Antoinette Brim-Bell, Connecticut State Poet Laureate, spoke with Helix Editor Maryam El Khalfi as part of the inaugural Media Board Lecture Series. Brim-Bell is the author of three full-length poetry collections: These Women You Gave Me, Icarus in Love, and Psalm of the Sunflower. She is also an accomplished printmaker and collage artist, and a Professor of English at Capital Community College. Their conversation was recorded in front of a live audience at Central Connecticut State University, February 27, 2025.
El Khalfi: I have burning questions about your collection, These Women You Gave Me. Poet Suzanne Frischkorn wrote on the dust jacket, “Brim weaves her personification poems of Lilith, Eden and Eve into a collection that is intimate and powerful.” Georgia Popoff wrote, “This is a bold symphony to Lilith, the first woman, who “has read the Book and found her name erased.” Eve, the second wife, submits; Lilith owns her name, her reflection, her body, and soul.” So, I want to start talking about the structure and form choices you made in writing these two voices. Earlier, you talked about the art of the sentence and a specific class that transformed your poetry. In addition to that, you talked about the silence workshop, and I feel like some people would like to hear about those two things: speech versus silence.
Brim-Bell: You bring up a really interesting point, this juxtaposition of the sentence and how sentences are formed, and then the absence of “the sentence with the silence.” That’s something I had to really think about, especially as I was writing this book.
When I started out with Lilith, I did a lot of free-writing, and ultimately that allowed me to go into free verse. I felt like that worked really well for her, and I thought that the lines should be very terse. So I looked at sentences that were very simple. Sometimes when we’re writing, we look at something that’s short, and we are dismissive of it. But those short groupings of words are very declarative, and they’re often followed by silences, which make those lines and thoughts more prominent. I wanted it to be declarative, because I wanted the “Garden of Eden” to say, “Hey, she’s more than this, you’re getting it wrong. Trust me, I was here, I know.” I wanted, sometimes, for her language to be abrupt. But she’s filling in all the background stories about what’s going on, while also challenging us to rethink these stories.
When I was writing the “Garden of Eden”, I wanted that to be conversational, so I went with a prose poem that gave me the opportunity to do a bit of storytelling in a more traditional narrative way. I wanted Eve’s voice to be written in what’s called a solitary renga. Renga is generally a collaborative poem. You have at least two people writing back and forth. I wanted her voice to be in the solitary renga, because I thought, how sad is that? A collaborative form that you have to write all by yourself. I realized that gave me the breath and the silence I needed for her constantly deliberating over the fact that she has made all of creation fall.
She didn’t know Lucifer. She didn’t know pride, right? She wasn’t there when Lucifer decided to take a third of the angels and go against God and create a war. She didn’t know he’d been kicked out of heaven. She just saw this very beautiful creature amongst all these other beautiful creatures. I wanted us to think about how much weight and shame we want to put on someone who really is just a babe coming into the world; perhaps the way we look at women is incorrect when we’re placing so much blame on Eve. “Well, Eve messed it all up for us.” I’m just saying, not necessarily. Let’s give her some grace. Let’s give each other some grace.
El Khalfi: You were talking earlier about your book cover and the process of finding the art for the collection.
Brim-Bell: It was quite an ordeal to find a piece of cover art. My publisher was having lunch with a friend and saw this hanging on the wall and said “Oh my God, that’s the cover.” And I did say to him, “Michael, I love it. It’s beautiful, but this piece of art is violent. It looks violent to me.” And he said “Antoinette, do you not think your book is violent?”
And then I thought, Oh my god. How did I not see this as violent? There’s so much violence against women that occurred in this book, and because of these stories. There is violence that continues to happen to women. Why was I so accepting of that? Even after I’ve spent years working with this, doing all this research, was I willing to accept it as anything other than violence? That was a telling moment for me, because I was going for a feminist perspective. I think that this cover is a very solid depiction of what happens. Even if I didn’t see that at first, I’ve had time to carry the book around, read from it, and have a bit of distance from it.
El Khalfi: The feminist perspective versus violence–they definitely do interact. I want to know more about how you feel these different mediums interact, especially as a printmaker. How does your writing play off printmaking? Does it play off printmaking? And how does your printmaking play off your writing?
