Welcome: Accessibility in Craft by Viola Lee

Sean Benham CC



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Welcome: Accessibility in Craft


Yesterday, I checked off one of the items on my bucket list: I taught a Pie and Poetry class to working adults. Eighteen people filled the room. It began as a craft talk and then moved into a poetry workshop.

Yesterday, I gave myself permission to free myself—to liberate myself through poetry—and in doing so, I felt my burdens soften. I also took myself out to sushi before the class. The green tea was necessary.

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At 4:00 in the morning, I wrote:

If you were to ask me what this session would be, I’d say this—ideally, we eat pie and think through poems that explore longing, the body, and whatever remains.

In class, I want to share poets who write about desire, joy, vulnerability, and grief through the body. I want us to consider how poetry transforms physical experience into emotional meaning—how sweetness and sorrow can coexist in the very same moment.

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When I was in college, I avoided poetry classes that had the word craft in the title. It scared me. It sounded rigid, exclusive—as if poetry were a secret club I could never afford.

But then I began thinking about writing the way children think about arts and crafts: scissors, glue, paint, glitter—make a mess and learn from it. Suddenly, craft felt less like a gate and more like a tool. A tool anyone could pick up, experiment with, and play with.

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So what is craft, really?

In poetry, craft is how we build a poem. It is the choices we make—the words we select, the line breaks we trust, the hyphens we use—that make a poem generous, cohesive, and alive.

When we understand craft, we take our baked, broken emotions—our imperfect, messy bodies of experience—and shape them so they land with clarity and power. Craft does not make our feelings smaller. It gives them the room they need to breathe.

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I may be stating the obvious, but I want anyone reading this to understand what I mean when I say craft. I am not trying to make poetry easy. I am trying to make it approachable.

I want a middle schooler, an older person at the end of life, an immigrant feeling isolated—to read this and feel invited.

Making poetry accessible is how we grow it. And isn’t that what poetry is for? To connect. To reach. To remind us that poetry is people.

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Beyond gratitude lives freedom. Beyond gratitude lives generosity.

One of the most generous acts, I think, is to study the craft of poetry. I realize this now, after years of avoiding it. There is something deeply loving about looking at a poem together and sharing what we see. Teaching someone how to read a poem is giving them a quiet form of attention.

Poetry is people.

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Form. Meter. Imagery. Rhyme. Theme.

My former high school English teacher once wrote, “Write a storm. Shape the storm. Share the storm.”

These elements—form, meter, imagery, rhyme, and theme—are how we shape that storm. They allow us to take emotion and experience and turn them into something others can enter. Craft lives in the music of a line. It is in the architecture of a stanza. It is in the image that feels like home. It is in the quiet rhyme. It is in the naming. It is in that connective thread.

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What is poetry?

Perhaps I should have started here.

Poetry is an art form that uses language to evoke emotion, create image, and carry complexity. It communicates human experience in a way that is both tangible and exact.

But poetry is also labor. It is practice.

The craft of poetry is a space—a room we enter. It measures. It reasons. It argues. It apologizes. It practices deep empathy.

It is vital. It is necessary. It is a way to process the intensity and uncertainty of the world, especially now.

Poetry helps us navigate identity, justice, climate change, and the fragile condition of being.

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The craft of poetry is something poets work hard to understand. Sometimes they spend their entire lives trying to comprehend what it means to write even one poem well.

In Pie and Poetry, we discussed Khalil Gibran’s The Great Longing, Ross Gay’s Throwing Children, Robert Hass’s The Story About the Body, and Victoria Chang’s Obit.

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Before our discussion, we talked about the difference between the narrative poem and the prose poem.

Narrative poems often share a clear story or arc. If we were to play God and arrange poems into a family of siblings, the narrative poem would be the oldest child—responsible, observant, honest, filtering the most important details, and right most of the time.

The prose poem, by contrast, would be the strange middle child—attention-seeking, experimental, impulsive, always taking risks, like bungee jumping without warning. It fights to be seen and often leaves others dumbfounded. Yet that very impulsivity gives it its power. There is beauty in its odd details, its raw humor, and its sense of wonder.

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In The Great Longing, Khalil Gibran writes:

Here I sit between my brother the mountain and my sister the sea.
We three are one in loneliness, and the love that binds us together
is deep and strong and strange.

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How many weddings, funerals, and celebrations have you attended where a poem was read?

The craft of poetry allows us to name what otherwise feels nameless. It offers language in moments of deep emotion or confusion. It gives calm. It gives safety. It gives attention—that quiet, steady attention.

I love this poem by Khalil Gibran, especially that it begins and ends with the line, “the love that binds us together is deep and strong and strange.” I love how it holds mysticism, lyricism, and love at once, drawing the reader inward through its questions and longing.

