Jessica Cuello, her words as a panelist for “Understories: Tapping Hidden Networks” presented at the 2025 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, Salem.
Probably because I lived silently in my head as a child, the majority of my relationships were imaginary with objects, cats, writers, with characters in books. I did not have networks and so I learned to create them internally and developed a rich life via what was underground: ghosts, books, spiders. Once I took fifty tin coffee cans and put a spider inside each one with twigs and grass so they could form a web. I labeled each can with a name in masking tape and checked on the spiders to see how their homes were coming along. I’ve come to understand that those imaginary relationships are real. They nurture us, they feed us, and there are indications that they exist.
My literary networks came out of a silence where it remained for a long time. I viewed poets I’d never met as my teachers and in the beginning I felt cut off from other writers. I used to yearn for community, not understanding how to find it, not seeing that I already had it. I opened little by little, first with a mentorship with poet Marian Haddad at San Antonio’s Gemini Ink, a community literary center. Then I took classes at the Syracuse Downtown Writers Center, perhaps the most egalitarian writing place I know. These local relationships have been essential to my development as a poet.
The big institutions have never really been there for me and their loss and betrayal teaches me to reaffirm relationships with what is at hand: each other, books, the spiders, and our non-poetic jobs. When I first began publishing in my 40’s, I won The New Letters Poetry Prize. The publisher/editor asked me to read at AWP. I didn’t understand what AWP was, but my family insisted I go so I put it on my credit card and went. At AWP I read for five minutes, my name was pronounced wrong, I wandered around the bookfair feeling alienated for the rest of the time, and it took me awhile to pay off my credit card. I’ve gone to AWP several times since then, and have a great time now, but it’s not where I live as an artist. Thinking I wanted to live in that world hurt me.
When I began publishing and glimpsed that world, I wanted to belong to it. I began to resent being a public schoolteacher. I felt shut away, overworked, and invisible. I started to want things: an NEA, to be part of this or that reading series, publication in Poetry, etc. and I did something I had never done in my life: I began to compare myself to other people. I floundered among these desires for a couple of years until I recognized that I’d lost my way. The longing to belong to these hierarchies was a way that I’d abandoned myself as a poet.
Poetry is about paying attention to what is close to us, at hand, and adaptation.
I remember reading an interview with Alice Notley where she said that her home was so crowded in the ’70s she had to write with people around. She said she often wrote in accretions or accumulations, writing what her children said, listing things.
There is a Meister Eckhart quote that says, “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which god sees me.” When I was younger I thought god didn’t see me. Then later, so much later it’s embarrassing, I saw that it was me: I did not see myself. So I scrambled to belong. I reached out to people. I became active on social media, and it opened my poet life. But being seen is not as important as I thought it was. We are not really seen among the trappings of institutions, and social media. We are poets when we listen. When we observe. June Jordan wrote, “Most people search all / of their lives / for someplace to belong to / as you said / but I look instead / into the eyes of anyone / who talks to me.”
Even alone, we are not alone. After I wrote my first book I looked differently at the books on my shelf because I understood how much care went into a book. It’s like my friend who became a farmer. One summer I visited her and my daughter stepped in some very wet, sticky dog shit. My daughter was wearing cheap sandals, sandals she would outgrow in a few months, so I just threw them in the trash. My friend retrieved them and started to hose them down, “When you know how much work goes into making each thing, you can’t throw perfectly good things out.”
When I return to the child I once was who followed a cat on hands and knees, the loneliness is gone. The urge to be seen is gone. I wrote about that child because the need to share remains—and that urge remains an important part of poetry. Even if you have no degree, no workshops, no job teaching writing, every time you send a poem into the world you connect to someone else. As an editor, I sometimes am very moved by poems that are not good, not publication-ready, but that come from a genuine place. When I read these poems I feel connected to the person: people who write about a sister who died, or recently a man who was sending out the poems of his dead wife. There are thousands of these relationships happening all the time. I have faith in these invisible threads between us. Sometimes I feel them. I know they are there.
To share our vulnerability is a kind of power; the intimacy of a poem will always be a kind of fuck you to repression and control.
A cat named Boots, my first network, occurs in my poem “Feral”:
Feral
Why did I love her? Because I became her, followed her
on all fours. My face grazed the cradled spider in a cotton bed,
its web frayed on my finger: sticky, spun. The others didn’t see
me, she sunk on my chest each night. I never learned to swallow,
I chewed and chewed, forbidden to leave the table, grisly meat
in my animal mouth until the kitchen emptied, but she chewed
the sweet blade of grass and I the clover. My arms clasped empty
air and I woke with her, her purr my rasp. She pressed her velvet
belly to my calf. The others didn’t let me hold them. They named me.
They filled the plate and bowl, they bought the single pair of shoes.
She and I slipped inside the quiet room. We barely breathed, quick
to jump from breaking glass, tuned to the pinch in a voice, our hunch
of wrongs. The others didn’t let me peep, she mewed beneath a grate
until I found her: mutilated, undernourished. No sibling, no mother. Her
paws were dry magic beads. I touched them. All the love I was not allowed
to give in the human house, she let me. She let me touch them one by one.
* “Feral” was first published in Adroit Journal and is forthcoming in the author's collection of the same title in 2027 from JackLeg Press.
