Poet Shivani Gupta Rhymes Anger and Hope in Verse

The lights in the Damen South Multi-Purpose Room were dim, but the energy was electric. Students clutched notebooks and sipped boba as the room was transformed into a slam poetry sanctuary Feb. 27. 

The event, titled “Peace in Your Poetry,” was part of Social Justice Week, organized by Ramblers Analyzing Ideas in collaboration with the Center for Diversity and Inclusion.

The event’s keyboard speaker was Shivani Gupta, an Indian-American poet and Board Member and Development Committee Chair at The Chicago Poetry Center. Gupta said she wants students to use poetry as a quill against injustice, but she also stressed the importance of community within poetic spaces. 

As a writer, Gupta has mastered the delicate rhyme scheme of balancing daily life with performance writing. Many of her poems flow in a stream of consciousness, yet Gupta insists there’s always a stanza of structure within the chaos, shaped by her surroundings.

“While I do have word vomit and cathartic poems that come out of me angrily, there is still some discipline of writing and sharing that comes from being in community spaces,” Gupta said. 

Gupta said she wanted the evening to channel “angry hope.” She said anger, often dismissed as undesirable, carries an honesty that makes people pay attention. In a world where creative work is frequently softened to appeal better to a wider audience, she said anger is a necessary driving force.

“We have to acknowledge angry hope comes from within,” Gupta said. “Writing and art has a way of forcing itself to become consumable. Anger is an emotion that can be directional and channeled to be useful. We think of anger through the lens of the conventional masculine type. The ‘angry young man’— it’s very aggressive.”

Gupta said she recognizes students need spaces where they can not only draft their verses, but also speak their truth aloud. She said having a safe space as an outlet keeps hope circulating.

“It is easy to lose hope,” Gupta said. “It’s easier to be indifferent. It’s easier to be suppressed. To be angry takes effort and takes energy. Spaces like this allow anger to live and breathe and coexist with hope and with love — and it’s wonderful.”

That coexistence of anger, hope, identity and expression has been central to Gupta’s poetic journey. During spoken poetry performances, a poet is expected to act on stage, and Gupta likes to carry her identity with her in a different light. Gupta said she carries a persona with her that reflects her identity but sometimes feels disjointed.

As an Indian woman, Gupta said she grapples with the complexities of her identity, often feeling the term “person of color” doesn’t fully capture the nuances of her lived experience.

“When someone refers to me with the term ‘person of color,’ it feels interesting because it’s a label that doesn’t sit as easily as Indian or even brown,” Gupta said. “Indian feels the closest to what I feel like because it’s real. I grew up there. I have been Indian for a long time. A ‘person of color’ feels like something I am by comparison to someone else — that feels like a weird version of identity.”

At a predominantly white institution like Loyola, marginalized students may lack space to express their anger. When attending predominantly white institutions and higher education, minority feel discrimination and lack of representation because of the cultural barrier and implicit bias, according to the American Council of Education. Gupta said community is essential to preserving culture and creating spaces where anger can be shared and understood.  

One of Gupta’s poems, “What is this immigrant instinct to cook my day away?” sees cooking as a way to understand systemic injustices. Through food imagery, she explores the tension between assimilation and cultural preservation, using ingredients like turmeric and mustard seeds as metaphors for resilience and identity. 

The poem points out how the act of cooking, a simple means of survival, is remade into a form of defiance. Gupta said the poem contemplates her connection to her Indian heritage, but its themes extend beyond cultural boundaries, making it relatable readers of varying backgrounds.

“What are we if not fragments of each other bonded by a body?” Gupta read. 

Gupta discovered slam poetry coincidentally in college, joining a small group of students who would go to bars and occasionally read stream-of-consciousness poems at open mics. From there, her relationship with poetry became deeply communicable and reliant on peer feedback. She said slam poetry is an inherently competitive art form but can be welcoming when performed as a group.

Through the relationships she built in the slam scene, Gupta said she came to see writing as anything but a solitary act. There isn’t a pressure to create something immaculate just to impress a crowd — what matters more is being seen.

“Performance poetry is a way to feel validated,” Gupta said. “Poetry never felt like something I could do by myself because I do feel even the most intimate things you write, you hope that someone will find them. You hope someone sees the weirdness in you and is okay with it, and even better, resonates with it.”

Gupta ended the night with a poem titled, “I Want to Give my Friends Many Things.” She said the poem acts as a love letter for everyone who’s suffering because of government restrictions.

That defiance is what Gupta hopes students will hold onto. Even as censorship tightens its grip by banning books, Gupta said these spaces, where literature is spoken into existence, are designed so students can shed a light and speak poetry into resistance.  

“Whenever you have physical and psychological safety, 100% take the space and show up to things like this,” Gupta said. “Love is being made up in spaces like these. A lot of poems, they come from the heart. You’re just really sharing your heart — that scared, angry, hopeful part of your soul out loud to the world.”