Nikki Giovanni is a world-renowned poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator. One of the most widely read contemporary American poets and one of Oprah’s 25 “Living Legends,” she prides herself on being “a Black American, a daughter, a mother, a professor of English.” Giovanni is a University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.  I recently spoke with her about the breadth of her work and the stories she represents in her poems, essays, teachings, and spoken word recordings.

JG: You were a strong, outspoken, and prominent voice for equality and civil rights in the 1960s and 70s, and I know you remain so. In reading your most recent book of love poems (Bicycles, 2009), we see a gentler and more relaxed side to you. I particularly like the reflective poem “In Simpler Times” and the final, powerful poem “We Are Virginia Tech: 16 April 2007.” How did this book come together for you?

NG: I decided to write love poems.  There were a lot of sad things going on at that time.  “Blackburg Under Siege: 21 August 2006” is the first poem in the book and that was about the murder of two police officers here, which was a difficult time. Personally, I was dealing with the loss of my sister and mom,  who had died. I was sad and needed to make adjustments. Then April 16 happened. I had two wheels spinning, personal and public grief, and I realized that love is what gets you over all of this and love poems cheer you up.

JG: Your spoken-word CDs “Truth is On Its Way” and “Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection” have been very successful. Can you describe how music and poetry overlap in your work?

NG: My mother used to sing to me and she had a beautiful voice. Now I enjoy music and am seldom without it.  I am always making connections between poetry and music.  We had spoken word before we had music, really.  Poetry was lyrical and people would play instruments and tell the story of their people.

JG: You write a lot about the value of oral tradition in your essays. Can you comment on how the value of oral traditions nourishes and feeds your creative writing and poetry?

NG: Oral traditions nurture everyone. People have to hear things internally, there has to be rhythm. Writing from authors like Shakespeare and Milton benefit from being read aloud; “Ulysses” is better read aloud. Everything has to come back into that human voice.

JG: I once had a poetry teacher that said that a poem was not done until it was read aloud. Do you agree with that?

NG: Absolutely. Poets will read a poem differently than the reader. When you hear people read your poetry they generally emphasize words in different ways than you do. It is important to read your poems aloud in order to really understand them.

JG: You are a wonderful storyteller.  Your autobiography “Gemini” was a finalist for the National Book Award and your children’s books, such as Rosa, re-tell important histories and impart strong values and lessons.  How do you decide which stories you want to tell?

NG:I knew Rosa Parks and was asked by my publisher to write a children’s book about her.  We were all told the version of the story that she was a tired, old lady.  Well, the truth is that she was only 42 and she wasn’t that tired. I wrote about the woman I knew, her home, and I wanted children to know that what took place wasn’t a happenstance.

American kids get shortchanged on the details sometimes and get more myths than facts.  The facts will set all of us free. Things can be horrible and they can be wonderful, and it is important to deal with the fact that America sometimes doesn’t live up to its promise, but there is importance in striving to be good — despite the history.

JG: Before you go I have to ask about bats. I read that you have a bat named after you? Is that correct?

NG:  (Laughs) Yes, that is true. Dr. Robert Baker (Texas Tech University) found a new species of bat in Chile. Baker was from the South and respected my writing as well as my work on race relations and equality.  In 2004 he named this big-eared bat, Micronycteris giovanniae, which means Giovanni’s night flyer. It was an honor and Toni Morrison and I had a good laugh that she has her Nobel Prize and I have my bat. We all get something.

JG: We are honored to have you at the 2012 festival. Have you been to the Skagit Valley or Washington State before?

NG: My sister lived in Seattle and I love that area.  One of my top five favorite restaurants is Wild Ginger in downtown Seattle.

Find out more about Nikki Giovanni and all of her work at http://nikki-giovanni.com/ibio.shtml. In addition to workshops and conversations throughout the festival, she will be one of the headliners for the Saturday evening reading on May 19. 

