# Poetry Is a Record of Courageous Living: Raisa Tolchinsky, MRPL ‘24 February 04, 2025 Natalie Cherie Campbell , MTS '18 ![Raisa Tolchinsky ](/sites/g/files/omnuum8216/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2025-03/Raisa%20Tolchinsky_0.jpeg?h=d4b0b1cc&itok=pPep5YOp) Raisa Tolchinsky typing a poem for a visitor/ Photo Courtesy of Raisa Tolchinsky HDS alum Raisa Tolchinsky was part of the third cohort of Master of Religion and Public Life candidates and the first poet in the program. Her poetry explores the wisdom of the body and what it means to listen imaginatively. She is the author of Glass Jaw (Persea Books, 2024), winner of the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and other publications. Sitting down with fellow alum Natalie Cherie Campbell, MTS '18, Raisa reflects on her time in the MRPL program and its impact on her life and poetry. **Natalie Cherie Campbell:** What led you to the Master of Religion and Public Life program? **Raisa Tolchinsky:** It was my typewriter sites, which were absolutely life-changing for me. My life can actually be divided into before my typewriter sites began and after my typewriter sites began. I had seen people do such sites in parks. It felt terrifying, the idea of being absolutely present and having no idea what would happen. But, I had always wanted to try, so I set up my typewriter and waited for people to stop. In each meeting, there was a deep sense of spirituality and mystery, like a non-religious prayer site where I could write blessings for people, without religious affiliation. I felt there was something going on that I didn't quite understand. I wanted to know more about how these sites functioned and their possibilities. When I found the MRPL program, I thought, “This is it. This is the place to ask the questions.” Speaking with Dr. Diane Moore, I knew I had found a teacher and a leader who believed deeply in the work of poetry, someone who would both support the project and challenge my assumptions of what it was (and could mean). That combination is a gift. **NCC:** Can you tell me about the typewriter sites that you held while a MRPL student? **RT:** Nine times over the course of the year, I wrote poems for students and faculty in various locations across Harvard, for one to two hours, about whatever they needed most that day. To each site, I brought my Smith Corona Automatic 12 steel grey typewriter and a hot pink sign that said “POEMS.” When participants sat across from me, my opening question was usually, “What do you need a poem about today?” Over those two semesters, I wrote poems about sewing, hamsters, and unrequited love. I wrote poems about autumn, transformation, skin, birthdays, moss, slowness. I wrote a poem for a resident at Mass Brigham who had made a mistake with a patient, who wept by my side in an empty room. I wrote poems for a student who wanted to remember Ukraine as joyous, and students who wanted a poem about solidarity with Gaza. Another student’s friend was taken hostage in the Hamas attacks and wanted a poem about seeking out joy and connection, even amidst grief. The poems became a record of courageous living. They are artifacts of connection, of moments where I set down my humming mind, my pain, and my fear—in order to listen. I listened for a spark, a sense of heat, an aliveness—where I could find a space of compassionate neutrality, where the threads of language could unfold a truth that sometimes I did not know was there until I started writing. **NCC:** Are there any topics that made a particularly deep impression? **RT:** Some of my most essential work here was being a consistent presence at Eliot house. The poetry sites allowed me to be present to students’ specifics, both their joy and grief. In these sites, we sat together in questions such as “How do I continue to find joy?” “How do I accept change?” “How do I forgive myself?” The poetry sites seemed to inspire seeing pain or uncertainty as fuel for creative action. After October 7th, there was every kind of feeling from every kind of person at those sites, and I was there with all of them. I feel so grateful for this practice because it allowed me to be there. It allowed me to sit in the center of our moments of meeting and actively make something with my hands.The art happening in that space was life-affirming and connecting. I learned that almost always, the poem could meet the moment. I think back to how I prayed, as I wrote, that the poem could meet so many students and faculty in grief. For Palestinian friends, for my 95 year-old-uncle who lives in Israel, for my friends on the frontlines of protest sites. I do not know how to be with this world’s magnitude of suffering, but I know how to meet one person at a time, with what they bring at that moment. Perhaps these poetry sites are the only way I know how to be in contact with what is. It is my way of praying. It is where I find the sacred. Reviewing the poems I wrote, I especially love the mistakes that I forgot to correct—it reminds me of the humility and messiness required of this work. This is just one way I know I’ve changed as a writer—I am more willing to take risks, with more capacity to trust the errors. ![Poetry](/sites/g/files/omnuum8216/files/2025-03/Poetry.png) *"poetry," a poem written by Raisa Tolchinsky at one of her typewriter sites. The poem reads, "this language of the third space, which reaches across dimensions into a form of listening that follows time in a great spiral, may this poem honor the work of sitting with the uncertain, the in between, reaching into the great silence and pulling light from the aether--bless the