Lizzie Y

LSWA Poetry Club 2019-20

History Major at the University of Michigan

with an interest in Cultural Criticism & American Immigration policy

I joined the Poetry Club run by Domo (Mitchel had graduated Winter 2019) in the Fall of 2019. Though I had limited experience writing and reading poetry, Domo did a fantastic job coaxing me out of my writing shell. Traumatized by my middle-school angsty poetry phase, I was reluctant to commit pen to paper. However, Domo made the Poetry Club a safe and creative space, one where you could check your ego and judgements at the door. By the second meeting, I was reading my poetry out loud. Domo helped me understand poetry as something honest, something simultaneously institutionally rigid and fantastically free. She taught us basic poetry rules and forms, coaching us to understand the rules to better break them. In the club we had the freedom and the support to explore a breadth of poetry styles and topics.

Moreover, Poetry Club was my passport into new friendships and a new concept of self. After a month of Poetry club, me and some friends I met (in the club) started attending poetry events across campus. Domo gave me the confidence to see myself as part of a larger creative community.

Poetry demands you appreciate the momentary and take stock of your ever changing self. As a college student, I feel like I am always changing -- interests, classes, obsessions. Poetry gave me a way to document myself and my emotions in the moment. Me after Poetry Club was more emotionally in tune, evolving intellectually and socially. I am really grateful to Domo and the Poetry Club for giving me the tools and confidence to write poetry and consider myself a poet.