Link to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDFEnswSrkQ

To The Mysterious Tree That Resides In My Front Yard

Your mottled limbs,

twisting,

turning,

thrusting,

stretching up in impossible motions.

Swaying,

waving,

channeling the whistling wind.

Your thick bark,

splattered

with tiny canyons and crevasses,

offers footholds for tree-climbing

on the warm days during the summer months,

when you can feel the life in you

just by touching your surface.

Your green leaves

flap with the breeze in spring,

glow with the sun in summer,

flutter onto the sidewalk below during autumn,

and in winter,

disappear.

Your sturdy trunk curves gracefully,

ever reaching towards the clouds,

merging with both sun and rain,

standing tall

in spite of heat

and snow.

You hold your leafy head high,

defying all the elements that fight to uproot you,

until the day the pieces of green and yellow,

red and brown,

will sink down to the ground,

to be reborn in spring

when the cycle begins again .

– Adrianna G. (6^th grade)

__________________________________________________________________________________

Tri-Tree

from your moss gilded trunk

three writhing limbs surge upwards

long scaly protrusions jut outward

from your diamond patterned limbs

ferns march slowly up the lacerated backside

of your limbs

towards the clouded sky

your thick bark keeps out the cold and wind

North Face can’t make such a jacket

if Polartec had a chance they’d skin you for your bark

 it would take a thousand strands of lights

to truly do you justice

and a million ornaments to decorate your limbs

– Calder W. (6^th grade)

 ________________________________________________________

King of Trees

You are the master of the stars

the bringer of the sun,

you are the mighty oak.

You have seen a million years

of happiness,

and one billion years

of sorrow.

Your trunk

reaches above the clouds,

and is engraved with the markings

of old age,

yet your heart

has the memories of better times.

You lost your leaves centuries ago

and you only have a few branches,

 but why do the other trees look up to you?

Only nature knows.

As you stand watching over the world.

  – Will M. (5^th grade)

– Jericho Brown: “Jump-Start Your Engines”

– Tony Hoagland: “Layering”

– Will Hornyak: “Telling Stories, Changing Lives”

– Mark Schafer: “Recycling Poetry”

– Elizabeth Austen: “Poems From Poems”

– Ellen Bass: “Discovery”

– Lorraine Ferra: “Writing a Love Poem”

You can find complete information on the workshops by clicking http://www.skagitriverpoetry.org/skagit-river-poetry-festival-workshops/2012/03/skagit-river-poetry-festival-workshops/

Also on May 20 is a special “Poetry and Culture of Fishtown Event” with poet Tim McNulty and artist Bo Miller leading a voyage down the Skagit River in a 36-foot Salish-style canoe owned by North Cascades Institute. The day includes six hours of storytelling, poetry readings, writing exercises, paddling, and discussion. Cost is $175, which includes a closing-night barbecue. Information and registration at www.ncascades.org.

The festival will close May 20 with a 5-9 p.m. barbecue at Pioneer Park that includes a panel discussion on the poetry, culture, and art of Fishtown and the Lower Skagit River. Cost is $30 (it’s included in the ticket price of the “Poetry and Culture of Fishtown” canoe trip).

Tickets are on sale now for the workshops and all other events at www.brownpapertickets.com and at The Next Chapter Bookstore, 721 S. First Street in downtown La Conner, Washington. All proceeds from the festival help the Skagit River Poetry Project put poets in school classrooms throughout the year, boosting literacy and student engagement in the arts.

Jeremy Voigt

Conversations Across Borders was born out of an afternoon conversation with former WWU classmate Jordan Hartt in Port Townsend about the current state of literature and elitism.  An idea was hatched to start an online journal that would make literature more accessible while supporting charitable work that advances literacy in areas that needed it most.  As stated on the website, “The project has a mission to connect and support readers and writers around the world through the CAB Literary Journal and the Conversations Across Borders (CAB) project that pairs writers from around the world on collaborative writing experiences.”

