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Sue Cunningham: Finding Poetry in Unexpected Places
40 Plays2 days ago
What if poetry isn’t just for English majors and literary journals—but for anyone trying to make sense of their story?
In this episode, Wendy sits down with longtime friend, counselor, and poet Sue Cunningham to talk about the unexpected ways poetry has shown up in their lives—and how it’s helped them make sense of their stories. They talk about the moments that drew them toward writing, the wounds that made it feel out of reach, and the slow return to creative expression as a form of healing, honesty, and hope.
Sue shares how a flyer on a coffee shop bulletin board led her back to poetry, and Wendy reflects on a college experience that nearly convinced her to give it up for good. They also reflect on poetry as protest, as presence, and as a way to say things that are too complex—or too sacred—for ordinary language.
This conversation is gentle, grounding, and full of quiet encouragement. Whether you consider yourself a writer or not, it just might help you see your own story a little differently.
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Transcript
Introduction to Sue Cunningham and Poetry Journey
00:00:05
Speaker
So welcome back. I am joined today by an old friend, Sue Cunningham. Hi, Sue. Hi. ah So happy to be here, Wendy. So glad to have you. Sue is a counselor.
00:00:18
Speaker
Sue is a an employee of the Allender Center. You help with a Recovery Week for women. Is that right, Sue? ah so You've been there a long, long time. And Sue is a poet, which is what we're going to be talking about today.
00:00:32
Speaker
But Sue, I would love to have you introduce yourself. What would you like people to know about you? Yeah. Oh, thanks, Wendy. Yeah, I have always been really interested in people.
00:00:45
Speaker
And I think that's what probably got me to really want to be a counselor. And once I was a counselor, I became really super interested in people's stories.
00:00:56
Speaker
And the Allender Center has been a great place for me to Help train and facilitate people who are looking at their story sometimes for the first time or sometimes wanting to go a little deeper into it.
00:01:09
Speaker
And I started noticing a few years ago that poetry was part of my story. And I wouldn't have necessarily known that at certain points in my life. But now as I look back, i see how I see how that's always kind of been part of it. And now poetry is a really big part
The Birth and Purpose of Living Poetry Podcast
00:01:27
Speaker
of my life. I write it, I read it, I share it And I started a podcast last year called Living Poetry. Yeah, I would love for you to share about this podcast.
00:01:38
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. One of the things that I love about being a counselor is the deep conversations that we get into and the places that we go and the places I can witness God moving in people's lives and them growing and becoming who they're meant to be.
00:01:56
Speaker
But one of the downsides of it is they're all confidential. They're all behind closed doors. And so i was just thinking one day and I was like, what if you could pull the curtain back and have deep conversations about people's stories that were for people to listen to And I thought, what if we use the poem ah song as a portal in?
00:02:21
Speaker
And so that's how living poetry came to be. I love that. It's like a little buffer between the person's heart and the public that allows them to share things that might be otherwise too sacred to say directly.
00:02:39
Speaker
So I really... Yes, that's part of really, yes, coming at it from the side. Yeah, I love that. Okay, so you said poetry had always been a part of your life and you saw that as a retrospective.
00:02:53
Speaker
Tell me about that. Yeah, sometimes when we're in the middle of our stories, we can't see it, but it's only in looking back that we have the perspective. Well, when I started thinking about poetry and actually started writing in, which I can tell you how that happened.
00:03:11
Speaker
But what I did was I was looking back through my journals just randomly, and I kept noticing like little scraps of poems and little things just torn out and shoved in my journal.
00:03:23
Speaker
And I thought, oh, these are my poems I've always been writing, but I never thought of them as
Influences and Inspirations in Poetry
00:03:29
Speaker
poems. I just thought of them as what I was writing and journaling. Yeah. And when I looked back and I thought, oh, they've been with me all this time. I was doing this even before I knew I was doing Yes, yes.
00:03:43
Speaker
Well, okay, when you said little pieces you had stuck in your journals and you realized they were actually poems, it made me think of, so Ocean Vuong is one of my favorite poets.
