Jeremy Jusek: Welcome to Poetry Spotlight presented by the Ohio Poetry Association. I am your host, Jeremy Jusek. And with us today is Pauletta Hansel.
Pauletta Hansel’s nine poetry collections include Heartbreak
Tree, a poetic exploration of the intersection of gender and place in
Appalachia, out in March 2022 from Madville Publishing, and Friend, Coal
Town Photograph and Palindrome, winner of the 2017 Weatherford Award
for best Appalachian poetry, all from Dos Madres Press. She is 2022
Writer-in-Residence for The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County
(cincinnatilibrary.org/writer-in-residence). Her writing has been
featured in Oxford American, Rattle, Appalachian Journal, The Anthology of
Appalachian Writers, American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily and Poetry Daily,
among others. Pauletta was Cincinnati’s first Poet Laureate (2016-2018) and
past managing editor of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel. For more, visit her
website at paulettahansel.wordpress.com.
Pauletta Hansel. Image: Kentucky Rose Photography
Pauletta, thank you so much for joining us.
Pauletta Hansel: Oh
thank you, Jeremy, I’m delighted to be here.
JJ: All right. You
want to start us off with a poem?
PH: Sure, I will read a poem from my upcoming collection called
Home Is the Place Where, When You Have to Go There, You Only Think About How to Get Out
Busted-up doll heads where the canned goods used to be.
Sunsteeped, hillbuckled sidewalks, and everybody
just looks tired. Nobody cares
this is where your mother used to buy her meat.
The houses you lived in plowed under,
moles scuttle through plumbing cracked with black dirt and roots.
Nobody cares about your old woman body
grown on the bones of the girl who walked these streets.
Everybody has their own worn bones.
Everybody remembers you, sort of.
The newspaperman calls you by your mother’s name.
You can’t remember the name
of who you sat next to in math class or whose backseat
you crawled out of nights, the river fog
so dense you came home hair and misplaced clothes
all damp and smelling like mountain. Nobody cares
you know this town by what is gone, the stench
of grease spilled from the closed pool hall, the mailbox on the corner
where the boys sprawled, pelvises jutted out to block your path.
You pull up your car too close to the high curb
somebody told you was made for hitching horses.
Nobody had any horses.
JJ: Amazing. That imagery is evocative! Do you see it while you're writing?
PH: Actually I do.
With that particular poem, too because, it was written from a day that I went
back to my hometown of Jackson Kentucky. And so, even as I'm reading it, I'm
seeing that day and feeling that heat and having having those memories. As I
was writing I was trying to be as specific and concrete about what I had
experienced as I could be.
JJ: That shows. Do you
often turn to place as an inspiration?
PH: I think I do, and
more and more as I get older, I suppose. Uh, writing about the places from
which I've come. And I think, you know maybe it's something about memory or age
but there's a way in which those those places are so real and specific to me
even more than perhaps when I was there that there was sort of this this
background camera, you know, sort of taking the taking the picture and saving
it into memory, whereas, I'm not really sure I paid that much attention to
place. You know, to the world that was the physical world that I was living in
when I was a girl.
JJ: Okay. Where did
you find poetry? Did you find it in that world or did you find it later?
PH: No, I started
writing as a very young girl. Actually, my first real memory of writing was as
a junior high student, and my earliest influences really were not so much
poetry as it was the singer songwriters of the day. But poetry is how it came
out in me. I write other and other genres, I mean primarily memoir, and essay,
a little bit of nonfiction, flash fiction—but really poetry is where I started
and poetry is what I always come back to.
JJ: Why poetry?
PH: I think that it’s
just who I am as a writer. It’s how I process. And it’s how I processed from a
very young age. I read constantly as a child as soon as I could hold of book
and read it myself, and I tended to read more fiction and biography, but poetry
is how is how I expressed myself. And it really may have something to do with
having grown up in the seventies, and the singer songwriter being so much of
what I was listening to. And not being a musician poetry is what I did with
that inspiration.
JJ: I'm amazed by
songwriters because I feel like I wouldn't know when to repeat stuff, you know
what I mean. Know when a chorus go somewhere and sounds good.
