Best Bilingual Poetry Workshop Series to Help Get Over Writer’s Block: Brighton Park Poets

Brighton Park Poets is a free, bilingual (Spanish-English) poetry workshop series. The group meets every first Sunday of the month, often at the Brighton Park Library. Paige Savarese, twenty-six, began Brighton Park Poets in her apartment last July. 

Savarese grew up in Edison Park and moved around the Northwest and West Sides before settling down in Brighton Park three years ago. Savarese’s own experiences with poetry groups motivated her to start her own.

“I don’t want to sound like a hater, but there were a lot of hater tendencies that motivated me to do it,” she said. 

Savarese felt there was often an in-group at a lot of the poetry events she attended. In high school, she was part of a poetry club and attended Tuesday WordPlay nights with Young Chicago Authors. 

“There was the cool kids who were there, and then there was the kids who were just kind of geeky and just really like poetry, but didn’t have any friends. I was one of those kids,” she said. 

Savarese wanted to create a consistent space for anyone on the Southwest Side interested in writing poetry to come together and feel included.

“There was just a lack of [a] young adult community [in Brighton Park],” Savarese said. “I kind of wanted an excuse to connect with people in the area as well.”

She began by posting on Lex, Chicago Queer Exchange, other queer-centered groups, and neighborhood Facebook groups, as well as posting physical flyers in different places.

After a rocky start hosting the series at her apartment, Savarese was able to secure a space at the Brighton Park Library. She has also hosted the series at Party Per Purpose, a local non-profit organization offering programming for youth. 

Savarese has managed to attract a diverse crowd of writers. At least 100 people have attended a workshop since she first started, and ninety percent are from the Southwest side. She says the oldest and youngest people to attend the workshop were seventy-five and nineteen.

Savarese wants to maintain classes accessible to Spanish speakers, recognizing that there aren’t many bilingual poetry spaces available. When college level poetry classes use Spanish poems, they use translated versions, which don’t always hold the same feeling as the original.

Being mindful of the introverted, shy type, Savarese has incorporated different methods of participation into her workshop to ensure everyone feels included. She has writers fill out a slip to share what they’d like to gain out of the workshop or their favorite line they wrote. Writers can also jot down something they like during the sharing portion of the workshop to give to that person afterwards. 

“I want people to feel like they can approach it, come be a part of it, and make a friend,” she said. 

The two-and-a-half-hour workshop is mainly dedicated to free writing in response to a selected piece of writing and other work of art. At the end of the workshop, writers are encouraged (but not pressured) to share their work. Whether it’s the welcoming environment created by the facilitator or the stickers that Savarese rewards participants, almost everyone in attendance is eager to share. 

“There’s a lot of beautiful poetry, but if [there’s] somebody who doesn’t have the most self-confidence and they’re not the most performative personality, then I don’t think their work gets the time of day,” said Savarese in regards to open mic-centered poetry spaces. “So the people who write for the page instead of the stage, they don’t usually get their stuff seen as much,” she added. But the Brighton Park Poets had their time on the mic on September 14, when participants read some of the poems they’ve written at the workshops compiled in their one-year-anniversary chapbook. The chapbook is titled La cosa misma, “The Thing Itself”, after a line in intelijencia dame by Juan Ramón Jiménez. Each writer got up there and read their poem as comfortably and confidently as they did at the workshop.