On Feb. 27, Trinity hosted an evening of poetry and discussion centered around conflict and reconciliation. To put on the event, Trinity’s chapter of Nurturing Hope San Antonio partnered with the Rotary Club of San Antonio and the Corrymeela Community in Northern Ireland, two organizations seeking to promote peace through meaningful dialogue.
“Nurturing Hope: Poetry, Peace and Possibility” featured three poets: Jenny Browne, English professor at Trinity and 2018 Poet Laureate of Texas, Pádraig Ó Tuama, Irish poet and theologian, and Naomi Shihab Nye, Palestinian-American poet and creative writing professor at the Texas State University.
The poets read a selection of their works and outlined the inspiration behind them. Each work related to the evening’s theme by addressing conflict in its many forms — from interpersonal conflict to global conflict in places such as Palestine and Ireland.
“I think all three of us … have devoted our lives, really, to the truth of making a poem – a humanizing act in a profoundly dehumanizing time,” Browne said in her introduction. “And I think poems do begin as conversations that often conflict within ourselves and as a way of holding difficult emotions together, at least they do for me, but also the greater conversation that poetry creates.”
The event was part of The Conversation series at Trinity, an initiative created by Kyle Gillette, interim associate provost, in fall 2024. The Conversation has hosted a variety of events, both big and small, in the pursuit of encouraging dialogue and giving space to diverse perspectives.
“I wanted to create a space for students, especially, to come together, talk about issues that matter to them,” Gillette said. “And part of what motivated this was recognition that many students reported feeling uncomfortable talking about things of urgent concern when they thought that somebody might strongly disagree with them … And yet students also kept reporting that they want those spaces, and they want to be able to have those conversations.”
This event sought to provide one of those open spaces of conversation by concluding the night with a discussion where both the audience and the poets asked questions of each other. During this segment, Browne asked Nye what helps her deal with the tumultuous state of the world.
“In a world of so much conflict and so many differences of opinion that our hunger for the artfulness of poetry and story is becoming more and more a necessity for people to just have a place to go with language that isn’t contentious and hating,” Nye said.
Jules Poage, academic coach at Trinity, attended the event at the recommendation of a friend who liked Ó Tuama’s work. They spoke about how the poets’ discussion caused them to reevaluate the way they view the art of poetry.
“I think of poems so much more as personal,” Poage said. “The social aspect and the political aspect is something that I don’t think about enough or as much as I’d like to.”
Lara Lashus, junior sociology major and former student of Browne, has been a fan of Nye since she was gifted a book of her poems as a child. She attended the event with Poage and agreed that the importance of poetry is larger than the personal.
“We are in community all the time and everything is conversation,” Lashus said. “Our life is the conversations we have, and the poetry is the conversations we have.”
The next event in the series The Conversation will be the “Public Debate on AI Legal Personhood” on April 23.