PH: Yeah, but as a
poet you do, right?
JJ: Right. Yeah. I
feel totally comfortable but once you add the element of music, and, you know,
the idea that people are listening and absorbing the music and not necessarily
scrutinizing your word placement. It's an intimidating thing.
PH: Yeah, yeah. But I
think about it I guess in some ways as a music of the poem, you know? The
music of the words, the repetition, then becoming a part of that. That music.
Maybe it's easier without having to have a melody with it as well. Just letting
the words be that melody.
JJ: Yeah, I mean I'd
be okay with singing a song if somebody else composed the music for me and
applied it to my words like “here, this would sound good.”
PH: That would be fun,
wouldn't it?
JJ: It would be! Have
you ever read your poems to music before?
PH: Um, not really. I
was just trying to think as we were talking about that and whether or not
anyone has ever made a song from one of my poems and I don't think they have.
And I have not used musical backgrounds for my writing when I’m doing readings.
And I think it probably does have to do with just the sense that you know that
the words themselves are the music. And so, to have a melody to be part of that
in the background, I think would feel distracting to me as a reader. Although,
you know, hey any musicians out there who want to use any of my poems as a
basis for a song of course that would be lovely.
But I would also recognize that they would need to
recreate them. You know, that the music or the poem would be the raw material
that they would be working with because of how a song has its own rules just as
a poem creates its own rules.
JJ: Sure. Now you've,
you've taught poetry for a long time. I mean your teacher through and through.
You done workshops and classrooms and all sorts of stuff in different settings
and venues and what have you. And you also worked with Wordplay which is a
literary and literacy an organization for young writers. So, I want to ask you what
inspires you to teach, and what are some effective methods for teaching poetry
specifically?
PH: Well, I started my
professional career as a Montessori teacher. My first teaching was actually
preschool. And before that my mom had a had a daycare center in Jackson
Kentucky where I'm from, and so I helped take care of the children there. But then
once I went away to college, my first work study job was in a Montessori School
and eventually I chose that as an initial career path.
So I think, you know, the idea of teaching, the idea
of guiding, facilitating people's education, whether it's as young people or
peers or people, you know, older or more advanced in their writing even than I
am is, that has been an impulse for, you know, for much of my life.
But I think with poetry and with teaching creative
writing, I teach to learn as much as anything. My first real teaching of poetry,
I mean I'd lead creative writing workshops before and facilitated classes, but
really my first experience of trying to kind of break apart the learning in
order to be able to put it back together and offer it back was while I was in
school, in a low-res MFA program. And so teaching poetry wasn't part of that
low-res MFA program, but it was something that I did in order to go deeper into
my own learning and to reinforce what I was learning in that MFA program. And I
told students you know “you're getting the MFA along with me here, but I’m the
only one who’s going to get the degree because I'm charging you a heck of a lot
less than what I’m doing.
JJ: “I’m going to ask
you guys a lot of questions!”
PH: But it was. It was
making sure that I really understood it that I was able to communicate it, not
just through my poetry, but also through a sort of organized method of
education and in a workshop setting. And it still ends up being true for me, especially
with my adult classes which tend to draw a lot of the same poets over and over
again so I'm always having to, you know, kind of come up with new ideas and new
approaches while at the same time bringing newer students along to the rest of
the classes. I go with what excites me, you know, things that I'm interested in
in learning and exploring is what I bring into my teaching, and it goes hand in
hand. For me that teaching and writing is kind of dual parts of my poetry.
JJ: Yeah, I found that…
because I've only taught. I've taught technical writing but I've never taught
poetry in an academic setting. And when I deal with classes, it's usually
people that are newer to the craft and I find that one of the things that they
struggle with often is the lack of narrative. That there's no conclusion to
what they're writing, that they're just capturing a feeling or an essence or an
image or whatever. Have you found that to be true? Having been on both sides of
the fence, you've taught and you've learned at the MFA level. What obstacles
are in teaching poetry?
PH: Well, I'm a
narrative poet!
But still, obviously it's a different kind of
narrative. There may be a beginning and middle and end to the story but it's
not it's not the same sort of wrapped-up conclusion that you would get in a good
mystery novel or fairy tale.
