Poetry Month - Shannon Carriger

welcome back to k pr presents i'm kate mcintyre for the rest of this hour it's a conversation with shannon character she's a writer living in ottawa kansas and the author of deep inside that rounded world shannon thanks for joining us today thanks so much for having me play happy poetry month absolutely it's my favorite month of the year april it is what is that april is the cruelest month is the cruelest month but only if you don't have good books to read will faithfully we happen that once a day to talk about the title of your book deep inside that rounded world well i actually came up with that line writing a poem several years ago one interesting thing about the book is that the poems were written over a course of about a decade and i have always been kind of fascinated with this poem in particular have been fascinated with stories from the bible i grow up going to church a great teaching vacation bible school but i also consider myself a scholar and a feminist and so i'm

always looking for new ways to think about those stories and so in this particular poem i'm talking about the relationship between sayer and hagar and abraham and a line of on deep inside around the world comes from the idea of hate are finally being pregnant and sarah wishing that that were her own child can you read the poem for us i'd love to deep inside our rounded world series said god has brought me laughter genesis twenty one six cyrano de value of waiting for right press the promise of texture and consistency buried beneath the skin a well timed peach not hers to dare she watched her car's belly heavy with fruit the secret sweetener is hidden deep inside that rounded world that hackers baby didn't say to sarah says she begged every day for a favorite of her own until the morning she found herself swelling abraham brought her a basket of

dates and she marveled at her miracle throwing her head back laughing she ate them slowly her mouth full of joy that's shannon character reading from deep inside that rounded world scene in your poems draw from such a wide range of inspiration from the bible from greek mythology from american history all the way to your father's military service what threads tied those poems together i love the question terry and i i wish i had a really really deep answer for you but the truth is i have been reading since i was a small small child i started reading barry young three or four years old when i learned how to drive at sixteen i didn't know how to get my grandmother's house because i had had my head buried in a book for every time i was in the car for the first sixteen years of my life so i think the reference only chair of the poems that i write

come from all of the absorption of this contact us things that i see around me that move me or that i find interesting and off than i am drawn to the concept of a story existing that we haven't been told that on the surface we think we know what's happening with that particular figure from history or particular figure for mythology for example but the truth is we only know what the dominant narrative is and i like to consider maybe why the untold story could be oh that's beautiful there's your poems really do that i mean they are they really they explore some of the hidden side of stories both familiar and unfamiliar ones and this may sound a bit indulgent but it's true i grew up in salon and then we moved to fall in kansas but at people and in that town and i went to a new high school i didn't know anyone and i sort of the opportunity to reinvent

myself in a loud mia become someone else in to tell a new story and so that's probably the beginning on the kernel of wanting to think about those news stories for other characters because i kind of had that experience myself talk about a couple of your poems that draw their inspiration from history that hinted dustin and another guilty offering will have a dust and was a woman who lived in new hampshire in the seventeenth century and there was a statue of her or corrected because of this horrific act that she committed and i came across the statue doing other research i came across a photo of the statue and i was struck by the way she standing in the way her clothes are draped on her but also the way the statues seems to be glorifying this coup reflects thing that she did she actually slaughtered ten native americans and she's been statue for it and i find that absolutely shocking that we think somehow

celebrating someone who committed the kind of murderous still appropriate and the what were the circumstances that led to her i guess not just watering pipes helping move members of his tribe well if she had nine children and she had been taken from her family farm with her youngest child with her baby her very recently born baby and that baby was taken a rather terrifically killed by being sworn into a treat and the child had connected with the answer that horrific violence prompted her a zen to retaliate and i am just horrified by both parents but particularly the notion that somehow this woman's grief and pain and anger obviously had seen her child murdered in front of her results it and there's other violent actors she committed and somehow that is celebrated with the celebration of violence i think is one of

the most disappointing facets of the american experience and so the statue erected to her is one of those bygone era kind of things that i think we should revisit and discuss culturally when did you read the poem that you wrote about her sure another guilty offering for hannah dustin taken captive during king williams or and sixty ninety seven shoulders bear waved hair pulled back and a dust and demands attention just off commercial street even granted fails to harden the kurds beneath her something dress the first american woman immortalized in stone is on a pedestal on her dress draped increase increases against abandoning her sightless eyes fixed on an uncertain horizon in sixty ninety seven hand and have her ninth child three days later i'm inaki were down on her

farm marching for miles away leaving safely behind her husband and other eight the baby died when its head meant tree bark smashed perhaps by a warrior tired of white settlers claiming his home as there's tired of burying his own bed tired escape that murder so has slaughtered ten and was statute for it tomahawk in her right hand and scalp and k in her left she stands another guilty offering to the new world that's standing character of ida was seized the author of deep inside that rounded world published by finishing line press cinematic they had just crossed the atlantic ocean and read bishops rock and tell me the story behind that welcomes interesting about the show broad is that this poem was actually part of an exercise that my husband and i did when we were first connected to one another