00:03:57
Speaker
And he, if people don't know, is a Vietnamese American author. He is a professor at NYU of creative writing, I think. He may teach fiction as well.
00:04:10
Speaker
But he is a New York Times bestselling poet. And as my adult kids would say, he has definitely been in my summer arc. So I've been listening to him reading him, and he has a poem where this may be from his book, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, but he talks a lot about what formed him.
00:04:36
Speaker
And his grandmother, was in a relationship with an American soldier during the Vietnamese-American War. And so he has had to contend with the fact that he exists because of war.
00:04:54
Speaker
And he was reading this poem the other day. I actually had it on my phone because i was thinking I might want to read it. But when you said little pieces of paper tucked in your journal,
00:05:07
Speaker
He says, maybe fragments are what make my life. I gather them all together in my arms, carry what I can from place to place.
00:05:18
Speaker
Here is where things have become disastrous. Here is where I learned to live through the pain. Here is where I've come to stand, knees trembling after being bent double in grief.
00:05:31
Speaker
And he goes on and on. And he also adds humor. He's such an endearing soul. He's one of the kindest humans that I have come across. But this idea that, yeah, life happens in little moments.
00:05:44
Speaker
Sometimes we record them in words, maybe in memories. And they all have a way of creating this mosaic of who we look back and see that we have been becoming all along.
00:05:57
Speaker
And so I just love this idea of you grabbing these little snatches of paper and going, I've actually been a poet for a long time. Yes, yes. Well, I love that you're talking about Ocean because I'm actually reading his latest novel right now.
00:06:12
Speaker
The Emperor of Gladness? Yes, yes. That is on my
Personal Experiences and Poetry's Accessibility
00:06:16
Speaker
list. I'm on chapter six, I think. Okay. So yeah, it's so it's so gorgeous. and I love listening.
00:06:23
Speaker
to him as well. ah But so let me tell you a story. I was a coffee shop and I was just waiting for my order. And so I turned around and while I was waiting, there was this board that had all these like advertisements and papers just, you know, tacked up to it.
00:06:42
Speaker
And so I was just like killing time and waiting and and I was reading. And one of the advertisements was for a poetry writing workshop. Hmm.
00:06:53
Speaker
And I just, I looked at it and I was like, oh, I mean, I've never thought of that. It's so interesting. would love to be interested and, you know, take that.
00:07:04
Speaker
And so i went home and it was near a birthday and I told my husband, I know what I want for my birthday. I want this writing workshop. And so he was like, okay, great. And so decided signed up for the class and became, like I always said to people, like I'm in kindergarten, I don't know, like I haven't written a poem since I was in fifth grade.
00:07:26
Speaker
But that process began my relearning to write poetry and be educated in poetry through this writing workshop. But the thing that is important about it in terms of the fragments is you could say it was just a random day in this random coffee shop where I look and see this random advertisement and I happen to notice it and I happen to sign up and I happen to love the workshop.
00:07:56
Speaker
Or you can read it back as saying, oh, this was always part of I was going to discover the poetry in myself all along. This is just the way it happened.
00:08:08
Speaker
Okay, so you made me think that is a lovely, lovely story. And you're right. The looking back provides just a richer, probably more honest view, especially for those of us that believe in the hand of providence.
00:08:23
Speaker
I went to college at a very tiny women's school in Atlanta. There were 550 women. And one semester, I decided to take a poetry writing class as an elective.
00:08:36
Speaker
And i kind of thought, this will be easy and I won't have to do anything. I'll just kind of spit words out. it And i remember the professor... Writing a comment, this, you know, was handwritten in those days.
00:08:50
Speaker
And then he would write little comments in by hand. And so he said on one of my poems, seems you'll need to get a better grasp of the English language before you continue writing poetry.
00:09:02
Speaker
And I remember the dagger in my heart. Yeah. So then we go home for break. It was Christmas break. And a friend was in the class with me. And she had originally received an A when we got our report cards in the mail.
00:09:17
Speaker
And then she was issued a second report card. And he had lowered her to a B. And i remember thinking, how do you do this with poetry? You just change your mind.
