Peace through prose
CT poet laureate Antoinette Brim-Bell aims to unite people through poetry
As Connecticut’s eighth state poet laureate, Antoinette Brim-Bell of West Haven has a clear mission to use the arts, poetry specifically, to unite people.
“What I want to do is connect people because I believe that the more people connect, the more they work together and collaborate, the easier it is for people to get along,” she said. “We are living in a world that is so divided right now. I think art can bring us together and that is the focus of my tenure.”
The poet laureate program, which began in 1995, sees its appointed representative poet as an advocate for poetry, to foster poetry and arts activities throughout the state. Brim-Bell’s term runs through 2025.
She has long loved the language of poetry, since she was six or seven. “My grandmother was always gifting me books and a book she gave to me had the ‘Dreams’ poem by Langston Hughes,” she said. “The language was simple and easy for me to read but of course, even the simplest of poems have layers and layers of meaning so as a child I was reading this poem and how you have to hold fast to dreams,” she said.
Brim-Bell said as a child, she didn’t know exactly what Hughes meant but she knew she liked the sound of the poem. “It seemed emphatic enough to me that I knew I needed to get some dreams,” she said with a laugh. “I was only seven but that was the beginning of my love of this type of writing that was carefully curated, had beautiful melody and was succinct.”
She soon began writing poetry and today is the author of several poetry collections: “These Women You Gave Me,” “Icarus in Love” and “Psalm of the Sunflower.”
Besides being a poet, BrimBell is also a printmaker and collage artist as well as an English professor at Capital Community College.
Asked if her poetry and printmaking work in tandem, she said they currently occupy their own places in her life. “I am hoping that I can bring them together with some upcoming projects that I’m working on,” she said.
After an accident years ago, she said she began to create
visual art when language was temporarily difficult for her. “Instead of everything coming to me in words and language and sound, everything was coming to me in colors and visual images and so I started printmaking,” she said. “As I healed, I started writing poetry again and now I guess I have the luxury of saying ‘ok, this particular idea or this particular image: is it better in a visual piece or a written piece?’ That is kind of how I toggle between the two of them.”
Brim-Bell has enjoyed traveling throughout Connecticut since she began her new role in July. “I’ve been going to parts of the state that I have never been before and learning what’s going on in those spaces where poetry and the arts are concerned,” she said.
Her favorite part has been meeting people: fellow poets as well as poetry enthusiasts who don’t write to her cohorts in the fine and performing arts. “This has given me the opportunity to step out into the state, meet different people, listen to their stories, and hear their concerns. And I now have an opportunity to perhaps create some programming that will elevate these voices that we may not hear very often,” she said. “That is what is exciting to me.”
Inspiration for her poems comes from anywhere but often by nature. Her friends and family have gotten used to her saying, “there is a poem in that.” A keen observer, she is constantly looking at and listening to what is going on around her. “One time when my daughter was little, we were walking and she said, ‘Oh, it’s so hard to walk with a poet’ because I would stop and see something and it would be beautiful to me…and I would want to observe it for a while.”
The process of writing a poem for her is more than blue sky-ing ideas and putting verses on paper. Surprisingly, it involves a fair amount of research into the history and etymology of words. “I might have an idea or an image that I want to use but first I need to know a little bit more about what it is, how it functions and that oftentimes leads me into a whole other exploration,” she said. “I am working on a poem right now about water and I’ve done all kinds of research about water cycles.”
A recent collaboration with Witness Stones in Old Lyme about enslaved peoples led her down a rabbit hole of fascinating information and she worked with a historian there to learn more about the peoples’ lives there. From how they made soap at this time, what they ate to what the buildings were like then “to better understand what was happening to these individuals and then subsequently I was able to fashion the poetry around them,” she said.
Her poems often start with a spark that she fans into a flame with a lot of research and consideration. “Language is so beautiful. I will hear a word or come across a book I’m reading and if it sounds good in the air or feels good in the mouth, I will end up doing a little research,” she said. Brim-Bell added that she frequently looks up words in the Oxford English Dictionary to see when it was first used and its different meanings, which often leads her to new directions. “I love to research whether it is mythology or language or sacred text, I am always looking for language and image and metaphor to get inside of a poem.”