Openings for Encounters with Poetry

When I was commissioned as Alabama’s poet laureate on November 1, 2017, friends shared the news on social media. Under one friend’s post, someone from out of state wrote, “Alabama has a poet laureate?”—implying that we were way too backward even to have poets, much less a laureate. I try not to respond to half-wits online, but if I had responded, I would have informed him that yes, we do, and that we have had a poet laureate since 1930, a post officially established by the state legislature in 1931, years before the Library of Congress first named a Consultant in Poetry in 1937 (the position that later became US Poet Laureate). Growing up in Arkansas and having lived in Alabama since 1986, I’m used to a certain amount of South-slamming, and I occasionally indulge in fulminations myself, but when it comes to poets in our state, I will happily brag. I am grateful, sometimes even a bit stunned, to live among so many talented writers, and not just talented but generous with their time and encouragement of others. What I’m most grateful for, and what I’ve hoped to support and expand on, is the way creative writing professors, spoken word and slam poets, members of the state poetry society and local writing groups, people who write poetry on the side as a hobby, writers of different races and ethnicities and gender identities and even political stances, and poets of every age make up our statewide community. In virtual and in-person workshops, at festivals and annual meetings, at readings around the state, we gather and share our news and our progress, even when we come from many different backgrounds.

My lawyer father, still working at age eighty-five, came from Arkansas to be at my commissioning as poet laureate by Governor Kay Ivey at our state capitol. Less than three months later, he died, and one of the things I took from his office was a wood and brass plaque given to him when he became Arkansas’s state insurance commissioner in 1968. It reads “A Public Office Is a Public Trust” and it sits on the table where I keep all my laureate-related papers. Holding what I think of as a quasi-official post, I have tried not to be all things to all people—an impossibility—but to be a poet laureate for all the people, worthy of the trust placed in me. I see it as my work to create openings for encounters with poetry, quiet glades in the forest of daily concerns where people might pause, reflect, reconnect with something larger than themselves, and possibly even be changed.

During my four-year term, one of my main goals has been to connect Alabamians to their poets, but when the pandemic began, I suddenly was unable to travel. Wanting to continue to do the part of my work that involves outreach, I recorded a poem a day by an Alabama poet and posted the reading to Facebook and Twitter throughout the month of April 2020, and I worked to represent as many different kinds of poets and poetry as would fit into Twitter’s two-minute-and-twenty-second time limit. People liked it, so I started up a Mid-Week Poetry Break and read a poem every Wednesday. I’ve been doing that since last May, and I am in no danger of running out of poems or poets. I have a full wall of bookshelves, but this year I had to do some clearing to make more room for the Alabama poetry section. Imagine that.

I strive to help weave strands of this poetry into our communal fabric, and in doing so, to assert that beauty, meaning, the solace of solitude, the magic of connection through time and space, and multiple modes of self-expression are not luxuries but rather essentials in a fully lived life. I embrace poetry as a subversive force, for once you are split open by a poem you can only become whole again by refashioning yourself with its materials. I believe that poems can make us larger by expanding our ways of knowing and also our tolerance for not knowing, for there is comfort even in that. Instead of confirming us in the certainty of our own rightness, a good poem puts us beautifully off-balance, reaching out a hand for support, not to be right but to right oneself through connection to another.

I realize I haven’t said anything yet about my own writing practice during these times. Since I work from home anyway, the pandemic did not affect my writing schedule much, although I wondered at first if I would be able to find or create a calm moment in which to write. I did settle down and get back to poetry, and I even wrote a couple of poems related to the pandemic. One, “Out Walking,” was published in Deep South magazine’s April 2021 issue. Because it’s a pandemic poem that borrows from the pantoum form, I’ve dubbed it a “pantoumic” for the way it mimics the recurrent thoughts and concerns of our times.