Episode 33: Poetry in Motion: Utah’s Poet Laureate Shares Her Passion

Superintendent:
Welcome to the Supercast. I'm your host, Superintendent Anthony Godfrey. Throughout the month of April, people across the country have been celebrating National Poetry Month. On this episode of the Supercast, we are celebrating as well. I had the unique opportunity to speak with Utah's Poet Laureate, Paisley Rekdal. She shared some great ideas on how parents can support the budding writer and poet in their own children. First, let's find out how Paisley Rekdal became Utah's Poet Laureate and where we can go to enjoy some poetry by Utah poets. Paisley, thank you very much for joining us.

Paisley:
Thank you for having me.

Superintendent:
I just want to dive right in. I'm a former English teacher. I'm really quite excited to be talking with Utah's Poet Laureate. I don't get nearly the time that I would like to spend reading poetry. I used to read a lot and had my kids write a lot when I was teaching. Can you just start by telling us what first made you interested in poetry?

Paisley:
Well, it was funny because I became interested in poetry in high school and I didn't think I was going to be interested in poetry at all. I was more interested in visual arts. I would draw things and make maps and collages. And then I was taking an English class where I'd always done really, really well. And for the first time I was getting a B, and the teacher said she would give anyone extra credit if they submitted a poem to this citywide poetry contest. And if you win a prize, you will get, you know, an extra A in the grade book. And so I thought, well, why not? So I wrote a poem and it won and I actually could not believe that it won. I thought no way it could because it was my very first poem.

And I think it's probably a terrible way to get started because it makes you think that poetry is nothing but awards and claim. So the rest of my life definitely taught me that it's not that easy, but it got me interested. I thought, well, why did I win? What did I do? That was so good. And my mother was a former English major. And so she had all these books around the house. She just let me read whatever I wanted to, which sometimes worked out really well, and sometimes didn't.

Superintendent:
That's fantastic. And what I love about that story is that there was availability. There were books of poetry readily available. And so you just picked them up. I remember reading books of my parents the same way, the cover intrigued me or the title. And I just started reading and I think that's an important point.

Paisley:
Books in the house, for sure. Yeah.

Superintendent:
Right, right. I'm going to tell my wife that because she really would like me to get rid of more of my books.

Paisley:
You never know what's going to happen. Kids get so sucked into all of these books and it's true. Sometimes it's just the cover.

Superintendent:
You're a professor at the University of Utah. You're a writer, obviously Poet Laureate. How do you find balance between those two and what different pleasures do you get from each of those?

Paisley:
Well, I love teaching actually. I really do. I don't love grading. I think everyone can agree that grading is not as fun as the teaching and working in the classroom with the students. But I get a lot of inspiration actually from some of the things that I teach to my students. Some of the conversations that I have with my students, I get insights into the books that we're reading, things that I never would have thought of. I've got some really good students. And then with the writing, I used to be a better, I'll have to admit. I used to be a lot better about being able to write a little bit every day, but actually with being a Poet Laureate now, a lot of my time has gone into different public projects. So it's been tougher to get a creative time just for myself. But that being said, I must say some of the projects that have been offered to me were so interesting that I enjoyed doing the research and I enjoy doing the writing. I wrote a book length multimedia poem about the transcontinental railroad which, trust me, I never, ever, ever thought about writing about unless I had been commissioned to write about the transcontinental.

Superintendent:
Well, that's the thing about a creative project. It can open you up to things that you weren't expecting would touch you. And I'm sure that happened with that project. Speaking of your writing, did your mom really meet Bruce Lee?

Paisley:
She worked in the same Chinese restaurant with Bruce Lee. Yes. And I have a little story about that in my book that my mother met Bruce Lee. I thought it was so funny. My mother is Chinese American and growing up, I thought that she probably was not a very interesting person because she was my mother. That's the only thing I knew about her. But then one night I was watching Enter the Dragon. I was a teenager and my mom stood there and she watched the movie and she said, I used to work with him. And I said, you worked with Bruce Lee? Yeah. And the best part was of the whole story, she said none of us liked him. Show off. And I just couldn't believe it. That's the big takeaway. It was right around the time that everyone was trying to be like Bruce Lee. Everyone had nunchucks and were smacking each other on the foreheads with them. And yeah, it was great.

