Fall 2021 Showcase Buckingham

Danielle Buckingham

The Poetry of Our Lives, ft. Sadia Hassan

The inspiration for The Poetry of Our Lives begins with Audre Lorde’s essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.” In it, she posits poetry as a vital necessity for the survival of women. It functions as a source of power that allows us to actualize our hopes and dreams. In her words: Poetry is not only a dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. L orde, then, led me to the idea of thinking about poetry both literally and figuratively as an experience or an “archive” of how we exist in the world.

This audio project, which is stylistically poetic, functions almost as an oral history where the artist recounts their life history and its influence on their work. For the audience, it should feel like being placed into an intimate conversation between a poet and their poetry. The featured poet, Sadia Hassan, reflects on religion, family, and the precarity of American-ness in her poem “Donald Duck at the End of the World.” In the intimacy of her reading and talking to her work, Hassan unveils to herself and the audience what it means to “bear witness to our experience on earth” through poetry.

Danielle Buckingham, affectionately known as Dani Bee, is a writer and creative from Louisville, Mississippi. A second-year Southern Studies graduate student, Dani is interested in documenting the Black South in all its multitudes. As a writer, she has received support from Voices of Our Nation (VONA), the Hurston Wright Foundation, and Lambda Literary as a 2021 Nonfiction fellow. Dani’s work has been published or is forthcoming in Midnight & Indigo literary magazine, New Orleans Review, Raising Mothers, and elsewhere.