The Geography Within Us: A Poetry Gathering on Place, Memory, and Belonging

Perhaps home is not simply the place we come from.
Perhaps it is a language in which our name sounds different.
A kitchen where someone knows what we like to eat.
A city whose streets our feet remember.
A landscape whose seasons still live somewhere in the body.
A person beside whom we do not have to explain ourselves.
A song that returns us somewhere.
Or a place where we arrived as strangers and, slowly, unexpectedly, learned to belong.

We carry many geographies within us.

The place where we were born.
The neighborhood where we grew up.
The cities we chose and the ones circumstance chose for us.
The landscapes we left behind.
The languages through which we learned to understand the world.
The people who made unfamiliar places feel like home.

Over time, these places become more than locations on a map.

They enter our memories, our gestures, our food, our music, our language, even the ways we understand distance and belonging.

Sometimes we leave a place and discover that it never entirely leaves us.

And sometimes a place we never imagined belonging to becomes part of who we are.

The Geography Within Us is a gathering devoted to place, memory, and belonging, and to the many landscapes, languages, people, and journeys that quietly become part of our inner lives.

Together, we will explore not simply where we come from, but the more mysterious question of what places have become part of who we are.

Across traditions, poets have carried entire worlds within their poems. Mahmoud Darwish carried Palestine through memory and language. Agha Shahid Ali recreated Kashmir across distance and longing. Derek Walcott explored the ways landscape, history, and identity become inseparable. Naomi Shihab Nye finds belonging in family, language, ordinary encounters, and the crossings between cultures. Joy Harjo writes of land, ancestry, memory, and our deep relationship with place.

Their poems remind us that geography is not only something outside us.

It can also become something we carry within.

This gathering asks:

What places have become part of who we are?
How do landscapes, languages, cities, and communities continue to live within us long after we leave them?
And how do the places we discover unexpectedly change our understanding of where we belong?

We will read poems about childhood streets and adopted cities, familiar landscapes and distant homelands, kitchens and train stations, migration and arrival, language and memory, journeys and returns, and the unexpected places where belonging finds us.

You are welcome to bring:

A poem about a place that has shaped you.
A piece connected to a city, landscape, language, neighborhood, or community you carry within you.
A poem about leaving somewhere, arriving somewhere, or unexpectedly finding a sense of belonging.
A song, photograph, recipe, memory, or passage that transports you to another place.
An original work about a geography, real or imagined, that has become part of who you are.

We invite poetry from all languages and traditions.

Together, we will read, translate, reflect, and listen, allowing the different geographies we carry to meet in the same room.

As always with Kaavya Connections, the gathering may wander beyond the theme. We follow where the poems, memories, and conversations lead.
Join us for an afternoon exploring the places that made us, the places that changed us, the places that surprised us, and the places that continue to live quietly within us.

Bring a friend, a poem, a place, or simply come to listen.

Above all, bring the worlds you carry within you.

Please find more about us here —

Kaavya Connections Website:
https://www.kaavyaconnections.com/

Please also join the mailing list for upcoming gatherings and events:
https://www.kaavyaconnections.com/mailing-list/

If you would like to volunteer to help organize future gatherings and performances, please email:
[email protected]

Kaavya Connections