Superintendent:
Well, as a pop culture fan, it's just amazing that you would be sitting there watching virtually on TV and your mom says, Oh, I used to work with him. Crazy. That is crazy. Did you think that maybe your mom knew martial arts more than she led on when she said she worked with Bruce Lee?

Paisley:
Yeah. No that never did. My mom, she fights with words. She doesn't fight with fists.

Superintendent:
Words can be much more powerful, that's for sure. So tell us, what has your path been from a prize winning author as a teenager to Utah's Poet Laureate?

Paisley:
It was all downhill. I kept writing, like I said, in high school and in college I took some classes as well. I thought I was going to be a journalist. I applied to journalism schools and then I applied also to go to a PhD in medieval studies. I started thinking, I'll just be a professor of medieval studies. I went to graduate school and all I did was write in the mornings. I would get up at four or five in the morning so I could write for a couple of hours before I could take the bus into school. And that's when I realized that I was probably not going to be a great scholar, but I could be a good poet. Then I went to the University of Michigan and just kept writing. Then I had books and then I got into academia. It was sort of a roundabout career trip trajectory. But I think almost all the writers I know ended up doing many different things and sort of fall into finally a job that allows us to both write and create and be supportive in the community.

Superintendent:
Tell us, what are some of your duties as Utah Poet Laureate and what are some of the unique approaches you're bringing to the position? I know you're doing some things that maybe haven't been done yet.

Paisley:
Well, the duties that I have are to mostly go and visit K-12 schools, as many as I can around the State. And so I've been doing that and that's just been a real pleasure. Let's just come in, bring creative writing exercises and work with the students, talk about poems, things like that. And then basically just show them that if they were interested in becoming writers, that's possible, but each Poet Laureate also has his or her own project. And so the one I proposed was something called Mapping Literary Utah, and it's a website. It's a web archive of Utah writers, past and present, and it just went live. We're really, really pleased with this. This site is http://mappingliteraryutah.org and on it, there's about 130 writers, storytellers, slam poets, cowboy poets, Utah, State poetry, society people.

We have essays on young adult literature and Orson Scott Card and the Literary Legacy of Topaz. We have basically all the different types of prose writers. You can imagine, we've got young adult fiction writers, we've got science fiction writers. We've got playwrights. I mean, it's supposed be a compendium of Utah writers and some are deceased, but most are living, and we're hoping to continue to expand that archive. So we're always asking for more people to come forward and say, "Do you know this person, or let me put you in contact with someone else?" And almost every day we get more people saying they would like to be part of this website. So that's really great. We not only have biographies of each author, we have photographs and samples of their work and also audio and visual stuff too. We have Native American storytellers and you can listen to them performing. So we're hoping that people can see writers performing their work here now. You can get online and you can get a sense of what Utah's culture is like right now, at least for the writers.

Superintendent:
I stopped by the website and I absolutely love it. It's very appealing visually and the variety of authors and the variety of voices that you have represented there is just incredible. I thought everyone talks about eating local. I think we need to read local. That is a really good resource to just say, there are people around me who are authors. And I think that would inspire kids to feel like they can become authors themselves, when people right here in Utah are so successful.

Paisley:
That is exactly the point of the website. Obviously ,it has historical value so that people know who was here and who was producing what at what times. But the thing that's most important to me is that students can get a sense of the possibility of becoming a writer. When I was a kid in Seattle many years ago, Seattle was not cool. I'm bi-racial and not a lot of people wanted to be at that time. When I knew I wanted to start writing, my dad got me Poetry Anthologies, and I looked at the biographies of the writers in the back and no one was from Seattle. And I thought, oh, I didn't go to Harvard. I didn't grow up in New York. I'm doomed. I'm never going to become a writer. But I kept doing it. It would have been really great and useful to see an anthology or myself in some ways reflected. And that's what I'm really hoping that people get from this site. They can go online and they can see people coming from their own communities that have made a life in literature, and that's so important.

