HCAS REASSIGNMENT AWARD FOR ACADEMIC YEAR 2021-22 Grant uri icon

abstract

  • It's difficult to be a poet in academia. Many academics look at us askance; they believe that ourpoems can be jotted down in the few free minutes between classes, that the sustained focus andgreat effort their own research requires far surpasses that which poets bring to bear on theircreative production. This is often true even within English Departments themselves. Of course,these perceptions are inaccurate. Whatever an academic may think of a working artist sharingspace at the university table, whatever value they may ascribe our contributions to students andthe world at large, the fact is that poets require no one thing more than quiet time. This is timeremoved (as much as that may be possible) from day-to-day responsibilities and interruptions,time for deeply considered reflection, composition, and revision.
    The above paragraph partially describes the "problem" I seek to address. However, the bookproject I mean to complete with the time a reassignment will buy me is, of course, the primaryconsideration. Night Wing Over Metropolitan Area, inspired by Yvonne Helene Jacquette'spainting of the same name, will be my fourth collection of poetry. The poem was commissionedby our ECU colleague, Helena Feder, for an ekphrastic anthology she has edited for the NorthCarolina Museum of Fine Art. The anthology, You Are the River, includes new creative workbased on artwork housed in the museum's permanent collection. I hope that the Museum willallow me to use the image as the cover for my collection.
    My books of poetry are spaces in which the speakers of the poems enact dramas that,philosophically and emotionally, reckon with cultural, political, and private entanglements, andthey reflect struggles with the private and public stimuli with which I engage during the period oftime in which the books are composed. They are sounding boards that examine human behaviorsubjected to the various pressures the speakers of these poems experience. For example, my mostrecent volume, Domestic Garden (Carnegie Mellon UP, 2015), features poems that consider theissues of my private life: a late in life marriage, a mother with dementia in a nursing home, thediscovery that my stepson suffers from mental illness, North Carolina as a new landscape, andmore. Some of the poems touch on the Bush administration, the ecology, war, race, religion, andimmigration. In other words, they hypothesize situations that affect all of us, in one way oranother.
    There is, of course, great personal value for me in the making of poems, value I'd calltherapeutic. For those who choose to read poetry, there is also value. Many studies demonstratethat reading poetry improves cognitive function, helps heal emotional pain, leads us to greaterself-awareness, creates empathy, and helps us celebrate our participation in the human race.
    When considered in this light, poetry is currency. That is, two main prongs of the ECU MissionStatement read as follows: "Transforms health care, promotes wellness, and reduces healthdisparities; and Improves quality of life through cultural enrichment, academics, the arts, andathletics." Poetry, then, is valuable, an important tool that is directly applicable to what ECUdoes and cherishes.

date/time interval

  • February 2020