What Andrea Gibson Understood About Very Simple Poetry

The Atlantic

3 days ago

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
Andrea Gibson wasn't, in most circles, a gigantic celebrity—but their face and words were visible and prominent. Gibson, the poet laureate of Colorado, who died on Monday, began their career with spoken-word performances in cafés and at open mics around Boulder. Despite their intense stage fright, Gibson would stand in front of crowds of strangers and recite intensely confessional verse about their anxieties, their queerness, their heartbreaks. As their public profile rose, Gibson kept speaking to strangers—though more often than before, the audience wasn't in the same room. In the 2010s, when slam poetry exploded in popularity, Gibson began appearing online—in Button Poetry recordings, in a video submission for the NPR Tiny Desk competition during which they were accompanied by piano. When the pandemic, and then cancer, prevented them from touring and performing live, they held virtual readings and distributed videos recorded at home. They asked listeners to have an experience with them, and they valued the way speaking poetry aloud can amplify its power.
Here are three new stories from The Atlantic 's Books section:
Gibson was all over Instagram. They were a visual poet—not in the manner of writers such as Anne Carson and Claudia Rankine, who have included photographs, drawings, and found materials in their books, but instead in a distinctly 21st-century fashion. In performance, their face and their body became crucial parts of the work, and their written words were frequently arranged in stark type on plain backgrounds. That's how I most often interacted with Gibson's poems: as small snippets of video or text on friends' and strangers' Stories. An avalanche of these posts was what informed me of the poet's death.
Because Gibson leaned so much on the spoken word, their poems were obvious and emotional—to their benefit. Figurative language played its part, but so did lines as straightforward as 'Why did I want to take / the world by storm when I could have taken it / by sunshine, by rosewater, by the cactus flowers / on the side of the road where I broke down?' As my colleague Faith Hill wrote this week, 'Their verse sometimes risked seeming cloying or sentimental because of how unselfconsciously it concerned love: feeling it, cultivating it, spreading it, protecting it.' And this unabashed style made their words easy to share, as Hill points out; the universality of their themes was a feature, not a bug. Clearly, they wanted to be understood instantly, and by all kinds of readers.
This kind of accessibility is not always prized. 'Instagram poetry' is sometimes invoked as a derogatory description of writing that prioritizes drama over artistic reflection. But I saw Gibson's open-hearted verse strike a chord with all kinds of people, including readers who don't spend much time on poetry. Gibson's focus on the connection between poet and listener allowed them to reach beyond traditional readers of verse. And they used that platform almost exclusively to spread a message of gentleness: 'Nearly every poem is an exercise in empathy, summoning generosity even in response to cruelty,' Hill points out. Gibson was well read, well watched, and well loved for that approach.
Andrea Gibson Refused to 'Battle' Cancer
By Faith Hill
The last years of the poet's life were among their most joyful.
What to Read
The Book of Records, by Madeleine Thien
The Book of Records takes place in a postapocalyptic limbo called The Sea, where past, present, and future fold in on themselves and thoughts float in the air like dust. It's a giant structure—maybe also a metaphysical construct—on an island in the middle of an ocean, full of refugees from some vaguely described ecological and political catastrophe. Our narrator, Lina, is remembering the time she spent at The Sea with her father 50 years ago, when she was a teenager. The pair had interesting company there: Their neighbors were the philosophers Hannah Arendt and Baruch Spinoza and the eighth-century Chinese poet Du Fu. Or maybe these were their spirits; the reader isn't quite sure. Thien writes beautifully about the lives of these thinkers, and their tales of escape from political or religious oppression end up melding with Lina's own story: Her father, we discover, was also a dissident of sorts. With The Sea, Thien literalizes a state of mind, the in-betweenness that comes before one makes a major decision. The stories Lina absorbs in that out-of-time place all ask whether to risk your family or your life on behalf of an ideal—whether it's worth sacrificing yourself for another, better world you can't yet see. — Gal Beckerman
Out Next Week
📚 Shade, by Sam Bloch
📚 Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Ba r, by Katie Yee
📚 Pan, by Michael Clune
Your Weekend Read
I Fought Plastic. Plastic Won.
By Annie Lowrey
Before I could buy something expensive and relax, I stopped, for once. Was I actually reducing my exposure to dangerous chemicals? Was my family safer than it had been before I began my campaign? What kinds of plastic are truly dangerous in the first place? I had no idea. More than I wanted to spend hundreds of dollars at Williams-Sonoma, I wanted to know my enemy.
When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.