Superintendent:
I think it does a great job of conveying exactly that. And I hope lots of students, teachers and parents will visit it. Can you tell us the web address?

Paisley:
Yes. It's just http://mappingliteraryutah.org . It's all lowercase, altogether. If you just go to my own personal website, I linked to it as well. You can find it there and every week I tweet or Facebook out a Utah Writer of the Week to go through our archive and sort of ask, do you know about this writer? Take a look at this person's work, you know, and hopefully people will start to call it that.

Superintendent:
And Paisley's last name is spelled R-E-K-D-A-L. Is that correct?

Paisley:
That is correct. And Paisley, just like the print P-A-I-S-L-E-Y.

Superintende:
So it's just http://paisleyrekdal.com and you can find a lot of great resources there too. I love that website and I'm going to spend a lot more time there and we'll be promoting it in our district, sending that out to teachers. I think it's remarkable. It's a really great site for anyone who has an interest in anything literary.

We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back more from Utah's Poet Laureate, Paisley Rekdal, including tips for parents and aspiring writers.

Break:
I'm Steven Hall, Director of Jordan Education Foundation. In today's challenging and uncertain times, it is more important than ever before to support one another. Here at the Jordan Education Foundation, we invite you to join us in making sure children are not going hungry. Your $10 donation to the foundation will help us feed one student for a weekend. When food and meals may be very scarce for some, with food and hygiene supplies in the Principal's Pantries at Jordan School District being depleted and in higher demand than ever before. Every financial contribution made will help us to keep the pantries filled for students who would otherwise go without the Jordan Education Foundation exists due to the generosity of people who care about kids. If you would like to donate to help children from going hungry, please visit jordaneducationfoundation@jordandistrict.org, or contact the foundation at (801) 567-8125. Thank you. Together, we can make a difference.

Superintendent:
We're back with Utah's Poet Laureate, Paisley Rekdal. You told us that one of your main duties is to visit K-12 schools. When you visit, how do you engage students in poetry?

Paisley:
Well, I think we'll be speaking to issues that they're interested in, in language that they themselves recognize. So even though I love John Dunn and Shakespeare, I don't tend to bring in poets like that. I tend to bring in poets that are still alive, very contemporary, writing about anything from you know a tree outside the window to a TV program or music or something like that. I want the poems to be accessible in ways that students can recognize their world in that poem too. And I also build creative writing exercises around the poem. I want students to not just read poems and talk about poems, but try writing them themselves. One of the great marks of fluency in the language is you can create a minute. So getting students to play with language is actually not frivolous. It's a foundational way to get them to be fluent in their own language.

Superintendent:
It makes a lot of sense, that writing can reinforce reading. And even if you don't think that the product you create is going to be something that others want to read long into the future, or that will win you a local prize or extra credit in your class, at the very least, you're processing. And you're working with words and that sparks the brain and it cements some language skills that maybe we can't cement in other ways.

Paige:
One of the things that I was trying to do also with the students this year, and I'm disappointed again, it didn't work out. I was going to schools this spring and asking them to write what we call pistol area poems, little letters and the letters would be written to a stranger because what I was planning to do as an April Fool's prank, where the parking enforcement officers would deliver parking tickets, but they would be with student poems. And everybody was on board. The mayor was on board, the parking enforcement people were on board, the police, everyone was on board, except the lawyers. It turns out it's illegal to put any kind of flyer on a car. So unfortunately, that was one of the exercises I had with the students. And so then I tried to take those poems and turn them into menu inserts. And obviously that didn't work either. It's a lot of my best ideas this year have kind of gone by the wayside, but I usually try to get them to at least create something that will be used in another kind of way. Maybe a public performance something you can share with other people.

Superintendent:
It's making the poetry engaging and active and interactive by putting it in a menu or a parking ticket.

