Marjorie Barrick Museum Podcast

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You're listening to locally produced programming created in KUNV Studios on public radio. KUNV 91.5. The following is special programming aired in collaboration with the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art on the campus of UNLV. The content of this program does not reflect the views or opinions of 91.5 Jazz and More, the University of Nevada Las Vegas, or the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education.

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Hello, everyone. I'm Deanne Sole and I work in communications and curation at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art. And today I'm going to be talking to two wonderful people about an ongoing collaboration between the museum and Poetry Promise Incorporated, a local non-profit organization that has been working since 2016 to create a multifaceted support system for poetry throughout the Las Vegas Valley. And before we go on, I should also mention that the collaboration between our two organizations is supported in part by Nevada Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities. So thank you to them. And I am joined by Isabel Bellinghausen, who's the program director for the Poets in the Schools program at Poetry Promise. She's a poet and writer in her own right. She's worked at Black Mountain Institute and the Writers' Block. And I think you like to be known as Izzy, don't you, Isabelle?

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I do.

0:01:28
Brilliant. Okay. And I'm also joined by Charlene Stegman-Moskal, one of Poetry Promise's teaching artists. She has been published in numerous anthologies and magazines. She's also published a number of chapbooks, such as One Bare Foot by Zeitgeist Press, and Leavings from My Table from Finishing Line Press. And she's got two new publications coming up, which is really impressive. I think the first one that's due to come out is Running the Gamut from Zeitgeist.

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Is that correct, Charlene? I'm not sure exactly. I think that Running the Gamut and also Woman Who Dyes Her Hair from Kelsay books are coming out at about the same time, which would be the end of summer, beginning of fall, so whichever one comes first. And how would we find out when they do come out? Should we just keep an eye on the websites of the publishers? Yeah, you can either keep an eye on the websites or for those people who follow me on Facebook, you can check me out on Facebook. Yeah, and various kinds of media like that.

0:02:34
Sounds good. Are they going to be in any particular bookshops where people can look for them?

0:02:38
We hope so. I hope perhaps that Writers' Block will have them. Maybe there will even be an Author's Night where I can do a reading from probably the Zeitgeist book, maybe the other one as well.

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Correct.

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And you just did a reading at Writers' Block not that long ago. I did. I did a reading from Leavings from My Table at Writers' Block.

0:03:02
That's awesome. How did that go?

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It went well. It went really well. It was, what's the name of that, the new theatre?

0:03:11
The Beverly Theatre.

0:03:12
The Beverly Theatre and boy what a beautiful place that is speaking about art and the building itself is is an artistic piece of architecture, it's really lovely and yeah, good theater

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Okay, so if listeners enjoy what you heard from Charlene today, don't forget to keep your eye out for her publications. Okay, so to move along, Izzy, before we get into the details of the collaboration between the Museum and Poetry Promise, can you tell us a bit about your organization? I know you've got a couple of really great programs that you work on.

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Absolutely. Yeah, so Poetry Promise is a Nevada charitable corporation with a federal 501c3 exemption. The company, as you mentioned, was formed in 2016 to support programs of the Clark County Poet Laureate. Its board includes former Clark County Commissioner, Chris Giunchigliani, education activist, Rosa Mendoza, and poet and former administrator for CCSD, Rodney J. Lee. Former Poet Laureate and finance executive, Bruce Isaacson serves as the board, chairman, and treasurer. And since its funding Poetry Promise has paid over $306,000 to poets and writers to support the literary arts.

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That sounds fabulous. I know you have things like the Alzheimer's Poetry Project, you've got poets in the schools. What goes into those programs?

0:04:47
Absolutely. So each program is really tailored to match its audience. So we have programs that run like the Poets in the Schools program, and those programs are tailored towards students who are in kindergarten all the way through ages 25 for college students. For college students, we have a program, a really robust program, running at Ferguson's downtown. And we also have a safety program. We work with government programs as well. And I always kind of joke that it's like the wild, wild west. You never know if you're going to get 25th graders and one first grader in the room. So our poets go in, you know, braced for impact, but always get down for a good time. But Poetry Promise has done even more than that. We've had three sitting US Poet Laureates, Juan Felipe Herrera, Tracy K. Smith, and Joy Harjo come out.

