Poet Megan Pinto held an event at local cafe Bird in Hand to present her debut poetry collection, Saints of Little Faith on Sunday, Oct. 6. Alongside Pinto, Samuel Cheney, Jimin Seo and Jess Yuan presented their work. After the attendees had settled into their seats inside of the atmospheric bookstore, the poets were introduced and the event began.
The first speaker of the afternoon was Yuan, a current Master of Fine Arts candidate at Hopkins. She read three poems from her poetry collection, Slow Render (2024). Her architectural expertise could be clearly felt throughout her poems, not just through their subject matters or some of the metaphors used, but also through the book’s layout.
She began her readings with a few pieces from Slow Render, sharing “Work Song as Silkworm,” then “Disorientation,” and “Craft Talk on Pain.” For her last poem, she read “Amtrak Again,” a newer poem whose topic involved the physical distance between her and her spouse, due to her living in Baltimore.
The second speaker was Seo, a Korean poet who read select poems from his debut poetry collection, OSSIA. OSSIA is a collection that revolves around the concept of language, translation, love and grief. Within the collection, many poems are addressed to “Richard” — referring to Richard Howard, a poetry critic and translator, as well as Seo’s mentor and friend who has passed away. Like Yuan, his book had a wonderfully expressive layout, with Korean poems oriented differently from the traditional top-to-bottom, left-to-right of English writing. From OSSIA, Seo read various poems in both English and Korean, centering the question of who his collection’s intended audience is.
As I listened to Seo’s readings in Korean, I couldn’t understand the words, but I felt the emotions Seo had embedded in them. There was also a strange sense of loss for not being able to decipher their direct meanings, even though I’ve never been someone expected to know the Korean language in the first place. Seo talked a bit about what he thought about the concept of audience, revealing that he leaves the interpretations of a poem entirely in their hands, curious about how they choose to understand his work.
After Seo came Cheney, Program Coordinator for the Writing Seminars department at Hopkins. Rather than reading from a collection of his works like Yuan and Seo, he read a series of individual poems, such as “Literal Country Music.” Before reading a poem circling the subject of Salt Lake City, Cheney described a new alphabet that Brigham Young, a religious leader who was the founder of Brigham Young University, once tried to make and gave his thoughts on how language can be used as a way of drawing a boundary.
Finally, Pinto, the event’s titular presenter, stood to begin her readings from her collection, Saints of Little Faith. Between poem readings, she gave insights into her reasoning for writing the collection.
“I thought I would sort out my relationship with God,” she said, before continuing with the realization that instead, her writing showed her that she was thinking a lot more about her relationship with her father.
For her, poetry is a way to “have conversations we couldn’t have had” with people who are either unapproachable or unavailable, due to death or otherwise. “How do we receive love?” she asked. Some of the poems she read included “Bloodshot” and “Tonight it is Snowing in Rome.”
Another comment she added about her own work between readings referred to the heavy topics she explored through words, as well as the range of topics she covered.
“As you can tell, there’s a lot of crisis and suffering. I got feedback to balance it out, [and so] there are quite a few poems looking towards nature and landscape,” she added.
After reading “Harvest,” her final poem for the afternoon, Pinto asked a question of all the poets present, “Why poetry?” to which she responded first. “I feel like poetry is a place to grapple with the dark things.”
Seo spoke up next. “I became a poet after [I got] finger damage while playing piano,” he said. “Somehow, I developed a voice in poetry.” He went on to describe how he found a true sense of freedom in written word: “I told myself, poetry is the one space where I won’t lie. [It’s] a space to be myself.”
Yuan's response was similar: “I write to know what it is like to sound like myself. [In poetry], I found community, joy, and the ability to live fully.”
“I’m going to live a life in language — and even if it never happens, it’s already changed me,” Pinto added.
After the other three speaker’s comments, Cheney closed off the panel with a final thought.
“Poetry is the technology that we use to refresh language and make it new,” he said. “[It’s] a way of working in language and on language.”
Following the event, I was able to meet with Pinto for a brief interview. She had already answered several questions during the reading — about her past as well as the big question of “Why poetry?” — so I asked her about advice she would give poets aspiring to improve their craft and voice.
“Just keep going,” she said in the interview with The News-Letter, which seems to be the answer every creator gives when asked this question — but it holds true. “Read a lot of poems. Write a lot of poems. Write a lot of bad poems,” she added.
When I went back to campus after the event, I left with a signed copy of OSSIA, a vegan brownie (the only brownie option — decent enough, though very crumbly), and a handful more thoughts on how language functions, how relationships work, and a bit of a deeper insight into the why poetry for myself. For every creator out there, I’d say to follow Pinto’s (and many other prominent creators’) advice — just keep going. Everyone started from somewhere. If you’re on the road right now, you’ll find the end eventually.
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