Brim-Bell: The intersection of my literary art and my visual art is still something I’m trying to sort out. Some things are better articulated visually. I have a piece of art, Bethlem Steel Under Arrested Sky. It’s the ruins of a steel plant. It’s my way of finding the beauty in the decaying. It was very easy to attack that visually. That’s not something I knew how I would approach in poetry.
"History gives us just the facts and the numbers, but the arts give us the heart and the soul of people."
It took pages for me to articulate how I was seeing this. Having Adam say the same thing twice: “this woman you gave me did this, this woman you gave me, gave this.” When I found out he had said it twice, that became the title of the book. I had to go through what Lilith was experiencing and what Eve was experiencing. That’s not something I could have done visually in a piece of art. So I think however the image or the idea presents itself, whether it is a visual image, or I start to hear the language, then I know that that’s where I need to go.
El Khalfi: I kind of want to describe your creative process as very non-binary. Earlier, I brought up intention, and whenever I bring up intention, it feels like a very loaded thing. So, bringing it up made me go, ‘No, I have to think about that more.’ When do you think intention is born in your process?
Brim-Bell: That’s a really interesting question. I usually go to the page because I don’t know something. I don’t know who Lilith is, so I spend months trying to get inside her skin and find a voice for her. My first book is coming of age through divorce, so I’m writing that in the midst of what’s going on, trying to figure out how I’m going to survive this. I’m talking to the page about things that I can’t talk about openly at that time. It lands on the page, as opposed to in conversation.
My second book was written on a dare. I was in Cambridge doing a residency. We had to take all of our meals late in the evening because we would go to eight o’clock at night. It was one of those National Endowment for the Humanities workshops about the Civil Rights Movement. There was one musician, one philosopher, and, of course, a poet. Everybody else was a historian. So we go to dinner, and somebody says “what’s love?”
All the historians start talking about marriage and mergers and land and acquisition. Then the philosopher was saying “what kind of love are we talking about, like Eros or Philia or Agape?” Across from him was the musician, talking about the quintessential love songs of all times. We’re talking around and through each other from our own vantage point. Then all of a sudden I start hearing these big thuds on the tables. It was the waiters and waitresses wanting to go home. We had stayed there past the closing. So we left. We turned to walk back to our dorms, and one of the historians said over his shoulder, “well, Antoinette, you’re the poet. You figure it out.”
At five o’clock the next morning, I began writing Icarus and Love, which is an exploration of love. I took into consideration everything that was flying around, from love of children and parenting, intimate love, spirituality, and love of self. Even after I wrote that book, I don’t think I could tell you what love is. The one thing I took away from it is that love will break you. But as I say in the poem, that I like to refer to as the thesis, there’s a certain beauty in having your wing broken.
The last twenty minutes of the evening was dedicated to audience questions.
Audience Member 1: One of my favorite Scorsese films, a novel, originally, is The Last Temptation of Christ. Jesus was deconstructed and depicted as a mortal man with fears and lusts and hopes and desires, and he was conflicted about being the son of God. They deconstructed him, and it seemed paradoxical, because it’s desanctifying him, but somehow it made him more holy. With your experiences with Lilith and Eve in their deconstruction, do you think you felt more spiritually connected to them within the context of the Abrahamic faith?
Brim-Bell: By the time I finished writing the Lilith part, I was afraid of her, and I didn’t want her in my head and in my house anymore. What I learned from Lilith was not to be so hot-tempered. I’m glad that she stood her ground and said, “No, I’m not inferior.” But the fact that she compromised herself in that moment in anger was a very interesting fable. If I were to teach that story, I would say “check yourself. Just walk away.”
What I learned from the exploration of Eve is to give grace. I feel that we’re so quick to judge and to condemn, and oftentimes we don’t think things through. I felt a great amount of sympathy for her. I don’t know if it made me more or less religious, but it made me more discerning of what I hear from the pulpit, the podium, everything. I started to look at things a little bit more.
Audience Member 2: Lilith called herself the daughter; she called Eve her sister, and then called God her father. When you were constructing your book, did you factor in a lot of how the traditional patriarchal family structure operates?
Brim-Bell: I thought that Lilith and Eve had a lot in common. I mean, they were married to the same man, and it seemed like they had a lot of the same struggles. I thought of that as a sisterhood. Even Lilith says “what are they going to call your daughters?” Which is interesting to me. We know Cain, Abel, and Seth, but they had daughters, and they’re not named. I thought that was important and impactful.