as writers we were taking images that we found in both of us trying to write poems or sometimes with a few other people in our writer's group and sometimes just the two of us this should brock is actually an island in the united kingdom and it said basically just a small slice of earth with a lighthouse on it and i was taken by the idea of this space that exists only for one reason which is to warn other people of potential dangers at sea and as i read more about it i learned different things about the history of bishop broad and also imagined that people who may be working and living in the white house as i wrote the poem bishop rock in the thirteenth century the rock was a prison for felons dropped to live with little food or water until the c swept them back to god five hundred years later

shipwrecks invisible and dark water the rock split scarce splintering what was once hole into halves everything goes in time bones it's often gone zig you were owed eyelashes fall out nothing can hold back the inevitable wreckage of a body eighteen fifty eight brought the lighthouse and began marking distance staving off the breakdown where two keepers ten floors above the atlantic needed no one but each other they were dropped onto the island to be the light in the darkness to steer the last towards home knowing everything in time would go until god's want them both away that's bishop brought by shannon character it's one of a number of poems in deep inside that rounded world published

by finishing line press seen a new and i have talked before about walt whitman so i was a surprise that he would be the subject of one of your poems or your interest and walt whitman and his trip to washington dc in eighteen sixty five well first of all i think what women is one of the most rewarding poets returned to again and again i fell in love with him in high school when i was in mrs wen says classes won't you know as coleman's for kansas i discovered what men and ran his poem song of myself and i felt like pieces of myself for cracking open and i know that that sounds dramatic but i was seventeen after all and when i first read whitman i have i've saw this examination of the self through the lens of nature and god and the world around you and occupation and i grab a working class kid both of my parents were blue collar so it felt deeply familiar even though he was an older white

guy that would go on time and so when i read him for lack of a better way of phrasing and i feel like i'm reading the story of america and when he was in washington dc and at sixty five he met a man who would become his longtime partner and that partner was peter doyle lawyer was much younger he was a blue collar worker he ran the streetcar up and down women would write on occasion and women was of course the celebrated poet he was ten years off of the publication of leaves of grass the first publication in the eighteen fifty five edition and the two of them felt a kinship in that moment that neither one of them could deny even though it was senseless by the standards of the day and senseless by their own experiences and the separation that they had

an occupation but they couldn't keep from recognizing the light and the love that they saw with each other than meeting in washington dc eighteen sixty five for walt whitman and peter doyle ample it was the rain sufficient proof that water spiritual internal currents forever curling curious and sensual seeking out the source can and will reveal the immaculate infinite world call or open and honest at the wheel here heavy in a face made for reframing peter steered without ceasing etching into memory the other man maneuvering the car from capital to treasury imagine a miracle of them momentarily momentous alone in a lamp glow the car a humming heart on a rain slick streets empty of traffic and to give me an empty of any soul save these two together

blanket shouldered and weary the last in a day's worth of writers smelled of salt and sweat blue eyes electric beneath the broad brimmed hat so out of fashion his beard polls singing the car's red light young and lonely and tired and cold kia came to sit wordless and wondering at the work of forty five years their breath think between them only drowned as bees after a busy day among the lilacs he placed his conductor's are plenty of america catalyst and rough it was and strong and all was made white and beautiful the universe scrubbed clean but they knew that's shannon character reading her poem the meeting in washington dc eighteen sixty five cent i'm curious as a big fan of walt whitman what it felt like to kind of interject your

own interpretation of the meeting between the hammett and someone who had become very important walt whitman's life that's such an interesting question i think that for me i didn't see myself as really putting my voice into it i was trying instead to do use a voice to the story that i think people don't talk about very often and i should say my study of women in high school led to my own teaching of women now as a public school teacher i've taught what then for several years at the high school level and one of the things that i think we should definitely be talking about in relation to his work is his connection not only to the world around him but to the person all his connection to the people who matter most to him and in some of those cases that was relationships with men curriculums need to recognize all relationships is valid certainly we don't live in a header a normative says it really didn't non

binary open accepting world at least i'd like to believe that we do and so we need to be teaching all those elements and celebrating all of those elements about the writers that have given us such gifts and so this was my small way of celebrating the part of women's history month cnn before i knew you as a writer i knew you as a teacher at once high school you know teach english they garner edgerton high school how you're teaching affect your writing up and does your writing affect the way you teaching was asked how we think the answer is yes yes yes yes i think that all of it affects everything i will start with the first few asked how does teaching affect my writing their subjects that i come to that i find interesting solely because i've been researching them are teaching them

i went through a phase of writing poems inspired by the scarlet letter after i started teaching a novel and it's a novel that i don't believe gets enough attention for the kind of dramatic art ridiculous story that it is students often find themselves buried in the language but the truth is if you want to read a nineteenth century jerry springer episode please remember similar from your local library so the things that i teach make me think about different subjects that perhaps i wouldn't in my normal daily life is a forty four year old woman in kansas and then how does my teaching her how does my writing influence my teaching i think was the second part of your question is not practical this just this month because it's national poetry month i've been teaching poetry both in my english eleven classes and mit language classes were looking at them for different reasons we're looking at that poetic trams that get used when we study poetry but also the components that

