The first rule of the President’s Book Club is that it’s simply an hour-and-a-half devoted to talking about language. And it’s open to all faculty and staff. Trinity University President Vanessa B. Beasley, Ph.D., started these events last summer as a way to gather the campus community around literature by Trinity authors. “We use this time to highlight the amazing writing and research being conducted by our faculty,” Beasley said.
On Thursday, Beasley hosted 40 Trinity faculty and staff from a wide variety of disciplines and departments to discuss the summer selection: “I Am Trying to Love the Whole World” by poetry professor Jenny Browne, MFA. It comes out Sept. 15, but book clubbers got advance copies.
Beasley said that Browne, a world-renowned poet and author, the 2018 Poet Laureate of the State of Texas, and the Distinguished Fulbright Scholar in Creative Writing at Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, was an easy choice for the summer selection.
“We knew her new book was going to be amazing and that it would be an honor to highlight it as a part of the book club,” Beasley said.
And it’s always an honor for Browne, who splits her time between living and teaching Trinity students in San Antonio and Belfast, to be embraced by her own community here at Trinity.
“As a poet it’s a real gift to get to work with a president who really loves poems and loves words,” she said to the book club attendees on Thursday.
Some of the earliest poems in her new collection came about during COVID, when Browne found herself coping with the challenges of isolation, teaching online, parenting during a pandemic, and then walking beside her closest friend, San Antonio artist Katie Pell, through terminal cancer.
Through the frustrations of teaching poetry to students over Zoom one day, Browne found herself telling her students: I’m just trying to love the whole world, you know? That became a daily writing prompt for Browne over the next five years. She alternately followed “I am trying to love the whole world” with words like “but…” “because…” or “until…” depending on where her thoughts were on that particular day. In the poem “The Teenage Gaze,” for example, Browne starts with the line: “I am trying to love the whole world despite ample practice failing…”
Browne found the word “trying” to be a way to explore hard things. “We turn to poetry when the other forms of language we have don’t seem sufficient,” she said. “We live in a world right now that really wants certainty. Imagining other possibilities than what’s in front of us can give us hope in uncertain times.”
Browne’s poems draw imagery from each of her home landscapes in Texas (“Tumbleweeds make such fine refrain”) and Ireland (“& if the hills dressed themselves in grey merino”). “I often begin with a scrap of language or an image I’ve gathered while moving through the world and then I try to open that up and see where it goes,” Browne said.
She encourages her students to practice recording images from their everyday lives, too, asking them to write down six things they notice around them and bringing one to share in class. “It’s a practice that wakes you up to the world,” Browne said.
Teaching liberal arts and sciences students means that not everyone in her classes wants to be a professional poet, which Browne loves because it means she gets to bring the practice of hearing and writing poetry to the likes of math and physics majors, too.
“I have the best job in the world,” Browne says. “I feel incredibly lucky to get to sit down every week with bright, open, thoughtful Trinity students who’ve chosen to take a poetry class.”
And last week’s President’s Book Club turned into a mini poetry class of its own–one with lessons that Beasley hopes will filter into campus experiences this fall.
“What if today’s not a special day?” she asked the group at the end of Thursday’s meet-up. “What if today is about the way we think about how we’re going to walk through the semester and the year, and the spaces we have together inside and outside the classrooms?”
Browne will officially launch her book at “The Conversation of Poetry” event on the day of its publication at 7 p.m., Tuesday, Sept. 15, in Mabee Auditorium, Dickey Hall. This conversation, featuring Trinity student Bergin Streetman, is part of The Conversation at Trinity event series.
Next month, the book club will discuss The Choir Playbook by Gary Seighman, Ph.D., Trinity’s music department chair and director of choral activities. His book explores how the skills that unite a choir can also strengthen leadership. The first 20 people to register for the Sept. 3 discussion will receive a complimentary copy.