There was a ballet in her image based on my book. The choreographer, Sarah Grace, had said to me “do you want to be a part of the choreography?” And I said “no, because that’s a separate piece. That’s your perspective.” It was very interesting to see the dancers together. They had the Lilith ballerina and the Eve ballerina at the end come together, dancing in a way that was conciliatory and comforting to each other. It was so amazing to see that that’s what she took away from it, that ultimately there is a sisterhood. And given the opportunity, these women could have taken care of each other. It’s a call to action for the rest of us.
Audience Member 3: What was on your parents’ bookshelf and how did it affect you?
Brim-Bell: My grandmother never gave me a toy. She only gave me books, so I was constantly reading. But the thing that she and my mother had given no thought to at all, was the age appropriateness of the books that they gave to me. My mother would always get whatever was on the New York Times Best Seller list, and put it on the coffee table so that when people came over, it looked like she was well read. She wasn’t reading that stuff; I was reading that stuff. So at seven and eight, I had The Agony and the Ecstasy, which was about Michelangelo. I had Shakespeare. I had all of these books about African American literature. I had stuff that was way over my head, but I read it, and over time, you began to understand things.
I read everything, and that’s where I fell in love with language, and where I realized that you could escape into it. As I was going to school, I would check out a book every day. Then, I would bring it back the next day, having read the whole thing. I got to know the librarians very well. “Hi, Antoinette, what did you think of that?” In the summer, my dad would drop me off at the library and pick me up on his lunch hour. I would spend all that time reading. It was fun, and I think that’s what got me here.
Audience Member 4: I feel the state poet laureate has a straightforward mission, to promote and share poetry. But what is it like for you to be poet laureate given the policies of the new administration?
Brim-Bell: We’re very blessed to have municipal poet laureates in this state, as well as a state poet laureate, to make sure that poets have a place to share. I think that poems become extremely important in times of unrest, because it also leaves a historical record.
We all know about the Holocaust, but when you read the Diary of Anne Frank or Elie Wiesel’s Night, you see it differently. When I read my poem about driving my son to school, I’m thinking about Trayvon Martin. The juxtaposition of this kid that we know of in the news and a mother who has a son that looks very much like this individual makes you feel the tension in the poem. Then you start to go, “Hey, maybe this is something that I should think about. She’s a real person, and she’s sitting right there and she’s scared.” This brings empathy, and I think we’re going to need a lot of this as we’re trying to figure out our way forward.
One of the ways we’ll do that is through poetry. Centuries later, if the planet survives, people will pick up the culture of the time, and say, “Oh, this is what they were thinking. This is what they were feeling. This is what we can learn from that time.” I look at ancient Egyptian poetry, and I’m surprised that they were thinking about the same things we’re thinking about. An ancient poem about a man who’s so sad his girlfriend left him, that he’s going to lay on his mat and wither away, and then she’ll run back to him, because she’ll feel sorry. This is ancient Egypt. This could be two doors down.
Audience Member 4: My students read inaugural poetry, and we talk about Shelley’s comment that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. How do you see that role shaping us in unacknowledged ways?
Brim-Bell: First and foremost, I think poetry is so important in the sense that the page is one of the places where you can figure things out in such a way that it’s private. It’s your very own space, and you can decide whether or not to let it out into the world. I have coaxed myself into writing many poems by saying “Antoinette, no one will ever see this.” And of course, I end up letting it go.
I think it’s also important because it’s one of the only places where you can rage and yell and scream in a way that is safe. It is a place where we find comfort. We return to our favorite poems the way we return to our favorite songs, and they give us solace. For me, that poem is by Lucille Clifton, and it ends with “every day, something has tried to kill me and has failed.”
Poetry brings people together and offers them an opportunity to communicate with each other. If I read my poem and it hangs in the air, then you’re thinking about my message and what I’ve said, and you’ve let me get my thoughts out, and then we understand each other a little bit better. We need poetry, it’s going to save us somehow, if anything can.
