The 2025 Massachusetts Poetry Festival

Writing about grief can be a literary exorcism. The completed poem, or book, becomes a vessel, an alchemical object. Betrayal, illness, violence, loss, and the deaths of those both known and unknown to us don’t disappear. Instead, the grief lives outside the body in the poem, the shellac or dry ice that preserves what’s passed. Grief can be a trigger for re-examining our lived experiences, and writing about grief becomes a portal to self-discovery, a way to navigate after loss. This will be a conversation among poets familiar with the way poetry mitigates and transforms grief into something we can revisit, a monument, a cemetery, an ever-burning flame.