00:09:28
Speaker
And so I put poetry away after this. It gave such a bad taste in my mouth. But there was one poem one that I wrote that my husband still remembers that was probably the first honest look I had ever taken at my story.
00:09:46
Speaker
from my family of origin. And it is tucked away somewhere in this house now. But again, as I look back, that is one thing that has been preserved.
00:09:57
Speaker
Even though I put poetry away all those years, it lit this interest in me of wanting to go deeper, which I wouldn't do for decades.
00:10:08
Speaker
I wouldn't find the Seattle School and the Allender Center for several decades after that. But it is a part of, like you said, something that was there all along.
00:10:19
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, ahead. I just want to say, well, I just want to say that just reminds me of why so many people kind have a bad taste in their mouth from poetry. Because so often it has been taught or not taught in ways that are, you know, somewhat elitist or that you have to be a certain way or write a certain...
00:10:43
Speaker
style and it's, it kind of turns people off or they feel like I don't get poetry. I'm not a poet. Yes. Yeah. And that's one of the things on my podcast that I really am working against. And a lot of the poets that come on and talk and say,
00:11:01
Speaker
You know, we want to level the ground so that poetry is available for everyone. Because I believe people are living poetry and people are creative and they can write. Not everyone wants to write poetry, but everyone who wants to can read and understand poetry if it's written
Poetry's Role in Truth and Resilience
00:11:20
Speaker
well. Yes.
00:11:22
Speaker
Sue, when I first met you, Sue, it was 2017 or 2018, and we were both out in Seattle at the Allender Center for one of their programs. You were helping. You were probably a facilitator then, and you shared a poem at Dan's request.
00:11:42
Speaker
And neither you nor I remember exactly which poem it was, but it's one you had written. And it was about losing a loved one to death. And I was so moved by it because I had recently lost my dear mother-in-law after a 14-year battle with cancer.
00:12:02
Speaker
And the year before that, we had lost a the husband of a dear friend. And so death was very much a part of my young family's world in ways that we did not wish for it to be.
00:12:16
Speaker
And so I came up to you and complimented you on the poem because it it had touched my heart so much. Do you remember that? Well, you know, actually, now that you're saying it, I do remember i was writing a lot of poems about grief because I was in the middle of losing a very, very dear friend to cancer.
00:12:38
Speaker
so And so as you're saying that, I do. And I do remember ah being a little trepidatious to share in front of everyone because yeah you never know how it's going to come, how it's going to come across or people will be able to understand what you're trying to say.
00:12:55
Speaker
And I did. Like you touched a part of my heart. And there's some poet, I don't think it's bell hooks, but somebody that I recently read had made the comment, there is a wound the shape of your words in someone's heart right now.
00:13:15
Speaker
And that's what your poem did for me that day. It just landed in a place that I needed balm. I needed that presence of someone who understood, but in a way that I didn't have to share the story.
00:13:31
Speaker
And I also in the moment didn't have to help carry your grief, because I think if we looked at that moment in time, we were bra but probably both faltering a little on our feet on the inside.
00:13:44
Speaker
And yet your words offered me a withness. And so ah the other thing I remember about you sharing that day is you talked about how poets are the truth tellers in society.
00:13:59
Speaker
And poets and artists bring the hope. They shed light on the way forward. And I think that's what you're saying you enjoy about counseling relationships and also about your podcast. But I'd love to hear you say a little bit more about even poetry for the times like we're living in, where there's a lot of dark and a lot of hopeless all around, no matter where you're sitting.
00:14:27
Speaker
Yes, that is true. Poets have been throughout time And think that's a great thing. poets are the truth tellers they speak of protest and they speak of things that other people don't want to talk about you know this is from the prophets from all the way back in every culture there is ah There are always poets, just like there are always artists, and different artists are always responding to current events, to what's happening.
00:15:00
Speaker
A lot of times people will say, this is a political poem, or this is not a political poem. And sometimes I would say, like, every poem is a political poem, because every poem is coming out of a time. And whether you're depending on how well you can do your craft, you're not hitting people over the head with it, but you're allowing people to find these ways in from the slant, as Emily Dickinson says, from the from a hidden place, maybe but through a metaphor, through something that opens up a portal or ah gate that someone can say, oh, I can see something that I didn't see before.