Both creators invested their own time and money into the website and journal creation and have sought out project partners.  Subsequently, a private donor has made a substantial contribution to infrastructure that will help with e-publishing, website organization and journal distribution.  “It is growing faster than we imagined, it is so exciting.”  They now have an official advisory board and will be donating quarterly to four project sites, ranging from an alternative school for impoverished children in Haiti to an Indigenous bilingual/bicultural school in Australia.

The CAB project will begin publishing their work from the first round of writing pairs this spring. Currently, Hartt is writing a short story with a writer from Ghana while Voigt is co-creating a poem with a New Zealand poet.  The next round of this project will be starting soon and is open to anyone eager to participate in this dynamic project.

In the future they hope to develop writer-in-school opportunities in the regions that they are funding.  On the website, readers can buy individual pieces, journal editions or year-long subscriptions.  Submissions are ongoing, open to all subject matters and genres and Voigt says that they are receiving on average three submissions a day.

In addition to being a poet Voigt is also an upper-level English teacher at Burlington-Edison High School where he teaches a range of classes from Creative Writing to AP English to Heroic and Epic Literature.  He is also an English faculty member at Whatcom Community College in Bellingham.

When asked when he started writing he quoted William Stafford, “Why did the other people stop?”  Voigt was fortunate to have three published poets on staff at Gig Harbor High School and they encouraged his writing. Voigt received his undergraduate degree from Western Washington University with a focus in creative writing and went on to complete his MFA in Poetry from Bennington College in Vermont.  At WWU he had many great teachers, such as Kathleen Halme, and was engaged in writing and actively involved in the Bellingham Review as a reader and web designer.

While in the Bennington MFA program, he made five pilgrimages out to Vermont for the residency workshops and found the intensity, immersion and direct experience with faculty (1:5 ratio of teachers to students) and fellow students invaluable.  He stays in touch with many of his peers from this program who are also published poets. “We had an amazing group and I feel like I am constantly hearing news about someone’s new poem or book.”

When he is not engaging his students or reviewing pieces for CAB, Voigt has his hands full with family–he lives in Bellingham with his wife, a former English teacher, and their children (ages 2, 4 and 6).

I had to ask him how he finds time to write a midst the family life, teaching and community organizing. He says he writes early, before most people are awake and his dedication to this writing time helps him to keep it all in perspective. He has several manuscripts in progress and is actively submitting his work.

This year Voigt will be the Emcee at the newly formed Chuckanut Writers Conference in June 2012.  Read Jeremy’s poem “One Night,” which was featured on the Writer’s Almanac. We are excited to have him at the festival this year.

SESSION 1: 9 a.m.-12 p.m.

ELLEN BASS: “DISCOVERY”

Almost every poet who writes about poetry talks about discovery: this turn into the unknown is at the center of a memorable poem. Robert Frost said, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” Marie Howe said, “If a poem from beginning to end is something you already know, you’re still on diving board.” Anne Sexton said, “Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.”

It’s not enough to report—even beautifully–what we already knew before we began to write the poem. Instead, we want the experience to reveal itself, to be enacted, within the poem itself. In order for this to happen, we have to enter a state of not-knowing. We have to let go of the story we know in order to find out more about ourselves and the world.

The challenge is to be open to what the poem wants to tell us. In this workshop we’ll explore strategies for getting beyond our previous knowledge. We’ll look closely at poems by three poets — Mark Doty, Sharon Olds, and Joseph Millar — that demonstrate different ways a poem can open up into discovery. And we’ll explore practical strategies to push into our own uncharted territory in order to write poems that take us where we’ve never been before.

JERICHO BROWN: “JUMP-START YOUR ENGINES”

This workshop will help you generate new work through a set of unconventional exercises that keep your ears open and your fingers moving.  The workshop engenders new ideas about writing, and as there is a profound relationship between reading poetry and writing it, participants read, discuss, and even recite the work of several poets whose examples might lead us to a further honing of our craft.