I also love the word strange. Here it feels closer to mystery than to weirdness. Like every sibling relationship, we instinctively know why that word is right. The poem moves between what we share and what keeps us distant from one another. And yet those very differences are what allow us to show up for each other—and what make the poem possible.

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The class then moved to Ross Gay’s Throwing Children.

Ross Gay writes a seventeen-line poem with only one period at the end.

because you’re pouring with sweat and breathing a little bit now you’re getting a good workout but because the kid laughs like a horse up there laughs like a kangaroo beating her wings against the light because she laughs like a happy little kid and when coming down and grabbing your forearm to brace herself for the time when you will drop her which you don’t

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If sonnets are rooms, the prose poem feels more like a first apartment. It has the energy of a party. There is breath, movement, and a kind of beautiful disorder.

I love this poem by Ross Gay for the joy that fills it—an unapologetic joy in giving someone else delight. I love the vivid details: the kangaroo, the ants, the mourning doves. I love the long run-on movement that seems never to stop.

The poem feels like it is working as hard as the caregiver. Those breath-driven sentences feel spoken aloud. Joy appears alongside exhaustion, and tenderness becomes a form of strength.

Ross Gay gives us permission to feel openly. His work is accessible without being simplistic because of the careful labor behind it.

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In Robert Hass’s A Story About the Body, the poem centers on an interaction between a young composer and a Japanese painter.

One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, “I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy,” and when he didn’t understand, “I’ve lost both my breasts.” 

Then the young composers says: “I’m sorry. I don’t think I could.” 

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The magic in the poem comes at the end when the composter finds a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door, full of dead bees and covered with a layer of rose petals given by the painter.

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One participant read this and said, “You call this a prose poem, but it feels narrative to me.” And that’s part of the beauty of poetry — it so often holds multiple elements at once. The closer you read, the more you discover.

I remember reading Robert Hass in my undergraduate workshop and feeling almost magically moved by his work; it followed me everywhere. My first reaction was — and still is — something like: this young composer is such an asshole. And yet I love how empowered this artist feels within the poem.

I’m also struck by the older Japanese poet, who continues to create even in the midst of everyday, practical acts — sweeping dead bees into a bowl and placing rose petals on top. Those rose petals make me think of childhood, of pulling them off one by one while saying, “he loves me, he loves me not.”

And even though the title reads “The Story About a Body,” what stays with me is the oddness, strangeness, and beauty in the characters’ behavior and language. That texture — the attention to the peculiar, the intimate, the quietly mysterious — feels, to me, like the truest quality of prose poetry.

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We then discussed the poem, OBIT, by Victoria Chang

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There is so much happening in this poem. The speaker’s almost clinical voice and the title itself work almost like a news headline. Yet beneath that restraint, the poem feels intensely hungry, as if it is working hard to prove its own need to feel and to live.

I’m struck by the image of the fake teeth at the beginning and the way she places them in her mouth. It makes me think of how toddlers first encounter the world — sensing everything through the mouth, putting objects there as a way of knowing. That detail carries both vulnerability and instinct.

I also love the line about Sprite. 

“Her last words were in English. She asked for a Sprite. I wonder whether her last thought was in Chinese. I wonder what her last thought was.”

It feels magical, not only because it balances so carefully on the edge of identity and doubleness, but because it gestures toward something language can barely hold. The poem suggests that language does not die with the body; as the poet writes, “it scatters.”

There are resonances here with Hass’s poem, too, since both end with bowls filled with something — containers holding remnants, traces, offerings. This poem feels deeply rooted in the body, in the way we experience the world through all the senses: smell, touch, taste, sight, movement, and love.

And what it reveals is that grief is not an object we can point to. It is something lived through the body — something felt physically, a way the body knows it is still alive.

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A poet friend once asked me, “How do you grow poems? Are poems living or dying?”

For me, to go into a poem, I must go through. And to go through, I must feel it fully in the body.

The craft of poetry lives in the body.

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I will end with the dismissal of the Pie and Poetry class.  Last night, eighteen people shared the room. We ate apple pie, chocolate cream pie, and a Gluten-free cherry pie. 

Just like in poetry and these four prose poems, we bring our longing, our grief, our joy into a space the way pie is built into its crust. We shape it. We name it. We share it.

When we teach craft, we are not building walls around poetry. We are setting the table and inviting others in.

We are saying: there is room. There is enough. Bring your body. Bring your storms. We will practice and shape them together.
Poetry is people.

Pie in our hands, poems on our laps, I now understand something I once feared:

Craft is not a gate. It’s an invitation.

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Viola Lee received her MFA in Poetry from NYU. Her book Lightening after the Echo was published by Another New Calligraphy, and her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Bellevue Literary Review, Mississippi Review, and Another Chicago Magazine. She lives in Chicago with her family and teaches 4th, 5th, and 6th graders.


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