Ariana Reines at NIGHTJAR: A Poetry Series

Ariana Reines. Attribution: Pickleeater777, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Some poems don’t open themselves up right away.  I found that to be the case with Ariana Reines’ ‘A Partial History,’ which you can find on the Poetry Foundation website.  But on a second reading, its vivid imagery and its shift from a personal to a collective voice started to have a pull on me.  

Reines will be the featured reader at NIGHTJAR: A Poetry Series at Tube Factory artspace on Tuesday June 18 at 6:30 p.m.  Reines’ most recent book is The Sand Book, which won the 2020 Kingsley Tufts Prize.  She has taught poetry all over the country, from Yale to Scripps College. In 2020, while a divinity student at Harvard, Reines founded Invisible College, which is a website devoted to studying, collectively, the sacred through the vehicle of poetry.  

As she puts it on her website: “I founded Invisible College while I was a divinity student at Harvard in the Spring of 2020. I had an intuition that reading Rilke’s Duino Elegies with people would unlock something that would help me—and possibly one or two other people—navigate those treacherous times with heart and soul intact. It was an experiment in study and love.”

That is to say, understanding poetry can be both difficult and rewarding.  (I myself have had a lot of trouble making my way through The Duino Elegies, though I find Rilke’s shorter works much more accessible.)  Sometimes the close reading of certain texts has been, and continues to be, impactful in my life.   

Poetry doesn’t necessarily require close reading to come alive, but it does require community. I’m going to go to NIGHTJAR this Tuesday not only to hear Reines read, but to be part of a community of poets. I might even read a couple of my own poems, since the featured reader at NIGHTJAR is always followed by an open mic. 

“The act of writing poetry is a soulshaping act,” Reines says on her podcast the Ariana Reines Experience. “It’s a way in which you are receiving language but you’re also kind of shaping and sculpting your experience as a soul in this plane…. anyone should, can and should write poetry. The experience of it goes all the way back to the ancients; all medicine, all magic knowledge, all kinds of human treasure was kept in and received through and distributed through poetry.”