Mitzi Rapkin’s in-person podcast at TACAW features poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Reading Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s latest soul-stirring poems to remind us how we can dance amid heartbreak is one thing; listening, in-person, to the woman who so profoundly wove grief with praise for life the same year her son took his own life at age 16 and her father died of kidney failure is a whole other thing.

On Tuesday, literary podcast producer Mitzi Rapkin interviews Trommer at TACAW as part of her weekly podcast, First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing.

Last January, she became the first poet laureate for Evermore, a national nonprofit that supports bereaved children and adults. For her, poetry is a practice, one of saying “yes” to things just as they are.

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She didn’t write poems specifically to appear in her most recent collection, “The Unfolding.” Rather, she continued her practice of writing poems every day “based on what is most alive, most interesting, most surprising in that day” throughout grief, which she said has become a natural part of her life, as opposed to something she strives to get over.

“It’s not something I wish away, not something I want to move past,” she said. “I don’t mind crying. I don’t mind the missing. I don’t try to push away the sadness when it arises. It feels essential. That’s not to say that the days are not easier to navigate now than they were right after my son and father died — they are. I am not as raw as I was, not as shredded. But meeting grief feels to me like an important part of our humanness — one that we will meet again and again. It has so much to teach us about compassion, love, connection, humility, humanity, gratefulness, paradox, and who we are.”

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Yet, the poems in “The Unfolding” don’t drown themselves in grief or even stick to that topic.

“They are often funny, curious, playful, even sexy,” she said. “They connect to gardening, skiing, baking, reading, hiking, and many other aspects of our daily lives. In other words, they reach toward the full spectrum of what it is to be alive.”

Rapkin plans to talk to Trommer about how to hold grief and love simultaneously, while immersing oneself in the creative process, among other topics.

“The poems in this collection are so moving, vulnerable, and strong at the same time,” Rapkin said. “Rosemerry highlights with such care and beauty how linked our human journey is to the natural world and how the pulse of the planet is vibrating within us. Grief, at its core, is brutal, mysterious, and transforming, and she writes about it with grace and earnest curiosity. She is a true artist, and the words in her palette paint a sublime picture of what it means to be alive, facing all the beauty and horror of love and loss.”

Trommer exquisitely places into words how both despair and praise can coexist. This paradox lies at the heart of “The Unfolding.”

“In any given moment, I could be weeping and, at the same time, notice how soft my friend’s hands were or how beautiful the light was on the snow in the yard,” she said. “I say, in the introduction, that the poems are written in the key of grief … but the melody is praise. We don’t often think of life in this full-spectrum way, perhaps because we lack nuanced words that speak to this complexity of experience, which is why I made up four words for this collection.”

These four, made-up words, comprise the four chapters. For instance, “verlilujah” blends the Latin “veritas,” meaning “truth,” and “hallelujah.” She defines this word blend as “the praise that rises up when we say yes to the world as it is instead of the way we wish it would be.”

“Praise itself is an especially bright word, but to me, it is about falling in love with the world, and this is possible whenever we offer the world our attention. And to this point, writing poems — or truly engaging in any art or mindfulness practice — helps us to practice paying attention,” she said. “I do think that because I have been writing poems every day for almost 19 years that practice of showing up and wondering what is here has really helped me as I meet the most difficult chapters of my life. Finding a way to meet both despair and praise for life at the same time is more possible when we’ve experienced meeting paradoxes when the stakes were lower.”

As she points out, poems lend themselves to paradox, offering a form to explore how opposite truths can come together.

“Life contains paradox, and more than anything, a poem wants to reflect what it is to be alive,” she said, adding that poetry is “a practice of showing up to life with wonder, curiosity, reverence, openness — and that serves every part of our life.”

Within her revision process, she asks: What does this poem still have to teach me, what have I missed, and where have I not quite seen the truth?

Through these inquires, she made substantial changes to the endings of about a quarter of the book’s poems.

“This is a curious endeavor because part of my process is also sending out the daily poems to a large audience, and sometimes people get attached to the versions of the poems that I send out in the daily email. Then they are surprised when the poem is in a book and has a different ending than the one they first read on my blog,” she said.

She loves sharing poems with audiences, especially those who don’t yet know they like poetry, she said. And, her “advice” to people who are grieving is:

“No advice. Whatever you are doing, whatever you are feeling, you can only do this right,” she said. “You will feel what you feel and do what you do. Show up any way you can. Shut down where you shut down. Say hello to whatever arises, even the most difficult feelings — unless you can’t do that; then don’t. However, you meet grief is exactly how you are meeting grief.”