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Awesome.

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Yeah. We've also had Pulitzer Prize winners Sharon Olds and Jericho Brown come out and put on programs, beat legend Michael McClure in one of his last public performances. An editor of Best American Poetry, David Lehman, a five-time national slam champion, National Slam Champion Patricia Smith, music, film, and Nuyorican poetry legend Saul Williams, Lambda Award winner Jan Steckel, and others. That's all amazing. Yeah, so Poetry Promise kind of tailors to a lot of different audiences. We have our Alzheimer's Poetry Project, which I think Charlene can speak a little bit more to as one of our teaching artists for that program. How do you find... Sorry.

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It's okay. Go ahead.

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I was going to ask how you find your teaching artists. Correct.

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How do you find these wonderful people?

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Yeah, well we're community based. So all of our teaching artists usually come by word of mouth. But people do apply for our programming. But they're all working artists. So that's really the big push that we have in our community. Is all of our teaching artists are publishing. They're working. They're doing slam poetry, they're out and doing poetry in real life. And that's what we want to show our students is that not only is poetry on the page, but it's spoken aloud. It's a living, breathing art form. And so when you see it in action, we just had our John Oliver Simon Award, and that's for high school students and college students. Charlene was actually one of the poets who did a live reading. It just wakes up the room. And so you can really see the difference in the students after they go do a live reading because they realize like, I can make a life out of this. I can become a full-time artist. And it's possible in Las Vegas.

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That's brilliant. Charlene, what's your experience been with this?

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How did you come to join Poetry Promise? I think that I simply asked. No, I did. I asked because I feel very, very strongly about poetry being accepted as an art form. And I think that the programs that are offered, Alzheimer's. I work also with senior citizens at Cora Coleman Senior Cultural Center, and Barrick Museum. I feel that poetry is only one part of an interdisciplinary form of art, and it needs to be included in being thought about as art. I think that very often it is kind of shoved aside. You know, we can see sculptures and paintings, we can hear operas, we can hear other kinds of music, we can... and I think that very often poetry is sort of like the orphan child, but all of those things are interdisciplinary because we have poetry that refers or has its genesis in the arts, in other arts, and we also make, for instance, take ekphrastic poetry, where you have a piece, a painting or a sculpture or some sort of drawing and from that poetry can be made and vice versa and vice versa. You know there are operas right now that are being made with its genesis in poetry. Can you give us some examples? There was something that I was reading the other day I think it's called, I'm going to screw this up probably, I think it's and it is taken from a Swedish poem and it has been made into an opera. And I think that's pretty, but let's get back to, let me get back here to Las Vegas and Poetry Promise. I have worked with Alzheimer's and it's amazing. We use, we use not only poetry, but we use poems that they might be familiar with from back in their past, like Joyce's trees. And all of a sudden you see them spark. They remembered something, something strikes them. And it's really wonderful because by the end of a session, there are many, many of these people who have been suffering with Alzheimer's or some other form of dementia, who will give a line that they have been sparked towards. And all of these lines get put on a huge piece of white paper, and a poem emerges at the end. And sometimes that poem is even sung. Yeah, so that's been wonderful. And it helps. It helps them. And as poets and as artists, I think it helps us also. Because there's a lot of humanity involved in doing something like that. And I've been working with senior citizens. You've also been working with some youth, though. You do Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth. Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth, which is really terrific. I mean, wow. You have people who have had unfortunate circumstance in their life, in their young lives, who come together and realize that they're not alone in what they're feeling. And they are able put these expressions into poems that are shared. And again, once again, you're dealing with poetry as an arrow, if you will, towards our humanity, you know, as something that pierces through a lot of covered up stuff perhaps and it sparkles. And Barrick Museum, has been wonderful working with Barrick. I've so enjoyed doing that also. Do you want to explain a little bit more?

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Yeah, let's leave that to that. That would be absolutely brilliant.