TONY HOAGLAND: “LAYERING”

The question in writing poems is always, “How can I do justice to the complexity of life? How can I not oversimplify human nature?” One way to achieve richness of texture and implication is “layering.” In this workshop I’ll present examples of poems strong in variety of texture, variety of voice, and in layering of data and diction. I’ll also run exercises that can enlarge your repertoire of tone, diction, data, and poetic structures.

WILL HORNYAK: “TELLING STORIES, CHANGING LIVES:
HOW STORYTELLING BUILDS COMMUNITY”

Stories and storytelling are the lifeblood of community. The ritual of listening to and telling stories can heal, inspire, inform, educate and entertain. During this workshop we will share stories and learn some simple methods for using storytelling as a tool to deepen understanding and better communication in a variety of community settings including educational, corporate, and therapeutic. A practical, lively and experiential workshop open to all backgrounds and levels of experience.

Will Hornyak teaches Storytelling in Professional Communication at Marylhurst University in Portland. He has provided programs in storytelling and communication for Intel, Johnson Controls, the Oregon State Penitentiary, Multnomah County Juvenile Justice, the American Cancer Society and the United States Forest Service.

SESSION TWO: 1-4 p.m.

ELIZABETH AUSTEN: “POEMS FROM POEMS: CALL AND RESPONSE”

“Good poems are the best teachers. Perhaps they are the only teachers,” writes Mary Oliver in A Poetry Handbook. This workshop explores ways to let others’ poems not only teach you, but lead to new poems of your own. We’ll look at examples of poems written in direct response to other poems, and experiment with ways to use one poem as a jumping off point for another. Come prepared to write  – participants will leave the workshop with fresh drafts of new poems.

LORRAINE FERRA: “WRITING A LOVE POEM”

Like love, a poem contains the element of surprise through unexpected language and image. In this workshop, you will begin with some short writing exercises focusing on uncommon uses of language; examine a few contemporary love poems that serve as models for writing; then shape a solid draft of your own for “the object of your affection,” a phrase that opens the “object” of your love poem to any possibility. A love poem to the moon, your car…?

MARK SCHAFER: “RECYCLING POETRY: MAKING ART FROM THE WRITTEN WORD”

In this hands-on workshop we will use poetry as a prime-grade material from which to create art in a variety of formats and media. Our reuse of poetry may involve reading, cutting, pasting, repurposing, constructing, transmogrifying, drawing, assembling, performing, and even (though probably not) refrying, among other techniques. We will use our eyes, hands, ears, legs, mouths and a variety of materials to creatively recycle poems from this year’s Festival in a range of formats. Bring your imagination, your creativity, and your fascination with poetry, and we’ll supply the rest.

CLOSING FESTIVITIES: 5-9 p.m.

The closing festivities for the Skagit Poetry Festival will take place with a gathering and party at Pioneer Park. We’ll enjoy delicious BBQ made with local ingredients by the Learning Center kitchen crew and a lively panel discussion on the poetry and art of Fishtown and the Lower Skagit. Poet Tim McNulty, artist Bo Miller, poet Bob Rose, Museum of Northwest Art curator Kathleen Moles, and filmmaker Pat Ford will discuss the art and community of Fishtown in the 1970s and 80s and the flowering of culture and place that emerged there.  There will be a brief showing of videographers Pat Ford and Maggie Wilder’s films on Fishtown.

It is also possible to attend just the Pioneer Park dinner and panel. $30 tickets will be available through Brown Paper Tickets and “at the door.”

SPECIAL EVENT: 9 a.m. – 3 p.m.