Paisley:
Yeah, I think when you have an idea that you're supposed to come across, poetry in certain particular ways in classrooms and things like that, and obviously, lots of cities have poetry on buses and things like that. I think we even do. But I like the idea of just getting people to recognize that poems are really all around us all the time. We don't have to treat them as these sacred or special or difficult or intimidating things. Some poems are intimidating, but other poems are just easy and delightful. You can have a lot of different types of relationships with poetry. You don't just have to sit there and feel like you're stupid if you don't get it. I think that's the thing that I really want students to walk away with. If a poem it's written in a length in their language, they can look up these words up online or in a dictionary and they can access it. It's not a riddle. It's not there to make them feel stupid. I think a lot of people feel like if they don't get it immediately, it's a sign of that they're not up to the task, but that's really not the case. Poems ask us to spend time and slow down and read and savor things. It's a different kind of reading and I'm hoping students feel comfortable with that.

Superintendent:
I like the way you described that. It is something to be savored, and we're not used to that. We're used to consuming things very quickly, dropping in, getting the point and moving on. And the pleasure of poetry is being able to sit with it and stay with it and really absorb it and understand it. But it does take time, like you said. If there is a parent out there whose child really enjoys poetry and they know that they like to write, are there suggestions that you have for a child in that circumstance? And then I want to ask if it's intimidating to people? What would be a point of entry for folks who are intimidated? Parents may be looking, especially now, for a way to encourage their student who is already interested in poetry or to have a child who may not be interested to get started.

Paisley:
With kids, you're very lucky, depending on how young the child is too, there's a surprising amount of children's literature and young adult literature that's written in verse. Jacqueline Woodson is a very famous young adult fiction writer and she writes a lot in verse and it's an easy way to get students hooked. You know, they're reading a narrative, but they're reading it in rhyme and suddenly it's something that seems really natural to them. The New York times just did a whole big, special on children's poetry. I think you can look that up online. I'll try and find that link and maybe send it to you. Maybe you can send that out to your parents. But there are 8 or 10 books that just came out. So if you just go to any bookstore, you'll be able to find very quickly children's books and young adult books that are actually written in rhyme and meter with poetry.

But you know, the other thing that I think might be a good start for parents, with slightly older kids, maybe high school age, there's a few resources, some are free at online poets.org and poetry foundation have a poem a day that gets sent out over email. And you can subscribe to poetry daily as well. These are threes online subscription services, totally free. You get a poem in your inbox every day. And a lot of them are written by poets that are alive right now. And so you can go look up their work and get more of it. If you're interested, a nice anthology to get might be The Best American Poetry series for more advanced high school students where you get 75 poems written by different American poets. Some of them are very funny. Some of them are hard, but some of them are also light and interesting and tell stories. It gives you a real sense of the breadth of American poetry. If you don't like a poem, it's okay. There's so many more.

Superintendent:
I actually started buying The Best American Poetry series in college because my professor said, if all you're reading are the dusty old leather tones of the past, and you think you're going to be a writer, it's not going to work because you have to read what's being published right now if you're going to have any chance of doing that. And that concept intrigued me. I hate to admit, it seemed odd that people were still writing poetry a little bit, because you think about it as something that was so popular in the past. I started reading that and I have every volume of that since 1987.

Paisley:
That's amazing because I'm The Best American Series guest editor for this year. My volume is coming out in September. I'm not kidding. I spent the last year reading for Best American Poetry. So I'm their guest editor.

Superintendent:
That is fabulous. I may get my first autographed Poetry Collection if I can get to the festival in the spring.

Paisley:
Absolutely. I'm more than happy to sign that. I read so much poetry for an entire year, but I agree with you. When I was just starting out, even in college, I thought that I was maybe one of five poets left because no one was out there. I didn't know anything like that. So something like Best American Poetry was really helpful for me because it taught me that there were people who were alive who are writing it still. That's the value of it.

