It all matters, it matters in the way that you read it and the way that you experience it on the page. It matters in the way that you read the tempo of it, the timing of the poem. Sometimes a line break can mean everything, sometimes you can read a line of poetry, and it means one thing. And when you read the next line, now, it means something new. And so yes, the way a poem looks on the page is incredibly important to the way that we understand it.
Instead of starting with a blank sheet of paper and being like, let's make a poem and then getting overwhelmed, you have your canvas there for you, out of all the millions and millions of words that you might know you don't have to try and pick from those, you've just got the words on the page. So it sort of helps narrow your focus and the poems already there, you just have to find it.
Poetry in perspective, this is random acts of knowledge presented by Heartland Community College. I'm your host, Steve fast. April is National Poetry Month. And in celebration. Today, we'll talk to two people who work with words. First up, let me introduce you to a librarian who rips the pages out of books.
So I'm Christina Norton, and I'm an Information Services Librarian here.
So what is an Information Services Librarian,
it means that my primary like thing I do for the library is I provide information services, which translates to like teaching students research skills, helping them put those research skills to use when they're working on assignments, I'm answering questions at the desk, things like that.
Students are probably searching for information on their smartphone about 15 times a day. So what are the kinds of skills that you're helping students with the type of research they need to learn to do in the library?
Well, that's a variety of things. I mean, most people are pretty good at solving like everyday questions for themselves in searching. But when you get to college, you're suddenly expected to know how to navigate these more academic and sometimes mysterious, like sources of information, like research articles, and studies and things like that. So how to find those in the systems that they're organized into, and how to evaluate them and read them once they find them are things that we help people most with?
Well, you are helping lead a blackout poetry workshop in the library. So what is this? What is blackout poetry all about?
The workshop coming up, is like the opposite of that. Because it's, it's less like fine, the serious articles for your paper and more like take a break and try to write a poem, we're going to do two workshops, actually. The first one's going to be a blackout poetry workshop, where you'll take an existing text and sort of modify it to find a poem within it. And then the second one is going to be an ekphrastic poetry workshop where you can go to the art show the student art show that's up in the library right now, and use it as inspiration to write a poem inspired by a piece of art
ekphrastic poetry. Wow. Okay, what does ekphrastic mean? That's a big word.
It's a big Greek word that I had to look up how to pronounce before I came to talk to you. It basically is exactly what it says like exforsys is the process of like, making art based on another piece of art, like writing a poem about a Greek urn, things like that. Yeah.
People have done that in the past few poems based upon a Greek earner. Yeah. Something you've seen? How does one prepare for this to lead this workshop for this blackout poetry exercise,
basically just taking a text and asking them to read it in a different way than they would if it was still in the book, because I did take some leftover books that we did not need in the library that did not belong there. And I did rip out some pages so that we could have some places to start from. And instead of reading it as what's the story in this book, like, what can I learn from it to just look at it as words and look for patterns? So just sort of come at it from a different perspective.
So these workshops are being co led by English department faculty, but this is happening the library and so what is their specific role that the library provides that the faculty cannot
making people feel comfortable in the library? Because it is my space being like, here is a place where we can encourage you to, you know, do things like this, don't just do it willy nilly with any book because we do need most of them.
This is true, if somebody is going to be ripping pages out of a book or marking up a book. It's good to have a librarian approving of that. Yeah. Are you being selective at all about what you are pulling out for the workshop? Anything that you think, Oh, this would be a good starting point for these workshop errs?
I mostly just tried to look for books that had exciting language in them. So there's a couple weird old novels in there. One that's I think it's like a science fiction novel about Elvis, the subtitles like a novel of Elvis past and Elvis future, and I'm like, okay, like, we'll write some poems that might be about all this. Some other ones that have very vivid descriptive language, some weird books about conspiracy theories, and Nostradamus predictions and things like that, like things that we wouldn't have in the library, because they might be a little bit Ancient Aliens type stuff. Thoughtfully donated, but ultimately not needed in our library. But they got a lot of fun words in them.
Well, since you're searching for fun words, do you have yourself any background with poetry? Or have you written poems?