make a compelling pom and oh i think about those elements when i write so it has made me more mindful of impressing upon my students that poetry does not have to be that scary one eyed monster in the corner of your english class that you're afraid will someday come to light here it's incredibly accessible if you understand that the foundation of poems is the same no matter how odd to some obscure warehouse sing songy and childish everyone's using descriptive language everyone's using simile and metaphor everyone's using deeply descriptive phrases to elicit emotion unless of course we're talking about the esoteric stuff from you know james joyce and william butler yeats the non teaching in high school i'm not so badly for the love i have of

this particular art form tell my students recognize that they don't have to love poetry that they don't have to fear it either that's a wonderful sentiment as somebody who myself and i'll freely admit to someone who was kind of afraid of poetry for a lot of my life i've actually got a really wonderful sentiments it and a lesson to convey to not just young people but everyone thanks it's really important to me i think because poetry has given me so much i have turned to poetry in my most joyful times because i want to see has someone ever trying to express this i'm having a hard time putting it into words i certainly turned to it when i've been heartbroken and needed to feel like other people have lived the same experience i was late and as a writer it's become a way for me to distill an idea into the purest language so that hopefully if

i'm doing it right on connecting with the reader in a way that feels intimate and authentic to them even if we've never met shena who were some of your favorite poet oh my heavens the list is long and wide right now i am just incessantly reading everything is natasha trethewey way has ever written and she's a former poet laureate of the united states it came to speak actually the university of kansas a few years ago and we had the good fortune of taking some students to cure her i also love tracy k smith i've for ever and ever will be a fan of kinetic meet ceo my first poetic love is ian sexton as dark and tragic and strangers she is i i have along lifetime love affair with jack kerouac though the pros i will acknowledge is better than the poetry but

it's just so we're getting is the part of me that enjoys the strangeness of it on i'm a huge fan of stephen dunn and kevin young on goodman's do list is long and five i well i should say full disclosure we have a beautiful old two story home and because i worked in bookstores libraries as a kid our top floor in our living rooms where affection is how zorn on fishes they're basing and we had two forums that's just poetry so my husband is also an english professor and he is also a poet so i have a lot to pull from i could say that you may have already into this question the already burned but i'm a throwback into anyway you described poetry as your first love me about falling

in love with poetry as a kid well i don't remember the very first poems that i read but i do remember writing poetry for the first time and i remember most because i still have those journals from about a huge tenor alive and i have intermittently kept journals and the ones that had at that age have big thick fabric floral covers on them and the handwriting is giant and sadly not much better than my current hundred and fifty and the ink is hot pink or purple and it's all rhyming and tragic sadness about people i love but i have a very conscious memory of sitting with that floral covered book in my hands and the pain in my hand and having feelings i didn't know how to express unless i was writing it down even though now i find those little miss is cringe worthy of their their beginnings

their the seeds that were planted that led to me feeling much more comfortable and confident about expressing the way i see the world and then my parents or lovely and indulge my writing habits and one year for christmas bought me a one hundred best loved poems book and e cummings was in that book and it just blew my head apart i'd never seen writing like that the lack of punctuation and then the weird parentheses and i found myself understanding it and it sort of felt like i'd been invited to this little side party there is a bigger party going on where everybody was talking about we're it's that there was this little other room where the poetry people were and if you could hang with them you could probably figure anything out and i found myself wanting to live in that little room senator told me like to go out on i would you mentioned earlier the reference to greek

mythology i'd love to read a poem that is inspired by one of my favorite paintings and one of my favorite places i am an absolute sucker for a good museum i love to take an entire day and walk through and take notes on the paintings and go home and try to learn the history of who painted it and what inspired it and that painting at the nelson atkins museum that i could probably stand in front of for hours as percent today by thomas hart benton and so that painting inspired this poem or seventy the terrible truth of the underworld is that it is not a terrible at all a girl can be crowned queen there a sector where her sewing have been when mount heard of my redemption she stopped the earth's spin and that's the thing about mothers will starve the world to save their own city back of course but not before

slipping me those seven seats that stained my teeth and downed mean to him oxen current needle and thread returning mom wanted me it isn't all narcissists and maps and meeting blaming him for my new taste for the dark she disliked me as a woman your own gleaming meantime gardens and raising me to suspect resurrection she should not have been surprised when after the underworld i longed to be immoral that's precisely by a scheming character of iowa she's the author of deep inside that rounded world seen and thank you so much for listening with us today thank you soon as for having me care really appreciate and happy poetry month and zero country for all i'm kate mcintyre kbr present is a production of kansas public radio at the university of kansas

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