Photo by Jennifer Waddell

danielle legros georges is a writer, translator, academic, and author of several books of poetry including the dear remote nearness of you, winner of the new england poetry club’s sheila margaret motten book prize. she is director of the lesley university mfa program in creative writing and is a faculty member of the joiner institute for the study of war and social consequences writer’s workshop, at the university of massachusetts, boston. her awards include fellowships from the massachusetts cultural council, the boston foundation, and the black metropolis research consortium. she was appointed the second poet laureate of the city of boston, serving in the role from 2015 to 2019.

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Having an audience is a great privilege and I like to give my audience, when I read, my physical voice and a part of my thoughts that will comfort, disturb or move or delight them. I want to change the quality of the air in a room when I read. I use voice and movement in the service of ideas. I want everything but the poem to fall away in the moment, to create a vortex, a portal, ultimately a shared if ephemeral journey.
Most artists I feel are acutely sensitive to the social, environmental and political events around them—and reflect these, or address what is missing or perhaps more generally inconceivable around them.
Toni Morrison writes of the violence that is oppressive language, and the limits it places on knowledge. I often wrestle with such language; and find myself engaging in linguistic experiments, attempting to create new visions, or recuperate hidden or buried sources of knowledge.
Performance adds another dimension to experiencing and understanding a poem, so I welcome these possibilities to help build a bridge between me and the listener, the “experiencer” of the poem.
I love poems that leap, that move quickly, that are bold in their associative properties. The metaphor, of course, is a fundamental poetic device that speaks to movement, and (I’d add) a shimmering simultaneity. I use it in its basic and extended forms. I also have sound drive poems forward. Poems can liquefy into song, and also solidify into sculpture on the page. For the latter, I start with a block of text and ideas and I chip away until there is nothing else I can remove. I’m seeking a gem-like quality.
I do believe that a poem should move the reader or listener. In order for it to do this, it must in its conception and/or construction move its maker somehow—it must shift something in its maker. This connects to the poem as space of inquiry for me.
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photo by Jennifer Waddell