I think it, it has—these are certainly things that I
stroke have struggled with or have struggled with in my own writing. What is
the relationship between good prose and good poetry? What you do what you need
to do in prose in order to, you know, set the scene, making transitions. In
poetry you need to learn to trust the reader, and to trust your words—bring the
reader along to make those leaps with you, which is often done in image as opposed
to and an explanation.
But when you get right down to it that's true in—I
mean, it's probably not true technical writing! Or maybe it is, I don't know! But
it can be true in fiction and creative nonfiction as well: overexplaining is
one of the one of the critiques that I will often offer to people who've asked
me to read their prose as well.
JJ: Sure. It's
difficult because sometimes, poetry—perhaps less than other forms, although I
can't, I haven't studied other forms as extensively as I've studied poetry—poetry
seems like a form where it’s more difficult to apply universal rules of any
kind, because sometimes excess symmetry really works and sometimes it doesn't.
And I've run into times with people in my workshop where they'll say “well, you
said this last month” I was like “I did, but this is a different set of
circumstances now, you know what I mean?
PH: Yeah, that's
definitely true. You know, one of the things that you asked about was sort of
ways of working with younger people or really with people in general around0
writing and writing poetry and one of the things that I find especially with
children, you know, children and teens. It's important to be a really good
listener in order to figure out how they're figuring it out for themselves. And
then to reinforce that so the first time you know with a group of young writers.
For example, the first time I hear a metaphor. You
know, it's like I'll just jump up and down with excitement and say, “Look, look
what you did! You know, you made this by yourself, this is one of the building
blocks of poetry and you found it in your own writing because you had something
to say and that metaphor was the way you wanted to say it!” Because I think all
have those tools within us, of image-making, of meaning-making through image
of, you know, of making music through our words without necessarily calling it
poetry. And so one of the things that a teacher can do is just to point out
that that's what we're doing. And take away a little bit of the fear around
getting it wrong by pointing out all the ways that new writers are getting it
right.
JJ: Yeah, that's 100%
true. I mean, you can, you know, not to be too crass but you can describe a
booger to anyone with enough description that they'll say please stop like,
that may not be a poem, but that is an image.
PH: It is it is an
image! And now what do you want to do with it?
JJ: Where do you go
with this booger? You've picked it out of the lineup, now what are you going to
do?
So you were also named the 2022 Writer in Residence
for the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library. So, tell us about that
role. What does that mean and what are you going to do with it?
PH: Well, it's. I am, I'm
really honored by having been selected and I just think it's so cool that our
library, that the Cincinnati Public Library has a Writer in Residence because
it's not really all that common, you know, throughout the country. I mean there
are definitely some municipalities and counties that do, but you know, as
uncommon as a city Poet Laureate is, a Writer in Residence is even less common.
And so to be able to help to promote this program within the Cincinnati public
libraries is just really cool. Libraries are and have been a big part of who I
have been, as a reader especially, and you can't be a writer without also being
a reader.
I'm thinking, I shouldn't try to say I'm not the first.
Let me just say that there are many wonderful writers who have come before me
as Writer in Residence and so the library has has got really a pretty good
system down for what they would like for their writers to do. And it includes
things like a number of workshops, office hours, where people can come either
now online but hopefully soon in-person with a little bit of their work or with
some questions about writing. Also have some conversation around that with the writer
and residents and whoever also happens to show up with questions.
I will be doing some podcasts, not nearly as well as
you but I'll try. I've been picking Jeremy's brain on how to do it.
JJ: I don't know about
that I'm setting the low baseline.
PH: And then also
blogging about my experience. I think a couple of things that I really want to
be able to do is to connect more of Cincinnati's writers with the Writer in Residence
program, and with the library, and just to make sure that more that people know
that this cool program is out there. And then it will serve as a resource for
writers even after I'm no longer in the position, and so making that connection
between Cincinnati's really lively literary scene and the library's lively
programs is one thing. And then the other is working with library patrons to be
a real-life writer. To show the kind of person behind the books that they're
reading.
