Renowned poets (and friends) Jericho Brown, a 2020 Pulitzer Prize winner, and Ada Limón, a 2018 National Critics Circle Award winner, spoke with Adrienne Brodeur, the executive director of Aspen Words, in January as part of the Winter Words speaker series. The pair explored how to truly appreciate poetry as art. “We have a misconception that a poem is a puzzle to be solved,” said Limón, who gave the audience permission to enjoy a poem “and let the unknowing and mystery just be.” Brown said he has read poems that have helped him personally; in his work, he unmasks the deeply private as a way to give back to poetry itself. Brown and Limón then touched on the political and the personal. Limón said when politics enter poetry, the poem must evolve. She even quoted Brown: “If I begin a poem with the police, I don’t want to end with the police.” Then Brown echoed Limón: “If you really allow your poems to have all of you, then the political will appear” whether you like it or not. “It is important to put yourself in the position to experience art, and if we are receiving art, then it will come out of you,” Brown concluded, earning a nod from Limón.
Let the Mystery be
Publications Section 4: Strengthening Practices to Improve Job Quality
Tools: Employee Ownership
View tools and resources related to employee ownership.
Job Quality Fellows Profile Series Longform
Centering Workers in Workforce Development
The Chicagoland Workforce Funder Alliance collaborates with employers and stakeholders to boost employment, earnings, and equity for local workers.
Job Quality Fellows Profile Series Longform
Lessons and Leadership To Foster Economic Justice for Illinois Workers
LEP trains workers to promote equity, enforce rights, build unions, develop leaders, ensure workplace safety, and advance economic justice.
Job Quality Fellows Profile Series Longform
Worker Owned and Worker Driven
While the rideshare apps have increased convenience, they’ve eroded job quality. See how the Drivers’ Cooperative is helping to end exploitative conditions.
Job Quality Fellows Profile Series Longform
Creating Employee-Owned Businesses That Provide Good Jobs and Succeed
Through employee ownership, The Industrial Commons is building a new Southern working class that erases the inequities of generational poverty.
Job Quality Fellows Profile Series Longform
Strengthening the Hidden Resilience Workforce
We see the effects of climate change, but we rarely see the people who help to rebuild — and they often lack safe conditions, decent pay, or benefits.
Job Quality Fellows Profile Series Longform
Advancing a Pro-Worker, Pro-Climate Agenda in Texas
The Texas Climate Jobs Project advances a pro-worker, pro-climate agenda — helping to solve the climate crisis while creating millions of good jobs.
Job Quality Fellows Profile Series Longform
Organizing and Coalition Building for Structural Change
LAANE, led by Job Quality Fellow Roxana Tynan, is fighting to build an economy rooted in good jobs, thriving communities, and a healthy environment.
Job Quality Fellows Profile Series Longform
Organizing Unemployed and Underemployed Workers
UWU, led by Job Quality Fellow Neidi Dominguez, engages unemployed/underemployed workers, a population that has not been mobilized at scale since the 1930s.
Longform
How Local Journalism Can Bring Communities Together
MIT Center for Constructive Communication Director Deb Roy explains how the caricatures Republicans and Democrats paint of each other diverge from reality, and the ways local newsrooms can leverage their “trust capital” and emerging technology to promote listening and understanding amid disagreement.