TIM MCNULTY AND BO MILLER: “THE POETRY AND CULTURE OF FISHTOWN”

North Cascades Institute is thrilled to partner with the Skagit Poetry Festival to celebrate the poetry, culture and lore of the lower Skagit Valley. Join artist and former Fishtown resident Bo Miller and poet Tim McNulty on a voyage down the Skagit River’s Swinomish Channel in the Institute’s 36-foot Salish-style canoe. While you paddle together, Bo will share stories illuminating the natural and cultural significance of the area and Tim will share poems from Robert Sund and other Fishtown poets and lead us in a simple poetry and writing exercise in the landscape that inspired them. We’ll stop along the way at Art Spot executive director Cathryn Vanderbrink’s house for refreshments, visit Robert Sund’s cabin at “Disappearing Lake” and end the adventure at Pioneer Park in La Conner.
The six-hour voyage begins at 9 a.m. The cost is $175, and includes the closing festivities and barbecue from 5-9 p.m.

To register: ncascades.org

(Interviewed by M.L. Lyke)

When I recently caught up with festival headliner Tony Hoagland, aka “The Poet of Risks,” he was at work on a politically incorrect play about a U.S. history teacher who gets in trouble for doing Martin Luther King imitations in class. Hoagland had also just sent off a volley of emails to his graduate students in the University of Houston creative writing program admonishing them for being too safe in their poems. He advised: Be wild. Make me care. Get my attention. If you can’t impress me or shut me up, then you just aren’t trying hard enough.

Safety’s dull poetic territory for the ironic, reverently irreverent artist, who has written an essay on the importance of “meanness” in poetry and has more than once landed in hot water for his frank poems on race, a topic he says has been well-addressed by African-American poets and pretty much ignored by poets from what he calls the “galaxy Caucasia.”

“White poets have not stepped up to do their part in the conversation on race, to open up the subject, to get into it and get dirty – and that’s something that art does. It can’t be self-righteous. It needs to get dirty.”

Hoagland – who writes that he was conceived in the decade between “far out” and “whatever” — has published four volumes of poetry: Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty; Sweet Ruin, winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry; Donkey Gospel, winner of the James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets; and What Narcissism Means to Me. a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Q. You’ve won numerous awards, but the one that caught my attention was the Mark Twain Award for contribution to humor in American poetry. Why do you think humor is important to poetry?

One benefit of humor in poems is that it un-intimidates audiences. One of the biggest obstacles to a popular appreciation of poetry in America is people’s fear of it – their idea that it is overly intellectual, that they aren’t smart enough for it, that it’s too highbrow or abstruse for them. As soon as a poet makes an audience laugh, the collective level of anxiety goes down. They become more open and more permeable to the things that you really want to say.

Likewise, humor has the capacity to express many things at once. When we joke about topics that are sensitive – like sex, or death, or race – it doesn’t mean that we deny their seriousness, it means we have ambivalent feelings about them, for example, anxiety, and a simultaneous desire to confront. Humor helps us unearth and express that ambivalence.

Q. You wrote an essay about the importance of “meanness” in poetry – calling that meanness “thrilling and valuable,” a kind of “literary endorphin.”

Meanness, frankness, candidness, pushiness, kindness, mercy, compassion, understanding, wisdom – all those dimensions work in counterpoint in a poem. When a poem of mine turns “mean” at some point, my intention is often just to get the listener’s attention – and meanness really does get our attention. It makes people wake up a bit.

In my poem about Britney Spears, for example, at one point the speaker says, “Jump, jump, you little whore!”  A moment later, in another voice, he says, “Put on some clothes and go home, Sweetheart.”

Perhaps that moment is somewhat shocking and misogynist, but it has the shock of the culturally true, and I believe that it’s healthy and interesting for people to be shocked when they encounter art.

The most criminal offense that any form of art can commit is not the sin of meanness, but to be boring or obscure.

Q. You’re called a ‘poet of risks.’ Should poets risk everything? How far can – and should – they go?

Part of the job of a poet is to be reckless. That means you are going to be wrong, if not often, at least sometimes. It means that to write a good poem or two, you probably have to write quite a few bad poems, not just bad, but offensive – you occasionally have to trample the standards of good taste.

