours? Is mine?

There are many of their poems I love. The one above is one I've posted on 37days before, and here again. I felt too shy to ask them to perform it that evening, and wish I had.

Love,

Patti

If you liked what you just read, why not share it with a friend? Or heart it! Shares and likes are an important way to help other readers find my work. THANK YOU!