JJ: Yeah. In my
workshops to the library, I meet so many people that are just interested in
writing. And there's a lot of people out there, they’re good writers, and they
just have this mentality like “well I'm not a writer. Because, you know, I
don't have a bunch of books out”, but then there are some studs out there. They're
just waiting to be discovered and connected, I think.
PH: Absolutely, absolutely.
And so, you know, part of that too is letting those library patrons who may not
be aware of what a supportive community there is, even outside the library,
through the various poetry and other groups in Cincinnati is something else
that I think I'll be able to do. And really it's one of the things that the
library staff has told me is that my passion for community building around
writing is a big part of why I'm a Writer in Residence, so I want to use that
passion for good purpose.
JJ: Absolutely, and
that recognition is so important because it empowers you going into the
position. What have you learned you think, from being Poet Laureate that you
can apply to this position? Because some of the duties are fundamentally the
same, even if you have, you know, different means of achieving it.
PH: Yeah, I mean, I
think within a city poet laureate position, you know, the audience is much
broader, in a sense. And so, there's various possibilities. Whereas with the
library, one of the things that I'm really happy about is that the programs are
all within the 5152 libraries within the library system and so there's kind of
a ready-made audience. A group of people who are already connected to the
library, or who could be.
But you know I think in terms of the similarities, it
has to do with the passion for the work for the community building, for being
able to offer programs that will appeal to a wide cross-section of people. So
with the library for example, I'm doing a memoir class that will be coming up
at the end of January. I'll do a poetry workshop in April. And then I'll also
do a flash fiction workshop with teens because I've found in my work with teens
that world-building through stories is something that you know that teens,
often teen writers, often like to do. And then I'll end up with an
intergenerational writing workshop where I'll be bringing adults and children
together to all write and to learn from each other. And so I’m just kind of
looking at ways to do programs that meet people where they are, and to serve
specific needs of specific audiences.
JJ: Okay, that's
really cool. And you had mentioned doing some of the intergenerational—because
you're really good at meeting audiences where they are, like, not just in terms
of your ability to build a community but in your writing, too. And the example
I want to use is the collection Friend because you wrote—it was written
as an epistolary, or you know, a series of letters about Covid. And one of the
things I found so fascinating about this collection is, it's almost like a Centos
exercise where you have these things that other people wrote to each other. And
they were shared not intending it to be viewed as a literary work, but you
commandeered it and displayed it as a literary work anyway. And one of the
things that's so cool about this collection, is you took snapshots of people’s
lives during Covid. So, how did that collection turn into a collection? How did
you decide that that is where you wanted to meet people, and why?
PH: Well, the book Friend
came about in a really very specific way, and it has to do with the
conversation we've been having about teaching. I was teaching one of my regular
classes From Draft to Craft as part of my community class for Thomas Moore University,
and we had our first class on—I’m making up the dates here but they're pretty
close—you know, March 2nd, 2020. And we had our second class on March 9th 2020.
And then, you know what happened: we were shut down.
But you know, some wisdom far greater than mine led me
to have made the decision already before I went into the class that what we
would be doing in the classes to write epistolary poetry. We would look at some
examples of letter poems, particularly the example of the series that was published
in The New Yorker, a series of letters between eight of Ada Limon
and Natalie Diaz, and that we would partner up and spend you know the semester
writing letters, poem letters, back and forth to each other. We looked at the
intersection of what was a poem and what's a letter. You know, where do they
intersect, where do they come apart. How did the rules of one affect the rules
of the other.
So, when we had to shut down, and this was not before Zoom.
Obviously zoom was out there but it was before I knew anything about Zoom and had
any thought of doing a class on Zoom. These letter poems were how we wrote to
each other. So, most of these poems with friends were written as an exchange
with three different poets who were in in my class.
I was being a little bit of an overachiever maybe
because I was so freaked out, and had so much I wanted to be able to say about
the experience of lockdown. And so what you're seeing is my part of the
exchange, but I think you get a sense of who that other person was. You know
the real-life person that I was exchanging with. You know I'm aware of when I
read those points back to myself, I still feel it as a conversation, you know,
I still feel it as this awareness, of this intimate other whom you know I could
not see that I could share these this experience with from afar.
