My guest this week on Poetry from Daily Life is Matt Hoisch, who lives in London although he grew up in Los Angeles, California. Matt is a broadcast journalist whose work has been featured on NPR and PBS stations across the United States. He is currently working on The Laureate Project, interviewing state poet laureates. “I’ve always been interested in poetry and writing,” he says, “and over the last few years I’ve become interested in how people construct a sense of belonging. So this project seemed like a great way to combine these interests. » In 2020, Matt worked as a radio journalist in Colorado and created a radio station featuring local musicians who wrote original songs inspired by a month of the year. As a writer for the PBS television show Articulate, he wrote television profiles of creatives. His team was nominated for an Emmy. Matt claims to be the only person he knows who really likes grape candy. ~David L. Harrison
A little more than two years after working as half of a two-person news team at a public radio station in rural Colorado, a member of our small mountain community named Rick died. He was a calm and unpretentious man whose frequent presence around the library, in the parks and on the city benches told me more than often. The kind of man whose death could pass with little or no public recognition.
Then I learned that our local librarian and county poet laureate, Joanna Spindler, had written a poem about Rick. With his permission, I ran the article on our evening newscast. It seemed a fitting way to commemorate someone whose small but visceral contributions to the social fabric of our community have almost escaped words.
A little less than two years later, Joanna and Rick were on my mind again. I started thinking about other Joannas across the United States: publicly named poets who devote their attention to the people, environments, and events that form a place in a particular way that only comes from being there for a good time. Who were these people? What language did they find to see things that others might have missed? What would it be like to try to see America – with all its joys, its anxieties, its contradictions and its promises – through their eyes?
This was the beginning of the Laureate project. For almost a year, I’ve been talking with some of these people – I decided to focus on the poet laureates at the state level – across the United States, about their lives, the places they live and of their time spent in poetry. The project was full of surprises. These writers come from very diverse backgrounds. In Montana, there’s Chris La Tray, a member of the Little Shell tribe of Chippewa Indians who has played in rock bands almost non-stop since the 1980s. In Maine, Julia Bouwsma lives off the grid with her partner on a plot of land. of land where they raise animals, cultivate plants and barter. In Missouri, David L. Harrison seems to have crammed two or three lives into one, having studied parasites, published greeting cards, sold concrete and written children’s books.
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Common threads and patterns also began to emerge. Many of these bards are fascinated by the vastness of the natural world: vast lakes, ancient trees, bitter cold. Many of them find peace in the simple details of daily life: gardening in the evening, sipping ice water in the summer, “good salsa.”
There is something to be said for the mobility of Americans, because the willingness to leave when opportunity or necessity demands it is one of the key ingredients to our country’s dynamism. But there’s also something to be said for being willing to stay put, trying to trust a place for a while and seeing what that trust reveals.
Why do the vast majority of states spend taxpayer dollars finding and supporting public poets? After almost a year of discussions with these dynamic and insightful people, I believe the answer is that poetry truly is a public good. We all need someone to speak poetically about our lives and the things we share. We all need someone to help us notice the things we might be missing. We all need someone to help us find the language to worship, parody, criticize, and commemorate the world around us. It is one of the great joys and sources of sanity in life to read a poem about a corner of the world that you know and love and to say to yourself “Yes, exactly” or , better yet, “I never thought of that.” like that!”
When I think of Rick now, I think of Joanna’s poem. This is the power of a good poem: it moves something (or someone) forward to be shared by everyone. In the words of Texas winner Amanda Johnston: “Poetry is for the people.”
You can subscribe to the Laureate Project on hoisch.substack.com and you can learn more about Matt Hoisch at hoisch.com.