I've Read Poems About Home to Hundreds of Strangers. Here's What I Learned

The first time I read a poem about my childhood kitchen out loud, my hands were shaking so badly I had to hold the page against the microphone stand just to keep the words still. That was years ago now, in a small room that smelled like coffee and cigarette smoke, and I remember thinking the whole thing was a mistake. Who wants to hear about someone else's kitchen. Who cares about my mother's hands or the particular sound our screen door made in summer.

It turns out a lot of people do. I just did not understand why yet.

The Poem That Keeps Working

Since that night I have read at readings from San Diego to Phoenix, in bars and back rooms and once in a library in Dublin, and the poems about home are the ones that never stop landing. Not the poems I worked hardest on. Not the ones with the cleverest lines. The ones about a specific house, a specific room, a specific person standing in a doorway.

I used to think this meant the poems were simple. Now I think it means something closer to the opposite. A poem about home is doing more work than almost any other kind of poem, because home is where a person first learns whether they are safe, whether they are wanted, whether the version of themselves that shows up at the dinner table is allowed to stay.

Why Poems About Belonging Land Harder Than Poems About Home

The part nobody prepares you for is what happens after the reading, when someone you have never met comes up to you holding their drink a little too tightly and says something like, that was my grandmother's kitchen too, or, I have never told anyone that my house felt like that.

I have had this happen in almost every city I have read in. A man in Phoenix once told me a poem about my mother's hands reminded him of his father's hands, and he had to step outside for a minute after. A woman in Dublin, after a night at Glór Sessions, said she had spent thirty years trying to explain to her husband why she still dreamed about a house she left as a teenager.

None of that happens because the poem is about a kitchen. It happens because underneath the kitchen, the poem is really one of my poems about belonging, and almost everyone is carrying some unresolved version of that question. Where did I belong. Where do I belong now. What did it cost me to leave the place that used to answer that question for me. I have come to believe poems about belonging are the real category, and poems about home are just the shape that category takes most often.

Belonging Is the Real Subject, Home Is Just the Shape It Takes

The stove, the porch, the specific creak of a particular staircase, those are just the details a poem uses to get at something much harder to name directly. You cannot write a poem called Belonging and have it land the same way. It is too abstract, too much like a vocabulary word. But write about the exact chair your father sat in every night, and the reader feels the whole weight of belonging or not belonging without you ever using the word.

This is something I learned slowly, over a lot of readings, not something I understood going in. Early on I thought the goal was precision for its own sake, getting the details of a room exactly right. Later I understood the details were only ever in service of something bigger. A reader does not remember that your kitchen had yellow curtains. They remember whether they felt, for three minutes, like someone else understood what it was like to lose a place that was supposed to be permanent. That feeling is why I keep coming back to poems about belonging even when I set out to write about something else entirely.

What Journalism Taught Holly Parsons Poet and Writer

The stove, the porch, the specific creak of a particular staircase, those are just the details a poem uses to get at something much harder to name directly. You cannot write a poem called Belonging and have it land the same way, it is too abstract. But write about the exact chair your father sat in every night, and the reader feels the whole weight of it without you ever using the word. This is exactly why, over years of readings, I have come to think of my own poems about belonging as the real category, and poems about home as just the shape that category takes most often.

What I Would Tell a Younger Poet

If I could go back to that first shaking reading of Holly Parsons poet, I would tell myself to stop apologizing for the subject. I spent years assuming poems about home were the ones I should eventually outgrow, that real poets moved on to bigger themes. I do not believe that anymore. I have read poems about war and poems about politics and poems about grand abstractions, and none of them have made a room go as quiet, as fast, as a poem about a kitchen table someone recognized as their own.

Belonging is not a small theme. It might be the theme everything else is secretly about.

Where Holly Parsons Poet Takes This Now

These days, when I am asked to speak or read at an event, I usually bring at least one poem rooted in a specific house, because I have learned that a room full of strangers needs somewhere concrete to stand before they can feel something enormous. It is easier to talk about belonging in the abstract. It is harder, and far more honest, to sit an audience down in one kitchen and let them recognize their own inside it.

That is the work I keep returning to, on stages, in bars, in libraries, in whatever room will have me. Not because the subject is small, but because I have watched, over and over, exactly how large it actually is.