(Guest post by Caroline Goodwin)

In fall 2020, I took an online class through the Poetry School with bilingual Welsh poet Rhys Trimble: “Poetry and Eclogue: Ritual Ecopoetics.” The prompts and the other students opened my eyes to many possibilities, and the “associative leap” became central to my practice in a new way. I have long been interested in writing about trauma survival, having lost an infant daughter in 2002 and my beloved husband suddenly in 2016. Trimble’s class challenged me to think about how I might continue to integrate these experiences into my creative practice in ways that honor their intensity and complexity. In my reading life, I began to ask myself: what leap might the poet be asking readers to make when juxtaposing wildly different images or tones? And, why might they be asking us to make it? In addition, I wondered how a poem might act through accrual, perhaps like a collage.