El Khalfi: I may have closed my tiny maroon notebook, but I will not be closing the book in my head that I’ve written down in, and I hope all of you keep the books in your heads open. Professor Burrello started the night by thanking the Media Board for sponsoring the lecture series. I will end by thanking all of these beautiful people for coming out to listen to us. And thank you, dear lady, you have been amazing.
It took pages for me to articulate how I was seeing this. Having Adam say the same thing twice: “this woman you gave me did this, this woman you gave me, gave this.” When I found out he had said it twice, that became the title of the book. I had to go through what Lilith was experiencing and what Eve was experiencing. That’s not something I could have done visually in a piece of art. So I think however the image or the idea presents itself, whether it is a visual image, or I start to hear the language, then I know that that’s where I need to go.
El Khalfi: I kind of want to describe your creative process as very non-binary. Earlier, I brought up intention, and whenever I bring up intention, it feels like a very loaded thing. So, bringing it up made me go, ‘No, I have to think about that more.’ When do you think intention is born in your process?
Brim-Bell: That’s a really interesting question. I usually go to the page because I don’t know something. I don’t know who Lilith is, so I spend months trying to get inside her skin and find a voice for her. My first book is coming of age through divorce, so I’m writing that in the midst of what’s going on, trying to figure out how I’m going to survive this. I’m talking to the page about things that I can’t talk about openly at that time. It lands on the page, as opposed to in conversation.
My second book was written on a dare. I was in Cambridge doing a residency. We had to take all of our meals late in the evening because we would go to eight o’clock at night. It was one of those National Endowment for the Humanities workshops about the Civil Rights Movement. There was one musician, one philosopher, and, of course, a poet. Everybody else was a historian. So we go to dinner, and somebody says “what’s love?”
All the historians start talking about marriage and mergers and land and acquisition. Then the philosopher was saying “what kind of love are we talking about, like Eros or Philia or Agape?” Across from him was the musician, talking about the quintessential love songs of all times. We’re talking around and through each other from our own vantage point. Then all of a sudden I start hearing these big thuds on the tables. It was the waiters and waitresses wanting to go home. We had stayed there past the closing. So we left. We turned to walk back to our dorms, and one of the historians said over his shoulder, “well, Antoinette, you’re the poet. You figure it out.”
At five o’clock the next morning, I began writing Icarus and Love, which is an exploration of love. I took into consideration everything that was flying around, from love of children and parenting, intimate love, spirituality, and love of self. Even after I wrote that book, I don’t think I could tell you what love is. The one thing I took away from it is that love will break you. But as I say in the poem, that I like to refer to as the thesis, there’s a certain beauty in having your wing broken.
The last twenty minutes of the evening was dedicated to audience questions.
Audience Member 1: One of my favorite Scorsese films, a novel, originally, is The Last Temptation of Christ. Jesus was deconstructed and depicted as a mortal man with fears and lusts and hopes and desires, and he was conflicted about being the son of God. They deconstructed him, and it seemed paradoxical, because it’s desanctifying him, but somehow it made him more holy. With your experiences with Lilith and Eve in their deconstruction, do you think you felt more spiritually connected to them within the context of the Abrahamic faith?
Brim-Bell: By the time I finished writing the Lilith part, I was afraid of her, and I didn’t want her in my head and in my house anymore. What I learned from Lilith was not to be so hot-tempered. I’m glad that she stood her ground and said, “No, I’m not inferior.” But the fact that she compromised herself in that moment in anger was a very interesting fable. If I were to teach that story, I would say “check yourself. Just walk away.”
What I learned from the exploration of Eve is to give grace. I feel that we’re so quick to judge and to condemn, and oftentimes we don’t think things through. I felt a great amount of sympathy for her. I don’t know if it made me more or less religious, but it made me more discerning of what I hear from the pulpit, the podium, everything. I started to look at things a little bit more.
Audience Member 2: Lilith called herself the daughter; she called Eve her sister, and then called God her father. When you were constructing your book, did you factor in a lot of how the traditional patriarchal family structure operates?
Brim-Bell: I thought that Lilith and Eve had a lot in common. I mean, they were married to the same man, and it seemed like they had a lot of the same struggles. I thought of that as a sisterhood. Even Lilith says “what are they going to call your daughters?” Which is interesting to me. We know Cain, Abel, and Seth, but they had daughters, and they’re not named. I thought that was important and impactful.