I've only dabbled in it through blackout poetry workshops that I've put on in this library and other libraries where I've worked before. And that's why I like it, because I don't consider myself like a poet with a capital P, that's not anything that I've ever studied super in depth or tried my hand out really seriously. But I have had fun with it. Because it's a really accessible form of poetry making, like instead of starting with a blank sheet of paper and being like, let's make a poem and then getting overwhelmed. You have your canvas there for you, out of all the millions and millions of words that you might know, you don't have to try and pick from those. You've just got the words on the page. So it sort of helps narrow your focus and the poems already there. You just have to, like, find it. Yeah.
You said you've done these in the past? And what kind of reaction have you seen from people?
I think usually, people just end up being proud of themselves. Like, sometimes you do a few duds. The first page is you're like, I can't find it, or like, I just circled the word, like flower five times, I'm stuck. But ultimately, most people do end up with something that's like, Hey, look at this, I did I did this, it's nice. Some of them can be really like affecting.
So this is a unique approach to writing poetry a little bit different. using somebody else's words, I like it, I think
it's unique, because it's not just a verbal form of art, because you're working with like a physical object, usually a text, and you're making marks on the page to denote which words will be visible and which ones won't, then it also becomes like a visual thing. And some people, instead of just blacking out the rest of the words, they will draw pictures in the space around the words that they want to keep or you know, make a collage or something like that. So it's also visual. And I think it's just an example of sort of remix culture that's been around, honestly, for centuries, but is now in new and exciting forms.
When you've done this in the past, have any the students been reluctant to? I mean, I know you've ripped the pages out of the books, but are they reluctant to want to mark them up? Like, you know, they've got a library and they're watching them. So if they were to just do that with any book, that would be bad.
I do rip out most a lot of pages beforehand so that they don't have to watch the decapitation themselves. But I think it's mostly okay, I tried to put on my least stern face. And they know that it's not like we're destroying the only copy of this book that exists. They're mostly older paperbacks that could be replaced if we really needed them.
Is there any kind of reluctance or twinge of guilt? ripping out those pages as a librarian, even though you know that the books aren't fit for the library? Or are something that could be easily replaced?
It does feel a little bad. And usually when I'm flipping through, trying to find a page to rip out, I'm like, what if I actually want to sit and read this? And, you know, if I'm sitting there with my scissors and like scoring the page, so I can rip it out and somebody walks into my office to talk to me and they see me doing that. It does feel a little weird. If they don't know that I'm putting on a blackout poetry workshop, but yeah, that's okay. Books, not a holy relic. You can use it a lot of different ways.
Christina, thanks so much for talking to us today.
Well, thanks for having me.
Christina Norton is a research librarian at Heartland Community College and she has led blackout poetry workshops. Those workshops are loosely connected to a unique exhibit that is also scheduled at Heartland Community College during National Poetry Month. To get an overview, I spoke with Heartland creative writing professor Cathy Gilbert, tell us a little bit about this exhibit. What's the title of this exhibit?
The title of the exhibit is type poetry.
Type poetry. Yes. And what does that mean?
Well, it means that the exhibit is mashup of the idea of typewriters and typos and the organic mistakes that we make and the art of a typewriter and then the art of poetry.
At the Joe McCauley gallery, it's usually visual art that's on display. But photography, painting, illustration, sculpture, when people think of poetry, they don't think of it as necessarily being solely visual. So was there something about the visual element of this that the organizers and the curators of this exhibit wanted to focus on?
Yes, I feel as though I'm getting a bit of undue credit is one of the poetry curators. I was this whole exhibit was not my idea. Tom McCauley and Janelle DeVore came to me with it. And it was actually the Nell who was an artist, right. And she's the person that puts together all the shows and the Jim McCauley gallery, it was her who was so enthralled with the idea of looking at poetry on the page as art. The idea that the way poets arrange words and phrases and stanzas and stanza breaks and use the space on the page and use the space between words as being a kind of visual display on its own. And the beauty, of course, of having these artifacts typed on these, you know, now seems kind of ancient, right machines of typewriters and creating this exhibit where we sort of transcend right and we kind of make the poetry of the page be the art on the wall
doesn't matter, in general, how a poem looks on a page,
it certainly matters, the way a poet decides to use space on the page. Even things like line breaks or space between lines, some poets use the whole page and put words all over the place or create visual space or images with their words. It all matters, it matters in the way that you read it and the way that you experience it on the page. It matters in the way that you read the tempo of it, the timing of the poem. Sometimes a line break can mean everything. Sometimes you can read a line of poetry and it means one thing and when you read the next line, now it means something new. And so yes, the way a poem looks on the page is incredibly important to the way that we understand it.