We have so many speakers in public life who are devastatingly careful and dreadfully dull; our cultural fearfulness of censure and error has effectively eliminated all ambiguity, complexity, and nuance from our conversation. But as we know, life is ambiguous. Right and wrong are never simple, never monolithic, and nobody has a corner on the truth market. But when we make it scandalous to be wrong, when we make reckless speech completely forbidden, what we lose are all kinds of opportunities for earnest, candid ‘truth speech.’

I often quote the Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz, ‘The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person.’ Poetry is supposed to evoke and articulate the chorus of inmates in our individual asylums. That cannot happen when speech is entirely careful. But no presidential candidate now says: ‘We know that war is always an act of insanity’ or, ‘We know selling arms to anyone is intrinsically evil.’ No politician, apparently, can manage to say such an obvious truth – even though such truths desperately need expression.

Q. Your poem, “The Change,” which talks about “that big black girl from Alabama,” sparked a blog-storm after African-American poet Claudia Rankine read it at a conference. Can you talk about the poem?

It’s a poem that tells the narrative of how Venus and Serena Williams first appeared in tennis. A ripple went through American culture. Because of our awkwardness and shame and complicity and anxiety about race, you could hear sportscasters not being able to address this sense they had of a sea-change. So I wrote a poem, in the voice of a white speaker that embodies our anxiety about The Other about blackness and whiteness, trying to articulate white America from the inside.

I feel that white anxiety about race is an under-represented, under-articulated part of American society. It’s one thing to pretend to be nice, to strive to be colorblind, to apologize for the inequities in American culture – it’s another to say, I am afraid, I am guilty, and if I am guilty I am ashamed, and if I’m ashamed, I’m silent, and if I’m silent, nothing changes.

(Listen to Garrison Keillor read the “The Change“ on a 2008 edition of The Writer’s Almanac.)

Q. What was the outfall from the blow-up?

What happened – and this was long after the poem was written – was that it provoked a little poetry discussion about race. White poets apologized for it. Some  black poets denounced me.  After all, I wrote the poem to push some buttons, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise to me  that it created a reaction.

There were lots of blogs, and such. I think it took the whole dialogue backwards instead of forwards.  Nonetheless, it was interesting and disturbing.

Q.  So, are you backing off the topic?  

No. I hope to get in trouble again. Each year, I try to do at least one thing that is impolitic.

Q. You’ve said you’ve moved on from the confessional to the social in your work. How do you see your poetry in relation to society and politics?

I’ve become progressively less infatuated with direct autobiography and using the first-person singular. In the same way that non-fiction becomes more interesting than fiction as we get older,  one eventually realizes what an extraordinary place the world is and that your inner life is only  one kind of  interesting, and that you, being a citizen of an empire, of a mass culture, a material culture, can examine the amnesia and hyper-stimulation that is so much a part of being an American.

I believe a well-written poem can break the great, post-modern hum-down and assign values – not simply to say how confusing and post-modern it all is, but also to declare that some of it has worth and some of it is utterly worthless. A good poem can separate the counterfeit from the real and the valuable.

Q. Can you describe your methods?

I do first drafts on a manual typewriter. It just doesn’t feel the same on a computer. And I keep a big folder of first drafts. I like to sit in my long underwear, sipping my morning tea, and open up the folder and see what I can hook into today. Then I put it in the computer, print it out, and start marking it up.

Q. Your background suggests you were a restless kid, moving from military base to base, then a restless academic, dropping in and out of college. Also a Grateful Dead devotee. Talk about the role of error, trial, failure, experience, suffering, and Deadhead madness in the voice of a poet.

Failure is a very under-advertised and under-celebrated part of our lives. We tell our children and high school kids that if they work hard they can succeed and get ahead. We should be telling them that   they will fail repeatedly, and that there is nothing wrong with that; in fact, your sense of meaninglessness and your humiliations will teach you empathy compassion and insight – if you survive them.