00:15:43
Speaker
There's some usually some turn or surprise in a poem. So that throughout all kinds of conflicts, like I'm Armenian and So I talk a lot about the Armenian genocide and one of the things that happened the night before the people were going to round up the people to start the systematic genocide, the night before they took all the artists and poets and intellectuals and doctors and they eliminated them first.
00:16:14
Speaker
So I always say we take the poets first. So when times are tough, listen to the poets because they're the ones. And you know this comes out in song as well. A lot of times the anthems, the visual art, they give us a place to to locate our grief, as you were saying, our lament, our protest, our opposition, our complaint.
Healing and Expression through Poetry
00:16:39
Speaker
I mean, the book of Psalms is full. yeah i was just reading... The book of Psalms in the Old Testament is full of more lament and complaint psalms than any other kind of psalm. any other.
00:16:55
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So my heart dropped when you said that about the eve of the Armenian genocide. And what they were doing is they were taking away the hope of the people and those who could see a vision yeah of something more.
00:17:13
Speaker
yeah And yeah, just I felt that in my stomach and thinking Elie Wiesel writes so much about hope.
00:17:24
Speaker
And so much about the necessity of it for survival. And so there's a way that the people were being broken down before their bodies were decimated.
00:17:37
Speaker
Like they're the emotion of hope was killed off first. And just the cruelty and the evil of that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. And just how it's it's ongoing. It's happening right now.
00:17:50
Speaker
ah few If you want to know, if if you do need hope sometimes, it's going to be very often through through poets or through poetry through a song that to say, okay, this gives me courage. This kind of fortifies me.
00:18:06
Speaker
And when you don't have it, there's a huge loss. You're right. And a minute ago, you said everyone is a poet and your podcast is living poetry, that people are poetry, that our lives are.
00:18:20
Speaker
And in my private practice, I work with children as well as adults, and I see family units at times. And so i do a lot of art-based therapy to help people engage the stories of their lives that are painful.
00:18:37
Speaker
And so i have a client who has been through a lot of hard things. And most recently, she's had a lot of pain in the context of her schooling situation.
00:18:49
Speaker
And I would notice that when she would get dysregulated, she would want to ask me questions about who was the next client. Obviously, I was very veiled in what I would tell.
00:19:01
Speaker
But she's young teen and she would want to know who's coming next and what do they need because I want to write them something on the whiteboard to encourage people.
00:19:12
Speaker
Or she would say, can i write letters to the people that suffered in Hurricane Helene, which was here in Asheville recently? And what she began spitting out was poetry.
00:19:26
Speaker
And so when she didn't write it, but maybe she was making something out of clay and just riffing, I began to take dictation. And I would say, you have written the most powerful poem.
00:19:42
Speaker
And then she began to do it at home and send me the words. And yeah ministered to and strengthened me as well as her parents because she was putting words of truth to the reality she was living.
00:19:59
Speaker
It would have been easy for us to say middle school's only a season. It'll be fine. But her heart was contending with so much that And I'm like, this girl is a monumental poet.
00:20:14
Speaker
Her words are so profound. And so I just love the capturing of story. Yeah. Well, I just want to say a couple things about that experience.
00:20:26
Speaker
One is you were a witness to her poetry and you were able to name it. And that is so important. And that's often what poetry does. So you were a witness to her and then she was a witness to the next person.
00:20:43
Speaker
So yeah her poems could also be called ah poetry of witness. It says, I want to tell you something that I know from my life and my story that I've witnessed as a gift, as an offering to the next person, whoever that may be.
00:20:59
Speaker
yeah And so I think it's great that you were modeling that for her and doing that for her and then reminding her of what she couldn't see herself. So often we say we can't see our own faces.
00:21:12
Speaker
We need someone else to describe them for us. So when you described for her who you know what you saw and who she was becoming, then that gave her a better view, an opportunity to see something that she maybe wouldn't have seen.