So you mentioned typewriters, have any of the poems that are in the exhibit yours, others that have come in? Have they actually been written on typewriters,
they will be, they will be we asked for submissions from any Heartland employee, we heard from people all across the college and not just English people, but all kinds of people, which was very exciting. And the deal was, they needed to send me a poem that would fit on a single page. And that either did something visually in terms of created a visual in the person's head with the words they used or looked interesting visually on the page. And then part of the deal is they have to come in and type their poem on special paper on our typewriter so that it can be displayed and look like this whole beautiful themed exhibit.
As somebody that teaches English at the college, did you realize that throughout the college, there would be this kind of response to a call for poems?
I think some of my colleagues who I'm working with on this exhibit had their doubts, you know, I'm the one who's been sending out the emails and the call for submissions and all the other information to the to the poets. And I feel as though I was kind of warned or not warned, but maybe just encouraged to lean a little bit heavily on my colleagues who I knew wrote poetry to kind of fill in gaps in case we didn't hear from anybody else. But you know, everybody kind of likes to think of themselves as a poet. I'm a creative writing teacher, I have many students who tell me like, well, I write I write all kinds of poems, they have notebooks full of poems. You know, I personally, I wasn't surprised to find that there were many people across the college who writes in their free time.
Were you surprised at all to see any of the subject matter? And did you hear from any colleagues that you didn't know did write or any departments that you were surprised that there were,
there are people in this exhibit I've never even met before, or I've never actually seen or heard their name before, which is a little bit embarrassing. I've now been at Heartland for 11 years, I feel like I should know more about but there's a lot of people that work here. I'm in a lot of different departments, and I mostly see students all day. So I don't usually come across the quad, you know, so to speak, in terms of surprising subject matter? No, I mean, we all right, we all write about the same stuff, right? We're all interested in things like love and death and loss and relationships and the beauty of the world or the sadness of the world. And that's, that's what gets, you know, our humanity. That's what gets expressed in these poems, and it's beautiful.
You have a couple of poems in the exhibit yourself, how did you choose them, and yours are a little different. Your years are going to be accompanied with a photograph as well. So tell us a little bit about those poems and the photography?
Yeah, it actually I didn't choose my poems, my colleague, Jennifer Pokken, who's also the other co curator, she had the idea that, Oh, you know, Kathy has this project, she's got these really old family photos, wouldn't it be amazing to also have this visual of this photo and this poem side by side and how they speak to each other. And she's been working with me on my manuscripts, she's read it all the way through and made suggestions about the order of poems and all of that. And so she actually said it needs to be these two. I didn't have to make the decision myself. And they both have a photo accompanying it. One of the fun things about having a family who loves to not throw anything away is that we have all these amazing old photos and documentation of that time. So one of the poems is called class of girls reconstruct giant ground sloth. It is a poem that was inspired by an actual newspaper article with that exact same title. My great grandfather was a science teacher in high school, he taught all different kinds of science of paleontology. But he also would teach nursing students. And so he would often bring some classes out to the digging, usually boys, that was the time period, right. And then other students would be doing cleaning as part of what they were learning about. And so these girls, this class of girls, quote, unquote, they were probably nursing students. And what he would do is he would teach them anatomy by having them reconstruct the skeletons. And so there was a, I forget what they're called. But it's a sketch, you know, that they put in with the newspaper of an image of these girls putting together this giant ground sloth. Well, that sketch is based on this photo that I have of a bunch of girls putting together a giant ground sloth. And I created a poem about that kind of imagining what must have been going on in their minds. So that's one of the poems in the photos, the other is more related to just my family history, and a loss. So my great grandfather's son, my grandfather, Walter, I never met him, either he died before I was born, as well. And a little bit of a tragic tale with him and his wife, who I'm actually named after a grace. My middle name is Grace. She died when my father was 16 have lung cancer. And so that's sort of a heavy burden for a young boy for my father. But there's this old picture of her and her husband, Walter and grace, probably at the time, they were building this cabin in the mountains in California in the 1930s. And he's pushing her in a wheelbarrow and you can't see him, but you can just see her smiling face, and it's a little bit blurred, it's an action shot. So I wrote this poem about the relationship and this lovely moments and kind of the love they were feeling and how they had no idea what their future was going to hold and sort of, unfortunately, the tragedy that was going to befall them. And so that's the other photo.
