feature image photo by MediaNews Group/Boulder Daily Camera via Getty Images / Contributor

“Isn’t Andrea Gibson the poet you had a poster of on your wall?” my mother asks today. She’s referring to a promotional poster from my college days, one I had pilfered from the Student Center bulletin board after the event had passed. Having gone to Catholic school up until college, this was the first time in my life I had access to a Gay-Straight Alliance. As cheesy as the jokes are about GSAs nowadays, for me back in 2015, it was a big deal to have one. Most of my high school friends identified as queer in one way or another (we were theatre kids after all), but the idea of a queer community was still far away. My college’s GSA, in addition to meetings, put on campus-wide events, including, in 2016, inviting Gibson to campus.

I had never lived on my own before. When I first met Andrea Gibson, I was living in the freshmen dorms of Bradley University, a small school in Peoria, Illinois. I hadn’t wanted to go to Bradley. I had wanted to go somewhere in NYC or LA to pursue a film degree, but was quickly convinced otherwise by my parents. I acquiesced, touring schools in Chicago, but it was Peoria I’d settled on, a closer drive to home and a “safer choice” than living somewhere I’d have to — gasp — take public transit.

Gibson came to my college, invited to perform by the school’s GSA, shortly after the release of their book Pansy, and months before that pivotal election. They held their poetry reading in the upstairs event space of the Student Center, in a large beige room where the carpet smelled damp and the chairs were uncomfortable. It was the first time I’d gone to a “real” poetry reading — one where the reader had actual books and a name I could Google. I had always known I wanted to be a writer, but I was still learning the landscape of contemporary poetry. I didn’t know where I might fit in it, as a lesbian, or just as the person I was.

Gibson gave me a gift that night. At 18, I wasn’t yet confident in my queerness or my poetry, though I’d been participating in both for a few years by that point. I had only just started understanding contemporary poetry, learning the publishing houses, the indie presses, the poets. I religiously watched Button Poetry’s YouTube channel, and once even submitted a very mediocre manuscript to their chapbook contest. Gibson was a frequent flyer on the channel. If you search “button poetry andrea gibson” on YouTube today, you’ll see several thumbnails where Gibson has their arms outstretched to the audience: palms up and open, at times in a manner that seems pleading, others like a prophet offering peace. At times, they are reading directly from one of their books, but more often, they are looking at the crowd, at someone, at what feels like you.

When I discovered Gibson’s work, I was an anxious teenager on the cusp of adulthood, in my first relationship, navigating what it meant to be queer, to be a writer, but also, to be anything at all. The stage they walked across was pathetic plywood, barely raised off the ground, a gesture of a stage more than anything. The lighting was low, save the fluorescent spotlight trained on their frame. The room was packed and, as they took the stage, their command of the crowd was palpable. When they spoke, it was soft but powerful, like a cresting wave. They introduced each poem with this gentle tone, like a handler of small animals, but when they recited their poems, it was a shaking-of-walls type of command. With every poem straight from memory, they could send their eyes ricocheting across the students, loud as a prophet and even more convincing.

They read their poem “The Nutritionist,” which contains the lines: “To every day you could not get out of bed, to the bullseye of your wrist, to anyone who has ever wanted to die: I have been told sometimes the most healing thing we can do is remind ourselves over and over and over, other people feel this too.” I remember the gut-punch of a subconscious familiarity with these words. I hadn’t known this was something I wanted, in a small way, until someone spoke it, and I hadn’t known I could survive it until they said that I could. If you look in the YouTube comments of any video containing that poem (or any of theirs), you’ll see I’m not the only one. Since that day, I voraciously read their work, and it led me to more queer writers, to more poets who taught me how to put my own feelings into a language I could share. They taught me to write not with ego but with heart — that the point of writing and sharing that writing was not simply to gain notoriety or fame (as poetry often doesn’t lead to either), but to make community with others. Today I still write with the intent of connection above all else: How can I, in the specificity of my experiences, channel something greater? Gibson taught me that art is a tool of love first and foremost, or at least, it can be, and it should be.

The loss of Andrea Gibson is not just one that rocks the poetry world, but the world at large. I never knew them personally, only met them briefly at this event as a coordinator, but they were kind, patient, and generous. A person that life-changing doesn’t happen that often. In a world populated by influencers and celebrities who are so far out of our reach, whose politics and personality often feel manufactured for a result, someone like Gibson is a reminder that sincerity is not a dead art form. Far from it — it is alive and breathing if we choose to give it life. And that life can extend so far after an individual death, even if in the moment it doesn’t feel that way.

In the last post of their Substack, an essay titled “My Friends Have So Many Issues,” they talk about how their wife Meg Falley encouraged their friends to bring Gibson “their problems,” as a means of helping Gibson through their medical treatments. “When I was in my mid-twenties, I wrote: The hardest thing about having nothing is having nothing to give. It was still true.” In this essay, they explain the care they both give and receive to those in their community is what fuels them — that to be someone for someone else is the greatest gift. Gibson has been that for me, and for countless other people, who knew them or knew their work. I would say we will never deserve them, but I believe they would disagree with that statement — that they might say, we all deserve each other, because each other is all we have. I am thankful that that’s true, and that each other includes them and their legacy. Thank you, Andrea Gibson.

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