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I think it was either the first or the second one that I did was the Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Felix Gonzales-Torres. I always do that name. Now you've got it. I got it right. Felix Gonzales-Torres. And he had this wonderful exhibit of green candies in cellophane on the floor in a kind to his lover. And you could take the candy and eat it, leaving holes in this thing. And it just became wonderful poetry and wonderful poetry experience in trying to take this very, very abstract piece of art and turn it into a tribute, as he did, for his lover. And it just, it was beautiful. And more recently, the exhibit Are You My Type, which has to do with graphics, it has to do with, that was awesome. We did erasure poetry, blackout poetry. And the participants and myself were so amazed at some of the stuff that we came up with, some of the really, really good poems. Yeah, yes, I love poetry. I would never have known.

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Okay, let me just quickly give listeners an outline of the program at the Barrick that we're talking about that we've just had so fantastically described. So what happens is that the museum and Poetry Promise hold a series of workshops and they run for about a month. Every Saturday, a poet comes in, one of their teaching artists, and they're there from 11 until one o'clock in the afternoon and anyone can come and join a session of talking about art with the poet. As you've just heard Charlene describe, she chose Felix Gonzalez-Torres's Untitled (LA) when she did this with us last year and she came back again this year and you worked with our type exhibition, which is fantastic. I'd love to know more about that. I did some of the curator work on that, so I always love to hear about people interacting with that show. So this is totally free, by the way. We've just finished our latest session which took place in June and we're going to be doing this again in fall. I don't have exact dates for that but we will announce them on our website in the future. All right, so that's a brief overview of what we've just been referring to. Charlene, would you like to tell us, is there anything more that you'd like to tell us about that erasure poetry and the artwork?

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Was it the whole exhibition that you looked at or specific works?

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No, it was the whole exhibition, but because the exhibition deals with words and how words affect us, what I did for that was I brought in, for those of you who are familiar with erasure poetry, this is no great surprise, but for those of you who aren't, I brought in pages from a really, really old 1965 National Geographic. And I also brought in some pages from a very brief short story that I had read by one of my favorite authors, and the short story was really awful. It was terrible. I'm not one to desecrate books, but I felt that if I ripped out some of the pages from this book and did some poetry with it, it wouldn't be desecration, but maybe it would be putting it up on a higher plane.

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You were doing them a favor.

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Yeah, I was. Basically. You know, and she is my favorite, and she's one of my favorite authors, but this one was maybe an early, early, early work. Anyhow, I brought those in, put them on the table, and talked a little bit about erasure poetry using a black magic marker or any kind of magic marker and finding the words that jump out at you. Because as you read, certain words will jump, will pop and take away, I asked them and myself, to take away all the other words and just leave the words that seemed to pop. There was some remarkable stuff that came out from that and I wish I had taken participants did, but they were also surprised by how at the end of taking out the rest of it, the words that they selected actually made a poem. Hack actually had a turn at the end and made a poem. And it's almost like jazz, you know, it's almost like jazz music where you kind of pick and choose the notes and pick and choose the instruments even. So yeah, it was a really lovely experience. I'll have to bring you some of what I did.

0:17:51
If you could, that would be lovely. I always love to, I love the Felix poem that you wrote last year. I've actually got it here on this piece of paper in front of me. Oh. So I thought I'll just print it out and bring it to this radio recording. But yeah, I'd love to see any of the erasure poetry that came out of that. And I'm just thinking of how well what you've just described to me must have gone. I wasn't there at the session, by the way, everybody, so I didn't see this in person. But how well it must have gone with the exhibition, which does focus so much on words and on artists often choosing words very specifically. I know there's a work in the exhibition by Caralea Cole who did, I don't think poetry was her aim, but she did a lot of erasure in a large document and used that method of pinpointing things that she specifically thought were important to tell and found a story in the fairly, I think, dry

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original legal language of the document. And that's what was happening with the National Geographic pieces also. One of the magazines was from, as I said, 1965 and it dealt with Africa. And it was so, I'm not going to say bigoted, because it wasn't. It was... but from such a different angle, it was like Edgar Rice Burroughs. It was just from such a different... from such a different perspective. In fact, one of the women who had gotten that said that she was totally distracted in reading it, because it was like she kept going, oh my God. But she went past that and was able to black out enough of it so that a poem emerged that had absolutely nothing to do with what the article had to say. That sounds so transformative. It is, absolutely. Well, that's what erasure poetry is. It is a transformative form of poetry. Yeah, for sure.