There was a ballet in her image based on my book. The choreographer, Sarah Grace, had said to me “do you want to be a part of the choreography?” And I said “no, because that’s a separate piece. That’s your perspective.” It was very interesting to see the dancers together. They had the Lilith ballerina and the Eve ballerina at the end come together, dancing in a way that was conciliatory and comforting to each other. It was so amazing to see that that’s what she took away from it, that ultimately there is a sisterhood. And given the opportunity, these women could have taken care of each other. It’s a call to action for the rest of us.
"Poetry brings people together and offers them an opportunity to communicate with each other."
Audience Member 3: What was on your parents’ bookshelf and how did it affect you?
Brim-Bell: My grandmother never gave me a toy. She only gave me books, so I was constantly reading. But the thing that she and my mother had given no thought to at all, was the age appropriateness of the books that they gave to me. My mother would always get whatever was on the New York Times Best Seller list, and put it on the coffee table so that when people came over, it looked like she was well read. She wasn’t reading that stuff; I was reading that stuff. So at seven and eight, I had The Agony and the Ecstasy, which was about Michelangelo. I had Shakespeare. I had all of these books about African American literature. I had stuff that was way over my head, but I read it, and over time, you began to understand things.
I read everything, and that’s where I fell in love with language, and where I realized that you could escape into it. As I was going to school, I would check out a book every day. Then, I would bring it back the next day, having read the whole thing. I got to know the librarians very well. “Hi, Antoinette, what did you think of that?” In the summer, my dad would drop me off at the library and pick me up on his lunch hour. I would spend all that time reading. It was fun, and I think that’s what got me here.
Audience Member 4: I feel the state poet laureate has a straightforward mission, to promote and share poetry. But what is it like for you to be poet laureate given the policies of the new administration?
Brim-Bell: We’re very blessed to have municipal poet laureates in this state, as well as a state poet laureate, to make sure that poets have a place to share. I think that poems become extremely important in times of unrest, because it also leaves a historical record.
We all know about the Holocaust, but when you read the Diary of Anne Frank or Elie Wiesel’s Night, you see it differently. When I read my poem about driving my son to school, I’m thinking about Trayvon Martin. The juxtaposition of this kid that we know of in the news and a mother who has a son that looks very much like this individual makes you feel the tension in the poem. Then you start to go, “Hey, maybe this is something that I should think about. She’s a real person, and she’s sitting right there and she’s scared.” This brings empathy, and I think we’re going to need a lot of this as we’re trying to figure out our way forward.
One of the ways we’ll do that is through poetry. Centuries later, if the planet survives, people will pick up the culture of the time, and say, “Oh, this is what they were thinking. This is what they were feeling. This is what we can learn from that time.” I look at ancient Egyptian poetry, and I’m surprised that they were thinking about the same things we’re thinking about. An ancient poem about a man who’s so sad his girlfriend left him, that he’s going to lay on his mat and wither away, and then she’ll run back to him, because she’ll feel sorry. This is ancient Egypt. This could be two doors down.
Audience Member 4: My students read inaugural poetry, and we talk about Shelley’s comment that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. How do you see that role shaping us in unacknowledged ways?
Brim-Bell: First and foremost, I think poetry is so important in the sense that the page is one of the places where you can figure things out in such a way that it’s private. It’s your very own space, and you can decide whether or not to let it out into the world. I have coaxed myself into writing many poems by saying “Antoinette, no one will ever see this.” And of course, I end up letting it go.
I think it’s also important because it’s one of the only places where you can rage and yell and scream in a way that is safe. It is a place where we find comfort. We return to our favorite poems the way we return to our favorite songs, and they give us solace. For me, that poem is by Lucille Clifton, and it ends with “every day, something has tried to kill me and has failed.”
If I read my poem and it hangs in the air, then you’re thinking about my message and what I’ve said, and you’ve let me get my thoughts out, and then we understand each other a little bit better. We need poetry, it’s going to save us somehow, if anything can.
El Khalfi: I may have closed my tiny maroon notebook, but I will not be closing the book in my head that I’ve written down in, and I hope all of you keep the books in your heads open. Professor Burrello started the night by thanking the Media Board for sponsoring the lecture series. I will end by thanking all of these beautiful people for coming out to listen to us. And thank you, dear lady, you have been amazing.