Someone in your corner

Before Mike Tyson became the youngest heavyweight champion in history, he was a kid in juvenile detention. Trainer Cus D’Amato saw a tremendous raw power that needed discipline and technique. He sharpened Tyson’s skills and helped him develop the peek-a-boo style that became his signature.

I came to poetry through freestyle battles. I knew how to land a punchline and get a crowd going. In 2016, I performed a poem about loving myself at Poets Resist, an event Santino DallaVecchia and Lisa Folkmire hosted at Strange Matter. My poems were punchy, but I had plenty to learn. Dennis Hinrichsen was in the room and saw something he could help me develop.

There was fear behind my desire, too.

I fear being a nobody, that my story will never be heard.

Poetry gives that fear somewhere to go. Hinrichsen helps me give it shape.

Around the time I started The Poetry Room at The Robin Theatre, Hinrichsen became Lansing’s inaugural poet laureate. He invited me to perform at his events and offered to workshop my poems. I accepted gradually. I was back in college and poetry had to compete with homework. I graduated for the second time in 2019. Then lockdown gave me the time to take poetry seriously and stop freestyling half my poems onstage.

Hinrichsen and I meet over food and he will redline anything and everything. But then he reaches a line he thinks is genius, and he smiles. Both reactions keep me coming back. 

He taught me to think of poems like computer programs: Execution matters, and so does conciseness. Find a poem’s function and cut what doesn’t serve it. He pushed me to read, and now I read at least one poetry book a week. We work from the strengths I already have: humor, a story to tell and riffing. 

He is relentless with me because he knows I’ll work. He knows my feelings can take a red pen. He suggested I could become a future poet laureate. First, we needed to get some poems published. 

Mine took six weeks to get a yes (because I am dope). Hinrichsen opened a door, and I walked through it. In 2022, I became Lansing poet laureate, a role I held until 2024. The title didn’t make the fear disappear. We still meet. He still marks up my poems. I’m still learning to write for the page, still chasing bigger stages, still working toward a book.

Last year, I spoke and performed at the University of Pennsylvania. Standing in that room, I understood years of conversations with Hinrichsen had taught me the language of the craft: compression, function, the line that has to earn its place. It was a wax on, wax off moment.

What I admire about Hinrichsen is that he wants people to take poetry as far as they choose. After a career spent teaching, he still wants to teach. He has an MFA, but understands a degree isn’t accessible to everyone. Poetry should be. Lansing has people willing to share what they know. We can build something here but we have to participate. Leave the house. Send the email. Ask for help. Bring the poem you’re unsure about. Then keep showing up. I still carry the fear of being unheard, but now I have more craft and someone in my corner.