Even though I read the interview with Traci Brimhall over a decade ago (shortly after she joined K-State’s English faculty), I still remember her comment: “I’m just this meat sack with a conscience trying to make sense out of all this bright noise.”
And I remember not just because I then added her words to my commonplace book — where I collect quotations that help me understand… an idea, the world, myself. I remember it because, in her precise mixture of images and wisdom, Traci’s words stay with you.
There were many such moments during Tuesday night’s book launch for her new poetry collection Love Prodigal (2024), when Traci filled the The Dusty Bookshelf with insights from her verse and from the deep knowledge born of a rich creative life.
As she writes in the title poem, “What’s broken cannot be / healed with anything but superglue / and imagination. Still, let it be tended to. / Let it be tender.” Her poems are tender, reflective, and cultivate language’s capacity to surprise.
Walking us through how she remains open to these surprises, Traci spoke of how she writes now: to accommodate chronic pain, she walks with a homemade pocket-size book, and then pauses to write whatever lines arise. As she said (both on Tuesday night and in a recent LitHub essay), one of the best pieces of advice she ever received was “Process saves us from the poverty of our intentions.” After a walk of observing and writing, she’ll read what she’s written and discover connections between lines and ideas that have emerged from this process.
As she said, during the Q+A, while making graceful swoops with her hands, these poetic discoveries only emerge from writing longhand — that grants her access to creativity.
Writing on the computer — she mimed typing — only connects to her list-making brain. Not much poetry there.
Traci brought scissors and paper, and taught us how to make — via fold and cuts — our own little books.
She is fascinated by all manner of facts because “facts are a foreplay to wonder.” She uncovered strands of her own poetic lineage, how Frank O’Hara’s line “Someday I’ll love Frank O’Hara,” inspired Ocean Vuong’s poem “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong,” which inspired Traci’s assignment that students write such a poem about themselves, and which, since she does her assignments with her students, have inspired many variants about herself. After many attempts, she wrote a “Someday I’ll Love Traci Brimhall” that met her standards.
The poem is in Love Prodigal, which is available at The Dusty Bookshelf, and at your local bookstore, when you ask them to order you a copy. When. Not If.
When because winter is coming. And an autocratic abyss looms. In their attentiveness to the world around us and the worlds we dream of, Traci’s poems can light our way through the gathering dark.
As she writes in “Diary of Fires: A Crown of Prose Sonnets” (also in this volume), “Survival keeps me in the present tense, / utterly abridged. I’m not ready to flee.”
Neither am I.
— Phil Nel, University Distinguished Professor
K-State English 