Subhaga Crystal Bacon

Why I Write

When I started writing poetry as a college undergrad, it was from an intuitive sense of wanting to belong. I was a competitive speaker, a member of the debate team and a regular participant in “oral interpretation” events. My friends in this venture were a mix of theater and English majors, and most of them wrote poetry. I remember thinking, “I should write poetry, too.” So I began. I grew up in a home that was short on literature. My father read one book, he said, when he had malaria in the Navy. I think it was The Grapes of Wrath. My German born mother read voraciously, mostly romance/adventure novels borrowed from the library or gotten for free at rummage sales. We got the local newspaper and some magazines, and we had a set of those gorgeous white leatherbound Encyclopedia Brittanica that got sold door to door for my brother who was expected to go to college and become something.

            I was never really considered “college material” because I was very bad at math and science. However, I was always the only person in my English classes who read what was assigned: Shakespeare’s plays, The Canterbury Tales, short stories, poems. In my high school summers, I lugged my own book-of-the-month one volume Shakespeare’s Collected Plays on the long sweaty walk to the community pool we’d joined, and there I would read in the shade from the onion skin pages the words of the Bard.

            I attended a medium sized state college with an excellent English Department and a literary magazine, the Avant, where, by the time I started writing, my poems were published. It was a short leap from being a reader to becoming a writer and part of the literary culture. We had regular visiting writers: Ginsberg, Stone, Bly, Ammons, and many others. I read both on campus and more daringly in the city of Camden, which in New Jersey in the mid1970’s was a ways off the beaten path for a kid from the suburbs like me. But we’d connected with a group of poets at Rutgers Camden and did exchange readings together, and I was in heaven.

            As the years have passed, poetry has been a combination guardian angel and lifeline. I might still say that I write for a sense of belonging. Whatever I feel, you are likely to have felt, so when I write it, shape it into something that transcends the basics, I’m sending out a message to the world. Like a guardian angel, it has often been both silent and invisible. Early disappointments, back in the days before the Internet, could easily derail me, and I’d close up shop for a while. I still owe a debt of gratitude to a former partner of mine who did a sort of intervention by arranging two of my best poetry buddies from Warren Wilson, Jennifer Martelli and Barbara O’Dair to schlep all the way to rural Nova Scotia where we were living, so I could reconnect to poetry. And over the years, poetry has lit my way to safety and well-being and been a kind of lifeline out of darkness.

            I’ve always believed that poetry, any art form, while often created in solitude, requires a village, a community of support. I don’t think anyone really works in a vacuum. We need each other to read and respond to each other’s work. In my ripe old age, I still need this, and I find that as the world continues to both terrify and enthrall me, poetry is the one place I can breathe freely and fully. Poetry has unlocked parts of me, even recently, calling me to modes that I’d never used before, particularly documentary poetry.

            Like many—if not most—of us, I feel things deeply. The height of the pandemic was a time when the world had changed in a new way for most of us. Then there was the murder of George Floyd, which sent me into a kind of extended fugue state: how could anti-Black racism still be this bad? I was invited to participate in a workshop on writing poems of social protest using forms, and I wrote the first poem towards what became Transitory. It was an acrostic that named the first twenty one trans and gender expansive people murdered in 2020. And I knew then that I would have to write a poem for each loss. This introduced me to epistolary documentary poetics in a sort of trial by fire.

            I often tell the story about my friend Jenn Martelli asking me after reading what was at first a chronological catalog of poems for those killed by violence, “where are you in this book?” What a question! So I had to start to unpack my own gender and sexual expression. And poetry was the midwife for a newly known me. And it continued to unfold once Transitory was in the works. I began to write about my sexual experiences, the ways my family and the culture at large punished me for being queer. This writing led to a recovered memory of early sexual abuse. In the end, it became my forthcoming collection from Lily Poetry Review Books, A Brief History of My Sex Life. In part, I suppose, I write to understand myself and the world and the relationship between us.

As the political and natural climate heat up, poetry is my compass, my outlet. My favorite professor as an undergrad once said that I had a lot of talent but needed to find something to say. Poetry has unlocked the world for me. Poetry lives in tandem with our late capitalist culture of hate, and together have certainly given me plenty to say. This is why poetry matters, always, no matter how many times that’s debated. It matters because it gives us a forum to speak back against the world’s cruelties, and to sing it love songs. It’s where we can rail against and weep and laugh and celebrate all that our human lives experience. I’m reminded of Rilke’s “Go to the Limits of Your Longing,” Nearby is the country they call life. / You will know it by its seriousness. // Give me your hand.”

            Part of the desire to belong is to belong in the world and to belong to myself. There’s a wonderful poem by Sharon Olds that concludes one of the poems in my new collection. It’s from her collection Balladz: Love is the love of who we are, it is a form of knowing. For me, poetry is that love of who we are, of who I am. This is why I write.

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Subhaga Crystal Bacon (they/them) is the author of five collections of poetry including A Brief History of My Sex Life, forthcoming from Lily Poetry Review Books in January of 2026, and Transitory (2023), from BOA Editions, a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry in 2024. They are a teaching artist in schools and libraries as well as working with private students individually and in groups. A Queer elder, they live in rural north central Washington on unceded Methow land. Visit Subhaga online here.