by Writing Workshops Staff
2 hours ago
“Pay attention.” In Irmi Willcockson’s poems, that’s not only the plea of a parent or a teacher but an invitation extended by a live oak, a paper wasp, a pond. Attentiveness is the spine of her first chapbook, Attention Comes First, now out from Bottlecap Press. Not long ago, though, Irmi describes her writing life as “sporadic and scattered.” Today she calls it “joyful and focused.”
Irmi is a place-based poet in Houston who arrived at poetry by an unusual route: a biology degree from UCLA and a PhD from Baylor College of Medicine. She’s a naturalist and nature journaler, an immigrant and a parent, “powered by ADD,” as she cheerfully puts it — reading and writing short poems attuned to the coastal prairies and marshes of the Gulf Coast. She was already a working poet, with pieces in journals like Equinox and Solace, when she went looking for a way to move a folder of loose poems toward something with a shape.
So she signed up for a six-week poetry chapbook workshop — the kind of focused container a scattered practice needs. She credits instructor Holly Lyn Walrath, a fellow Houston poet and editor, with the shift that mattered most. The breakthrough wasn’t a trick of craft; it was a question of focus — “really honing in on what the chapbook is about.” And what she valued was refreshingly concrete: “thoughtful and actionable instructor feedback.”
That instinct to keep moving hasn’t left her. She has kept studying poetry in the years since, and when the work gets hard she leans on a whole toolkit for staying in motion: revising from feedback, playing with sounds and prompts, even “writing a haiku or American sentence about my day.” The point, she says, is to keep the practice alive without always having to create something from scratch.
Attention Comes First gathers twenty pages that move, in Irmi’s arrangement, from the harm nature can inflict, to nature’s indifference toward us, to the harm humans do to the natural world — and finally toward hopeful glimpses of a different future. Rooted in Houston and the Gulf Coast yet reaching well past them, the poems pay attention to the grand and the overlooked alike. It reads like the work of someone who has been watching closely for a long time — which, given her naturalist’s eye, she has.
Her advice for anyone still on the fence about a class is characteristically unfussy:
“Working on your own usually produces incremental progress. Taking a class pushes you to the next level. You will grow as a writer in ways you can’t anticipate.”
For now, the thing keeping her up at night — in the best way — is a new sequence of “poetry focused around doors and doorways.” If Attention Comes First is any measure, it’s worth paying attention to whatever she opens next.
Every writer’s path is their own, but few of us get far entirely alone. If you have a folder of poems — or a whole book — waiting to find its shape, our community of writers and working instructors is here for the moments when a little structure helps. Explore the workshops and take the next small step toward your own success story.
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