The 2025 Massachusetts Poetry Festival

The act of caregiving has received new attention in recent years, as needs surged during the pandemic. On this panel, three women poets who participate in caregiving in multiple, overlapping ways, explore the poetics of providing care for people and communities in need, attesting to the act of writing as restorative and anchoring for those who offer care. Extending beyond the individual to the communal and historical, they consider poetry’s potential to offer a window into intimate care acts, provide connection beyond the isolating space of the sickroom, and record histories of suffering, such as the pandemic, for which there have been few rituals of remembrance.

Further, panelists will discuss the potential and need for poetry to represent and interrogate what it means to provide care and record histories of individual and communal suffering, in a grieving and overwhelmed world. Each panelist has expressed the experience of caregiving, often performed in crisis, and/or found relief from its burdens, through her work as a poet, opening avenues for creative expression, empathy, identification, and remembrance.

Panelists will each discuss how caregiving informs and shapes their work and share exemplary poems, followed by panel discuss and an audience Q&A.