Superintendent:
Well, and I think that's an important message for kids who are interested in poetry. There are a lot of great ways to publish poetry these days. A lot of people wanting to write that it feels like a bit of a resurgence to me, just because there has been some best-selling poetry out there lately. And and that's exciting. Is there anything else that you would suggest for parents or for students who want to get started writing? Are there any activities that you can think of or ideas for maybe habits that an aspiring writer might want to consider trying? I know that some authors I've spoken with will set aside time and a certain time of the day, during that time or we'll warm up. I know John Updike used to write reviews before he would write his own prose and poetry. Are there any habits that you would suggest students try or any activities?

Paisley:
So there's a couple. The first is, poetry to me usually starts out as a kind of game. I give myself an exercise. There's lots of books of poetry exercises, one by Chase Twitchell and Robin Vain called  The Poet's Handbook is really good, but there's another one that's even better, potentially. It's called The Little Book of Poetic Forms. It's by Louis Turco T-U-R-C-O. It is a list of every single kind of poetic form in every language across time. What I would do when I was blocked or just wanted an exercise, I would just randomly flip through the book, point to a poetic form and say all right, I'm going to write something, but in this poetic form. What I mean is that like making poetry a kind of game when you're trying to think about rhymes.

You're trying to think about numbers of syllables. And you're trying to think about numbers of stanzas. Oftentimes we are most creative and we have the most constraints and sometimes playing with those constraints will push you to do something you wouldn't normally do. So sometimes telling students to go out and write a great poem shuts them down. But if you tell a student to go write a poem where every line, first word begins to the different letter of the alphabet going from A to Z, they usually do that one because the constraint helps them. So that's one thing I would suggest. The second thing is sort of fun. Poetic exercises that you can get off of. I think it's Poets and Writers Magazine. They offer some free poetry and fiction writing exercises each week. So you can just go to the online and look at those. Keep lists of images, take a notebook with you everywhere and just write down strange things that you see over here, and then use them as a sort of starting point for speculation. What is it about this image that interests you? What is it about the sound or that snippet of conversation that really attracted you?

Superintendent:
Those are great suggestions and I love the concept that constraints actually help creativity and that when you're trying to write a poem within a particular form, it can spark something. I had The Princeton Book of Poetry and Poetics, and I would find these obscure kind of strange rhyme schemes from medieval times or when there was this a complicated form of a poem that was written during a certain period of time. And I did that. I tried to write that way and it makes you appreciate the poetry that is written in that form at a deeper level when you try it yourself too.

Paige:
Yes, it does. And it usually means that you end up abandoning the exercise. Something else comes forward. You're like, wow, I didn't really like that form, but I did like these images. And I do believe that constraint is ultimately our friend. I mean, how many of us have written that paper because it's due in four hours or something, right? It's that sense of the deadline. When you're thinking about the constraints, you're often freed up to imagine more fluidly, creatively, because you're just trying to make something work that you know logic would normally defy.

Superintendent:
You know, given the times we're living in, they're very unique. And this is something, it's a historical time that kids and families and people in the future will look back on. Is there maybe a starting point for kids to write a poem, maybe that relates to the times they're living in right now and the things we are going through?

Paige:
First thing I would suggest is never tell a kid what they're doing is deep or important. I wouldn't tell an adult that either because it shuts us down. When you think this, we have to write about the times that we're living in, it's too much to process. We're adults and I don't know about you, but I'm struggling to process this. I don't think I have a language for this. So what I usually do with students and I taught around 911 as well, one of the things that I did was ask them to keep what I would call an image journal. There's a wonderful book called The Pillow Book by Shawnigan. And she was a Japanese cortisone in 1000 AD in Japan. And she had this book where she just recorded her impressions.

She kept lists of things like things that make your heart race, things that make you grow cold with disgust, deceitful things, lovely things. And she would just keep lists of these images. And they were really surprising things, like lovely things as a black cat with a very white belly, wonderful things like the smell of perfume on old silk, things like that where you're like, wow. So what I would ask students to do or a child to do is to say, can you just come up with a list of things that give you delight, or maybe make you afraid and just try to focus in on an image, something that gives us a concrete sense of taste, smells, sight, touch. Get them to interact with their memories in the world that way. And it's small, but oftentimes I think that it will give you a portrait of how they see the world.