I didn't think about it as a collection until I was
working during that time with a wonderful poet and mentor, Rebecca Gayle Howell
who lives in Lexington and was sharing my poems also with her. And she said, “Yeah,
put this together, send it out as a chapbook.” So, she believed in the work as
a body of work, as a part as a book of poems, before I saw that message.
JJ: Oh, that's really
cool. I want to touch on something you had said about the audience. Because
you're saying, you know, the letters have an audience: it's the person that
they were being sent to. When you're writing a poem you also have an audience.
How do those two disciplines overlap when you’re trying to edit these letters,
which were meant for a specific person, into an experience for everybody?
PH: Well, part of it
certainly was based on the idea that these were epistolary poems, and so we
thought about these as poems when we set out to write them. I really thought of
them as poems, as well as intimate correspondence. So, they were always both.
You know, I think what I learned through writing these letter poems was that
there is something about knowing that someone specific is going to read them
that creates an urgency and an intimacy that then I am trying to bring into the
rest of my poetry.
You know, so I think I learned—you know I grew. as we
always do, when we write one poem we learn how to write the next poem, right? That
what writing teaches us, is how to them to keep moving into the deeper parts of
our body, of work, and for me, with the epistolary poetry. It was the intimacy
and the urgency that I take with me into the rest of my poetry.
And then you also realize that when other readers
outside of the person that they were written to responded to them in a way that
they spoke to you know a broader audience than just an audience of one, I think
is a reminder that that’s part of what poetry does I mean that poetry is in a
way, it encourages our eavesdropping. That there's a way that we feel like we
are looking inside to someone's life. And, of course, that's what literature
does that it gives us that view into each other's lives and so it didn't
necessarily matter that you, you know that the specific you, was not the
original intended reader. The reader still got invited in, and hopefully felt
the joy of just being able to have that intimate relationship through poetry.
JJ: Sure, that's an
important one to have. Let's talk about your newest book Heartbreak Tree.
So that's coming out in March, that will be out in two months from the airing
of this episode.
PH: Yeah, actually,
two months from today almost. I think the March 18 is supposed to be its
release date. And we're talking on the 17th so yeah, it's almost here, which is
exciting because I've been waiting for it feels like I've been waiting for this
for so long. It was accepted about 18 months ago, I think, so it's been a while
waiting for it to come out.
JJ: Sure. So how has
that gone? What inspired the collection and what came out of it?
PH: So, um, Heartbreak
Tree is a full-length collection, unlike Friend, which is more of a
chapbook. And it begins with looking back into my girlhood and adolescence in
Eastern Kentucky and Appalachia, and then it moves on from there. I mean it
really sort of covers the span of my life, and is as much about being a mother,
being there being a daughter, being a stepmother, being mothered, sort of all
the interrelationships between, between women and between generations. It
covers in sort of a widespread way.
But I had just finished when I started working on the
poems that became Heartbreak Tree, I had had just finished my book of
poems called Coal Town Photograph which covered some similar kinds of
material, in the sense of what it was looking back into, into growing up in
Appalachia. But there was much more of a sense of, not nostalgia exactly, but
of longing, my mother had just died. You know there was this sort of sense of,
of loss of place, as well as loss of my place, within the generation and
family.
And so with Heartbreak Tree, I decided that I
wanted to write here—or with the poems that became Heartbreak Tree,
because I wasn't really thinking of it as a book at the time—I decided that I
wanted to write as starkly and as non-nostalgically as possible about
adolescence, about Eastern Kentucky, about Appalachia. And so, those poems have
a little harder edge. Maybe.
Then some of my other poems of place... I was also
working with Rebecca Gayle Howell, the mentor and friend and wonderful poet
that I mentioned earlier, and all-around friend, and she just encouraged me to
keep going deeper and deeper into the story. And so I did.
I was also playing with as, as you know with epistolary
poetry with Friend, and it also includes epistolary poetry to some
degree, but the letters are to my 15-year-old self. So, there's a conversation
there between the adult woman that I am and the girl that I was.
JJ: Cool. That’s
interesting because I struggled with this when I was writing about my hometown,
because my experiences were, what they were… but my appreciation for the place
that I grew up in was a very different thing. And when I went to write about it,
I had a difficult time reconciling the two. So, my question to you is, how did
you decide that you're going to be frank about it? And, what did that mean in
terms of honoring the place. Like was that a conscious effort in your mind?