00:21:28
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's it's been stunning and it it has been a beautiful thing to witness her. And Ocean Bong comes back to mind again because he, I heard him say recently, and this may be a poem that he has, but he used the phrase, take the shoes off of your voice.
00:21:47
Speaker
And he says when he was little, there was a rule, you always took your shoes off. Well, that was in my house in the South as well, but it was so you didn't get dirt on the clean floor. He says that was really not the case. It was more that when you showed up in someone's home, you were showing the honor of taking your shoes off by letting them know you knew you were entering a sacred space.
00:22:10
Speaker
And so he says that the same is true with our words. And so I feel like that's what she was essentially doing in being witnessed. She was beginning to realize she actually understands this life she is living.
00:22:24
Speaker
And she's actually creating her own pathway of hope as she speaks to it. And so to watch her move from writing words to others to writing words for herself was beautiful.
00:22:39
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah.
Personal Poems and Generational Connections
00:22:40
Speaker
So, Sue, the time goes so fast, but I want to save a few minutes to hear one of your poems. And then I think I'll share one of mine. And it might be fun to have you back again where we could actually talk through what we hear in each other's poetry. But I would at least like the chance to witness one of yours if you're willing.
00:23:03
Speaker
Yeah, that would be that would be great. I started writing, i I've written a lot of poems about my family of origin and my grandparents' story as a genocide survivor, granddaughter of genocide survivors.
00:23:17
Speaker
And then I started writing what I started calling healing poems. And these were just poems that I would write just that gave me a balm, like you were saying before, that gave me some some courage, some encouragement.
00:23:32
Speaker
And so this is one, I'll read it. right It's called Raison d'Etre. Lucky you, upgraded on American Airlines, aisle seat 4D in first class.
00:23:47
Speaker
30 minutes from landing in Fresno, your seatmate, a frail, weathered, ashen-haired woman, rises for the restroom. As she passes you, she buckles at the knees, falls back, lands straight into your arms.
00:24:05
Speaker
airlessly, you catch her as if you do this every day. You hold someone else's grandmother solid as granite rock, like you belong in Yosemite, where she's going, she tells you.
00:24:21
Speaker
Maybe that's your raison d'etre, to hold the falling, a giant sequoia, limber as limbs, standing sturdy and immovable in currents of wind.
00:24:38
Speaker
So tell me first, tell us what raison d'etre means. It's like your reason for living. It's French for a reason to be. Yeah. OK. OK. And what made this woman stick in your memory?
00:24:53
Speaker
What is it about this grandmotherly figure? Well, just the experience of I was just standing there waiting for her to pass. And she literally falls. And I grabbed her.
00:25:05
Speaker
And I held her. And it was that feeling of, oh my gosh, if you've ever wondered if you were in the right place at the right time, you was literally were. i literally was. And it felt so good.
00:25:18
Speaker
It felt so good to like, kind of think, oh, for once in my life, I have no doubt I should have been right here because I caught her and she didn't fall and she didn't break her hip. And She could still have her vacation and all the things that were going through in my mind of, oh my gosh. And it also, it happened so fast.
00:25:36
Speaker
And it was over so fast. It was like probably 10 seconds. Well, but then there's this intersection with your own grandmother. that you alluded to a minute ago, right? Your grandmother was a survivor of the Arminian Holocaust. Is that what you were saying?
00:25:52
Speaker
No, I was just that, no, that was, I was just saying that she was someone, she was someone's grandmother and I got to hold someone else's grandmother. Got it. But were did you have grandparents who survived? I did. Yes, I did. Yes. Yes. OK, got it. So I knew she was not your grandmother, but there's this intersection where she is very reminiscent.
00:26:14
Speaker
Yeah, I guess you could say that. Yeah, that's great. That's great, Wendy. Yeah. Well, I'm just thinking the fact that your grandmother survived means you are here. Exactly. then you're you are now sustaining a grandmother, you know.
00:26:31
Speaker
so I love that. Yeah, that's good. That's really good. That's beautiful. Maybe I learned something in that poetry class that I didn't know English well enough for you. I think he certainly did. Most certainly.