Would you read one of those two poems now?
Sure. Do you have a preference?
Probably the sloth one I guess, okay. Sure,
I can read that one. Class of girls reconstruct giant sloth. We'd rather be digging hands black from the pits. Nevermind the heat or the mess, give us discovery. Each protuberance only the tip of a skeletal iceberg. Another tooth, or a rib bone, a skull, or a monster's heavy pelvis. Reconstruction is nothing compared to the divinity of the find. Give us black tar and trapped bone. Give us revelation, sweat and hope. We wish to know this thing had its fur, put our faces to his nose to nose. Imagine the unique Brown of its coat. The yellow of its claws and teeth. how long its tongue, how wide its gate. Oh, to sit on the branch this creature stands under see it take a leaf watch its mouth as it choose. Oh, to see this mandible and action to feel like God looking down on creation. Oh power. We are asked to pull this creature from the heap and put him together, our own rooms still quiet. Our hands lightly wrapped around each fossil old and brown. They warm beneath the palm. This remnant of life once given then slowly taken away. It is exhumed, wiped clean, and we place legs and proper sockets. Vertebrae aligned just so as if being whole again is better than the piecemeal comfort of Mother Earth's black belly. We are made of the same stuff, the structure smaller, but just as doomed to lose its fleshy casing. Someday, when we wrap a bandage around the leg of a patient and hear his tale of wounds of blood and bone of bullets and bombs will know his insights. And his end.
When did you find the photo or for see the file found the
photo and the newspaper article about those girls probably early in my research process. Because after I found that briefcase of bones, there was another briefcase with other family history stuff in these old photo albums. And so I found that and then the other things as well. So this was another poem that went through several revisions. And so it was probably written earlier in the process and then revise much later when I had some space from it. But it is supposed to be making a direct reference to the idea that these are nursing students.
What do you tell your students about how to use space and how to, I guess construct a poem in a way that is visual? I think when we think about the sorts of writing we do, and even the composition that people do, probably the most common exhibited that is when people text now that you know they're using space in a different way, changing language in a different way. What you're trying to get across to your students that shows up when you see a poem printed out or on the page or in this case on the wall of the gallery. Yeah.
What's funny is that lesson about space on the page applies not just to my creative writing students, but even just our composition students. Many students Creative Writing students in competition students who, maybe because of all of the other technologies we use don't have a real sense of the importance of space on a page. And so, you know, they'll be writing essays for class. And it's one giant block of text on a page, or they'll write a poem. And it's just straight up and down, the lines don't have any sort of consistency of how long or short they are. Breaks aren't done in really wonderful places, or it's just another big blob of text. And so in both cases, I tried to teach students that, using that space on the page, even hitting enter once and giving us a tab, like just one indent on a page for an essay gives your reader so much more space and ability to take in what you're saying. It gives them room to breathe, it gives them a way to locate themselves on the page. And just in terms of getting your reader to actually read what you've written, that can be so important. Of course, in poetry, the space on the page becomes even more important in kind of trying to guide the reader into seeing the line understanding the line and the space and the breadth, right in that poem, the musicality of that poem. It's so important to guide them by doing your line breaks in such a way or creating stanzas letting them know where the turn of the poem is, where that shift in tone are that surprises in the poem, by giving them space to see it on the page is very important as a guide.
With the exhibit, there's going to be an interactive element to it. Part of
the exhibit is having a typewriter available for people to attend to like, type on and maybe type their own poems, maybe add them to a specific wall, not in the gallery, but nearby the gallery to create this sort of growing body of the public's poems, right. Anything else you want to add about the exhibit that people come out to see it, not just to support our colleagues who have put their work into the show but to support poetry and art and their beautiful mashup?
Kathy, thanks for coming in and talking to us. Thank you
so much for having me.
Thanks to Kathy Gilbert, co curator of the type poetry exhibit at Heartland Community College is Joe McCauley gallery. The exhibit runs through May 3 of 2019. Thanks also to Christina Norton Information Services librarian, who co presented the black out poetry workshop and supports many programs at Portland's library. Check out other episodes of random acts of knowledge and learn more about poetry, the impact of art and other subjects by subscribing to the podcast via iTunes, Spotify or audio boom. Thanks for listening