poems which accompany the pain, the beauty of what dances underneath the days--this way of making, of holding open the door." / Photo courtesy of Raisa Tolchinsky***NCC:** How did RPL’s approach to understanding religion in public life impact your understanding of poetry and these spaces? **RT:** Understanding my own situatedness, which is part of the RPL Method, being extremely cognizant of where I come from allows me to enter that space with someone. I'm able to be present and see what I’m bringing to the table that is mine and learning from them. Often, it felt like I held a ministerial position, especially for the undergraduate students at Eliot house, who I saw every three months and who often had updates about the last poem (or last situation) where they encountered me. I lived somewhere in the intersection of a poet, a divinity school student, and a hairdresser who you know you can tell things to because they don’t live within the circles of your ordinary life. Though I showed up in all my “situated-ness,” with a culturally Jewish background, the sites were non-religious. The poems were able to be with many different kinds of belief systems and exist in many kinds of places. In each place, I found moments of connection, of careful listening, when time stops and it feels like the person and I are floating through the universe on a typewriter raft. I am devoted to this way of showing up and loving, without any governance except the moment, as it is, in all its complexity. The sites required a faith that the poem and my presence could hold whatever arrived. Saxophonist and jazz composer Patricia Zarate Perez visited a course I took called “Quests for Wisdom,” and spoke of “fear training”—developing one’s ability to deal with fear while publicly demonstrating the creative process. Typewriter sites are places to practice being with fear—of the unknown, of connection, of vulnerability—while staying present. RPL was a place of fear training for me. It broadened my capacity to sit in uncertainty. To ask, “what does it mean to sit in deep discomfort? To sit in really difficult dialogue and conversation?” In that lecture, Perez also said, “Improvisation is a practice of surrender. In this negotiation of the unknown, new knowledge is developed. Improvisation is a catalyst for change.” Poetry sites are a form of improvisation, a way to practice meeting the moment, in all its uncertainty, while practicing creative flexibility. In this way, there is a commitment to new pathways of meaning-making. This rings true to my understanding of RPL’s work of moral imagination and just peacebuilding. **NCC:** Has your time at HDS as an MRPL student transformed you and your work? **RT:** I’ve learned, in ways I didn’t know I needed to learn, how essential poetry is as a tool to attend to the difficult questions of our world. Somewhere, in the back of my heart or mind, I think I still carried the belief that poetry—that my great love, my deepest work—was frivolous, extraneous, absurd. How could I have carried that belief for over twenty years without realizing where it lived in me? It wasn’t a belief I chose, but one that had been handed down like the various terrible systems that organize the Western world. Through RPL, I got to wonder, discuss, and ask: What pathways does poetry open up for leaders in many kinds of fields? Why do doctors yearn for poetry? Why do Harvard students, in the midst of their busy lives, wait in line for a poem? I got to see how poetry opened up classes and difficult conversations, how poetry could help create new language for the ground we now walk. I got to investigate what happened when poetry came into contact with all different kinds of people and thinkers, in an experimental cohort, in a way that is precise to this place, during a year of much conflict and grief. I found poetry to be a medium that helped us find each other, no matter the moment. I have been deeply changed by the MRPL program and the writers and thinkers I discovered have permanently changed my mind and heart, and therefore permanently expanded my poems. This is perhaps the simplest answer and perhaps the truest. The program has made me braver as a writer and as a person, more willing to take risks, more willing to sit in the heat of conflict. **NCC:** How would you describe the power of poetry now? **RT:** Poetry acts like a medicine and feels like nourishment. Poetry is indispensable. It is a language of imagination, which is world-building. To imagine, to act on imagination, to choose to create instead of mimicking ways of communicating takes courage. It is what professor of international peacebuilding John Paul Lederach called “moral imagination”—imagining not what is plausible, but what’s possible. To be in a space of poetry is to allow for a deep uncertainty and mystery and spaciousness through language. It allows us to hear beyond our personal lives. It's a language that reaches out towards another as well as deeper into ourselves. The typewriter sites bolstered my belief in “the heart’s core, the rhythms and pulse of what is required to build genuine constructive change.” Sometimes, only one person would show up for a two hour site. Sometimes, participants would forget to write back. Sometimes, if my life felt particularly difficult, I would have to drag myself to the site’s location. Even so, each time, I left with a sense that sitting and listening to the questions and pain and beauty within a stranger’s life was the most important thing I could ever do. See also:- [ Religious Literacy and the Professions ](/news/religious-literacy-and-professions) - [ MRPL ](/news/mrpl)