Therapeutic Benefits of Poetry
00:26:45
Speaker
ah um yeah Okay, so I'm going to read one. um Let's see here. think I'm read this one called a Thousand Tiny Resurrections. And I also write for lamentation and for the pursuit of personal healing.
00:27:03
Speaker
Okay. So it's usually something I'm living through in some way that has kicked off this idea. Or like you said, oftentimes a comment will be made by a client and that will set a trajectory of thinking.
00:27:20
Speaker
And i will sit down at a coffee shop and it will pour out. This is called A Thousand Tiny Resurrections. God, the death in my life has not been limited to a singular physical one.
00:27:35
Speaker
Rather, it comes to me daily, sometimes hour by hour in its assorted forms. A word from powerful lips spoken to a press. A dream for goodness evaporating into an atmosphere of it will never work.
00:27:51
Speaker
Cries from the mouths of the vulnerable being met with indifference. bodies betrayed by ratios of melanin which were never meant to be simplified, love legislated into governmental permissions or vetoes, hope submerged in a pit of despair forced under by the sharp impact of broken commitments.
00:28:15
Speaker
Surrounded by pain, how do I bring my hope in the resurrection via a thousand tiny offerings in the catacombs? My heart tells me this, by bringing bouquets of wildflowers to ruins the storms left behind, by placing a trembling hand on the heavy-laden shoulders of my neighbors, through silence held on the heels of deep pain expressed aloud,
00:28:43
Speaker
By smearing ashes on her chest, a tangible portrayal of the state of her broken heart, using linen to remove the marks of shame, and then anointing her head with rose oil, she is new and oh so holy.
00:29:00
Speaker
By holding hands and witnessing tears as bodies huddle together wondering the when, the if of relief. by not giving answers but sitting with questions, so as to honor the complexity of human suffering and heartbreak, by pleading with God in the moments that are full of calamity and absent hope, through staying close to the unprotected as the bloodshed carries on, by remembering the cloud of witnesses for whom desolation, not deliverance and redemption, was the purview,
00:29:35
Speaker
By choosing their faithfulness over my futility and looking for the sunrise every morning anyway. By planting seeds, even though the last harvest froze and waiting for the dough to rise, there's nothing better to do than to expect new life to come from dead places.
00:29:57
Speaker
Wendy, that's beautiful. I could hear like... We may call that a list poem because there's like these two lists, these lists of the really hard, fractured things you're lamenting.
00:30:15
Speaker
And then this list of of hope and ideas of what you can do. i love the the flower, bringing the flowers. it just It's beautiful, very embodied.
00:30:26
Speaker
Thanks. And i I feel like today and probably always in this world, that's what our hope needs. It needs embodied forms and it needs ways that we choose hope and we choose to be a people of hope in the moment by moment actions.
00:30:46
Speaker
And that's often i don't have certainty. I have hope of a when Sometimes I wonder an if, but I feel I have to act and hope in order to perpetuate my faith.
00:31:01
Speaker
Yeah. When you, when you create, you talked about healing and we can get into this another time if you want, but and it's in the creating that our bodies both physiologically and emotionally change.
00:31:16
Speaker
We get, we get, we get a counter move. Our parasympathetic system moves counter to our sympathetic nervous system. So we're in fight and flight, but then when our parasympathetic nervousism kicks in it it takes us to places of rest and calm um and ease.
00:31:37
Speaker
And that's what creativity does to the body. So if you feel differently in your body after writing that poem, like you do with your clients, you do with yourself, it's for really, really good reasons.
Conclusion and Podcast Promotion
00:31:51
Speaker
um I love that. And yeah, I would love to talk about that another time. So thank you, Sue, for who you are, for what you bring to the world, for your podcast and your poetry. And your podcast is Living Poetry.
00:32:07
Speaker
Where can people find it? Pretty much anywhere you get your podcasts, Apple, Spotify. Yeah. Hey, well, Sue Cunningham, um thank you so much. It's been a delight.
00:32:19
Speaker
Thanks, Wendy.