Season Two of It’s a Poetic Life opens with a question that refuses to sit quietly:

What does it mean to live—and write—toward freedom?

In this opening episode, we enter a conversation about poetry, memory, and creative resistance—exploring poetry not just as art, but as an act of reclamation. Inspired by the work of the late Haitian poet Danielle Legros Georges and her haunting poem Makak, we also explore how language holds history while still making room for transformation.

Joining me is the brilliant poet and scholar Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie. Together we reflect on the ways poetry becomes both refuge and reckoning—a place where we confront what history leaves behind and imagine what freedom might yet become.

How do we write in the shadow of empire and displacement?

How do we remember without becoming trapped by memory?

And what does liberation look like when it must include tenderness, joy, and the courage to begin again?

This conversation moves through the spaces where poetry meets history, where voice meets inheritance, and where the act of speaking becomes its own form of freedom.

Because poetry is not only something we write.

It’s something we practice—

in the lives we build,

in the silences we refuse,

and in the worlds we dare to imagine together.

✨ Continue the journey with essays and reflections at enzothepoet.substack.com

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