PH: Well, I think I've
written enough about Appalachian Eastern Kentucky that anyone who knows my body
of work knows that there is honoring, there is respect, there is reflection,
there is, you know, all of those things and so—one poem is only one poem, you
know, even a book of poems is only one book of poems. And just as a place has
many, many different aspects to it, then it seems to me that we have
permission, as those who are writing about those places to explore the many
aspects as long as when we do it we do it honestly. And, you know, hopefully
not self-servingly.
The other thing that happened during this time was
that I was invited to go back and do a series of writing workshops in the
county that I grew up in. And so, I had the opportunity to write with young
people who were still going to the high school that I went to. People who were
still living in the places that I lived in. And to do some writing for that
project, which was a very different sort of writing, which was much, much more
about creating some blog posts and some newspaper articles about the strengths
of the place. And so I had an outlet, as well for that kind of writing.
You know, I think I would as a young writer in my 20s,
I stopped writing in part because I was afraid of telling the truth. And when I
began to write again in my 30s, I decided that if I was going to write, and I
was going to write, then I had to be willing to speak truth no matter how
difficult it was. You know I could make choices about whether or not that truth
ever saw the light of day in terms of other people's eyes.
But I knew that the only way that I could write was to
be brave and courageous and so I just leaned into that.
JJ: What does being
courageous mean for you? Like, when you sit down to write and you think “wow, I
really did it this time.” What would you be describing?
PH: Um, certainly it
depends on the poem or depends on the circumstance, but it is going down
beneath the surface to a place where I may not have realized that this is what
I'd seen, or this is what had happened, or this is what I'd felt, unless I'd
put the pen to the paper long enough to bring that forward.
JJ: Okay. And what
inspires you to write? What writers have inspired you and what keeps you going?
PH: There's so many
out there, you know, and I get little poetry crushes. I think that's what keeps
me going is my poetry girl crushes from one to the other. I do tend toward
poets who are generally speaking more narrative, more storytelling, who are coming
from the will of memory and place. I love Diane Seuss who does that about her
life in the Midwest and Michigan, and is just wild I think. Another wild and
courageous writer is Ada Limon, who is a longtime inspiration to me as another
writer who uses her own life, and her own experiences as a way to get to deeper,
and more universal, as well as more intimate and specific truths.
Just so many! More locally Maggie Smith, a writer out
of the Columbus area is a writer that I admire very much for much of the same
reasons. Rebecca Gayle Howell I mentioned before. I could go on and on but I've
also gotten more interested in doing writing that uses sources. Newspaper sources
or language that is not necessarily the language of poetry. And so writers like
Claudia Rankin for example, and Carolyn Wright and Natasha Trethewey who, you
know, sort of really delve into history and current culture and bring that
language into their poetry is also very inspiring to me right now.
JJ: Excellent. Okay,
well thank you very much for sharing. Would you like to read us a second poem
before we wrap up?
PH: I would! I would
indeed.
So, this poem is also in Heartbreak Tree.
So Maybe It’s True
poetry doesn’t make you a better person,
and the news that can be found there
is like some gone week’s Sunday Times
tossed in its clear green wrapper
beneath the neighbor’s car.
The one who died
and no one came to find him,
and you didn’t knock on his door
when his trashcan of carryout chicken and ribs
sat spilling its own kind of news.
Maybe.
But, oh, to live awhile as marrow
in someone else’s bones,
to breathe her breath upon the mirror
held up to your life,
doesn’t it make you want
to fling open whatever door you come to,
doesn’t it make you want to try?
JJ: I love that poem! Alright, thank you so much for sharing!
This has been Poetry Spotlight, a production of the Ohio Poetry Association. Please follow the OPA on Twitter @OhioPoetry and on Facebook at facebook.com/ohiopoetry. A transcript of this episode can be found on the OPA blog. Visit ohiopoetryassn.org for more information.
And Pauletta,
thank you so very much for coming in.
PH: Thank you, Jeremy, I really appreciated it!
Comments