Certainly that’s what turned me into a human being: failing, and falling apart, and making mistakes.  My mythological archetype is definitely the phoenix,  the pattern of ruining everything over and over again, and then starting again from scratch.. All my credibility and humanity comes from my failures and my ongoing humiliations.

It’s so easy to lose touch with the fact that you are an idiot – that you’re just as crazy as everybody else walking around.

Q. Can you talk about the audience reactions to your razor-edged poems when you read them aloud?

When you’re reading a new poem, working it out, and read it in public for the first time,  there is sometimes an audible  moment when the good taste barrier is breached – POP! There’s a sudden pressure drop, a held breath in the room and it can be artistically very satisfying, because you know you really have caught the audience’s attention.

At other times, depending on where you are, it can be quite unpleasant if you are reading and suddenly the audience goes blank. They may all just start shutting down, because they don’t feel safe reacting to a poem. They don’t know if they’re allowed to laugh, and don’t know if they should be offended.

Q. How do you think our festival audiences in our corner of the country – the land of the polite – will react to your poems?

I hope to catch them off-guard.

Sessions include:

1. Opening night, with Sherman Alexie

2. The Annual Robert Sund Memorial Reading, Finn Wilcox

3. Fooling With Words: Tony Curtis and Molly Tenenbaum

4. Valley Voices: Chuck Luckman and Patricia Hawley

5. All Creatures Great and Small: Chris Dombrowski and Patrick Lane

6. The Poet and Art: Mary Cornish and Molly Tenenbaum

Read more about Kathleen at her website. Her recent publication Plume has been selected for the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series and will be published in February 2012.

Enjoy one of her poems below which was featured on the Writer’s Almanac in 2010.

Gil’s Story

by Kathleen Flenniken

Ellen Bass lives in Santa Cruz, CA, and is a faculty member at Pacific University’s low-residency MFA program in Forest Grove, OR. In the low-residency MFA model, students work independently with a mentor and gather for intensive residency periods twice a year. Bass usually mentors four or five students at a time through this program. In 2011, Pacific University’s program was ranked as one of the top five low-residency MFA programs in the country. Jessica Gigot, one of the Skagit River Poetry Project communication directors, had an opportunity to talk with her about her experiences as a teacher of poetry and her life as a poet.

JG: How long have you been a poetry teacher?

EB: I have taught poetry for a long time, over forty years. Most of my teaching has been in the community and I teach at retreats and conferences nationally and internationally. This is my first time teaching in a university program. In the past I’ve taught mostly alone and it’s really wonderful to be part of a team. I have been teaching for five years at PU.

JG: What do you think about the low-residency model? This seems to be a more common option for MFA programs.

EB: The low-residency model makes it possible for students who have established lives, jobs and family responsibilities, to be able to study poetry deeply. Also, developing poets can choose a school based on who they want to work with, rather than be limited to the schools in their area. Students come to Pacific U because there are poets there who they want to learn from. It’s like an apprenticeship.

Most of our students are serious about wanting to become the best poets they can possibly be. And all of our students become insightful and joyful readers of poetry.

JG: How do you connect with your students?

The residencies are a 10-day immersion, so in addition to workshops, craft talks, readings, and discussion, we also eat meals together and have time to talk informally. Then, over the semester, my students send me their work via email along with letters in which they talk about their process of writing, the poets they’ve been reading, ask questions, discuss issues of craft, and bring up anything else that’s important to them about writing. I send them back critiques  of their work and a long letter responding to their interests and concerns, making suggestions  and including notes on the craft that I hope will be useful to them. This is an on-going conversation about their work, their reading, and the life of a poet. It’s an intimate and in-depth relationship.

JG: Is it hard to teach poetry?