I myself have been keeping lists because, for instance, now that it's so quiet, I'm able to hear birdsong that I've never heard before ever. I didn't even realize there were birds around me, I guess. So I'm writing down the sounds of things that I'm hearing. And in that I am giving a depiction of this world. I think that I would recommend trying the second thing. I would say, really quickly, this might be harder to convince your kids to do because they might not ever have written a letter before, but the epistolary form of poetry, which is basically what feels like a very casual form of poetry, you basically write a letter to somebody and you list what it is. You tell them what you've been doing and what you've been thinking. Having them write a letter to someone that they miss, someone that they're not being able to see right at this moment, that might be a really good exercise for them, right? It gives them something concrete and someone concrete to imagine, and to write.

Anthony Godfrey:
How early should we try to engage students in poetry?

Paisley:
I think as early as you can. One of the things that I notice when I go to schools is the younger, the students, the more eager they are to participate, to speak, to play, and somewhere around middle school, they become really self-conscious of that. And then in high school, it really starts to divide between the students that are going to be interested and the students that feel like this is just another joyless exercise. I thin, I don't know what is happening, but I suspect a lot of it has to do with the ways that students or children have a natural sense of playfulness. They love Sonic rhyme and games, and they love wordplay. And when we start teaching them that poetry is a riddle, they feel that they're stupid. If they get it wrong, I think it kills some of that joy. Some part of poetry s beyond just the analytical

Superintendent:
We all start naturally loving that and it kind of fades. And if we take advantage of that, you probably can't do it too early. When my youngest was little, he sat on his leg for awhile and it fell asleep and he said, dad, my leg is spicy. I didn't know what he meant at first, but that was a poetic image for me. I've never forgotten that one.

Paisley Rekdal, Utah's Poet Laureate, it's such a pleasure having you on the Supercast. And honestly, I'm going to look, I'm going to have to listen back and write down every book and author you mentioned, because it all sounds really exciting and it's a perfect time to dive in and kind of reignite a passion for reading and writing. I would love to hear you read either one of your poems or a poem that's a favorite for you.

Paisley:
Well, I will read a poem that I do find inspiring if not necessarily inspirational, because I think it is important to find comfort in this moment and to take some sense that there's more more joy to be had. This is not by me. I'm not a terribly hopeful poet, unfortunately, but this is one of my favorite poems. And I've read it before for other people too. It's by the Poet. Jack Gilbert, and it's from his book, Refusing Heaven.

And it's a poem called A Brief for the Defense.
Sorrow everywhere, slaughter everywhere.
If babies are not starving someplace, they are starving someplace else with flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise, the mornings before summer dawn would not be made so fine.
The Bengal tiger would not be fashioned so miraculously well.
The poor women at the fountain, they're laughing together between the suffering.
They have known and the awfulness in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody in the village is very sick.
There is laughter every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta and the women laugh and the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction, we lessened the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but not delight, not enjoyment.
We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world to make in justice.
The only measure of our attention is to praise the devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down, we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the proud again, of a small ship anchored late at night in the tiny port, looking over the sleeping island.
The waterfront is three shuttered cafes and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars and the silence as a rowboat comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth all the years of sorrow that are to come.

Superintendent
That's beautiful, beautiful, thank you.

Paisley:
Thank you so much.

Superintendent:
It's such a pleasure talking with you and I really look forward to meeting you in person and I promise you, I will have a copy of the latest Best American Poetry volume for you to sign.

Paisley:
Oh, that's great. That's really exciting for me to know that somebody with all of those collections will be there with it. So thank you again.

Superintendent:
Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure having Utah's Poet Laureate, Paisley Rekdal here on the Supercast. Remember to visit https://mappingliteraryutah.org/ to see the wonderful website that she has created to highlight homegrown authors and poets. Thank you again for joining us. And remember, education is the most important thing you will do today. We'll see you out there.