EB: (Laugh) That is a great question. It is challenging to teach poetry. That challenge is part of why it continues to be interesting. I like working one to one, teaching each person as an individual. Every student has different strengths and weaknesses, and as a teacher my job is to learn how to teach each person.

One of the challenges in teaching poetry is the same as it is in writing poetry—you learn many aspects of the craft, many skills, but the art is in when and how to apply them. Nothing applies all the time. For example, you learn something about how to create a metaphor, but then you can run wild with them and make a marvelous poem or you can clutter up a poem with them. If we could just learn something and do it all the time, it wouldn’t be so hard! But that’s what makes it infinitely challenging both to write and to teach.

Some students have strengths that are apparent from the beginning, but with others they go along on a plateau for a while and then make leaps into territory that I couldn’t have anticipated.

I am a very, very, very slow learner and I didn’t really show much promise early on.

JG: (Laugh) I find that hard to believe.

EB: The learning process for me was slow and arduous. I am particularly skilled in teaching, I think, because of this. Much of what I do was not instinctual, but a learned process, so I really can teach strategies of how to work the poem.

And part of my slow learning was because for many years I suffered from a lack of exposure to good teachers.

JG: Who was your favorite teacher?

EB: My most amazing mentor has been Dorianne Laux. I began working with her in the late nineties after a long time being away from writing poetry. I had been writing non-fiction and I longed to return to poetry, but I was at a stuck place and needed a teacher, the right teacher. People often say, I couldn’t have done it without so and so, and sometimes it’s just a way of expressing appreciation—they really could have done it. But in this case, it’s literally true. My poems started to change really fast after I started working with Dorianne.

The other teacher who was essential to me was Anne Sexton who I studied with when I was getting my MA in Creative Writing at Boston University in 1970 (in those days they didn’t yet call them MFA’s). Anne’s public persona was dramatic, flamboyant, but as a teacher she was very thoughtful and respectful of students and she loved teaching. Anne encouraged me to expand and write more and she plucked me out of the waters of acerbic criticism. Without her, I might have given up right then.

JG: I love the poem “Relax.” Can you tell me  where this poem came from?

EB: Of course, I’m mainly talking to myself in the poem. I am not someone who is relaxed. I’m a little high-strung. So I talk to myself and try to cultivate the perspective of this poem. Although I don’t have a formal meditation practice, I try to maintain an informal practice in the moment. The principle of the Buddhist story in this poem is one I’ve been chewing on for a good forty years.

The poem also was inspired by a friend who was in a long depression. When you love someone you want to be patient and not complain that you’re getting tired of their depression, but of course you are getting tired of it. So the poem was an outlet for me. I needed to present my most patient self to her, but in the poem, I could just tell her to relax! That’s one of the best things about poems—they are there for you to say whatever you want!

JG: Is it hard to find a balance between the teaching and writing process?

EB: Yes. I am working on being more selective and devoting more time to writing.

JG: Your most recent book is The Human Line, published by Copper Canyon Press. Can you tell me how these poems came together? There seems to be a strong theme of science and our relationship as humans to our own biology?

EB: All of these poems were written in a five-year period between when my last book (Mules of Love, 2002) was published and when this book was published in 2007. At that time I had a lot of stability in my personal life and I think that gave me the ability to focus outward to the actual world, the science of the world. When I was a young person I thought science was boring. I took a long time to look outside myself at all. Now I’m always thinking about the fact that we are on this planet moving around in this incredibly mind-boggling space with all of these natural laws governing us. There isn’t anywhere that you can look that isn’t interesting scientifically.

My partner is an entomologist and I have some new poems coming up on insects. I don’t feel like I have a lot of control over my subject matter. When the muse gives me something, I just say yes. Chickens are also showing up recently in my poems.

JG: I hope we will get to hear some of these new poems at this year’s festival?

EB: I am looking forward to it.

You can learn more about Ellen Bass at her website: www.ellenbass.com