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It's like you're talking back to the book, I guess, and then you find out right at the end what your conversation with the book was. Izzy, have you been hearing anything from the other poets who also took part in June's workshop? Because I know Charlene was the last one, but we also had Ms. AyeVee, for example. Did they talk to you about what they did with their groups?

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Yeah, so each one of them focused on kind of a different aspect of poetry. Some of them focused on more of the cultural aspects and wanting to connect with... how to describe it? I don't know like which poetic style they went with, but they wanted to connect with the backgrounds of the people who were coming into the workshops and make sure that they were sensitive to the storytelling that was coming out. That's something that we focus on, that we're creating a safe space for people who are sharing their poems, because a lot of times, we had an example of this at West Prep Academy, people will share very personal stories because the space feels so safe. So this will happen sometimes just with the adults that are in the space that are not necessarily going through the workshop. In one case, we found out that we had a former slam poet and the students were astounded at the West Prep Academy. One of the teachers revealed that they used to be a slam poet champion and this blew the students' minds. And they were not a teaching artist with Poetry Promise, they were just, you know, I think a PE teacher. A PE teacher, I agree. Not even an English teacher or something. No, no, no. So a lot of the transformative aspects with our programs, they really evolve from just creating that space and time to really connect with each person that's in the workshops. And our workshops can be very small sometimes. We have a program at El Shaddai and we work with four students five days a week for two hours a day and it's a refuge home. And so we work with students that have, you know, are experiencing homelessness, who are experiencing situations that we don't, can't even fathom. Some of us, but some of our teaching artists can. Some of our teaching artists come from the foster care system. Some of our teaching artists come from, you know, that experience of homelessness. So we have teaching artists that have a variety of different backgrounds, cultures. They're very diverse and we think about, you know, not to talk about the financial aspect of Poetry Promise, but we want to make sure that our teaching artists are paid really well, and we also pay them for like prep time too. So that way that thoughtfulness can go in and they have that safe space to really think about the audience that's, you know, receiving the instruction. I love that

0:23:15
So you're not just thinking about the people who are coming to you You're also thinking about the people who you're holding as as your own poets your teaching artists, correct? It sounds like this might be something that really sets poetry promise apart from I mean I can't think of any any other poetry programs that are quite as extensive as yourselves in Las Vegas at the moment, but a different program might not pay that same degree of attention that you have to things like, you know, fitting the artist to the specific people who are going to be there. That's fantastic.

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And that brings us back to considering poetry as an art form. As a poet who has work published, there are few, if any, agents for poetry writers. There are agents, a wazoo, for novelists and nonfiction books, etc., prose writers. But again, poetry is often a forgotten area and Poetry Promise brings us, as poets, validity and value because I think that you have value in many different ways but financial value is also important. Sorry I interrupted you.

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How do you do it then as a poet? Say I'm a poet, I've been to a poetry poem session at the Barrick Museum, I've gone, Charlene's inspiring me, I would love to publish some of my own poems. What do you think I should do?

0:25:02
Yeah, so right now we're kind of in a space where we're kind of, we're not in a growth space. That was last year, we got the Clark County Outside Agency Grant, and then we got the Nevada Fiscal State Recovery Grant. So in that sense, we had two community partners, and I basically had to plan 920 hours of poetry programming within the span of seven months. And we didn't think we were going to make it in time, but we did. So this year, we're really thinking about creating consistent programming, consistent, and we've had basically no turnover with our artists. We have 15 teaching artists. We really think about their well-being, what they want to do, what kind of programming they want to do. So I think if you're excited about Poetry Promise and the programming that we do, the best thing you can do is reach out. My email address, just go to our website. All of our information is on there, just poetrypromise.org. And just become part of the conversation and community, because when you do that, when you start going to the slams, and it doesn't have to be a slam if you're not competitive, but when you start going to these different events, you'll start to recognize the same people, and there's different opportunities. You know, there's the campfire community that's run by Ash DelGrego, and that runs at Rebar, and that's, you know, every other Wednesday, and it's huge, you know, and there's, I believe, gift cards that are offered, but it's more than that. It's this community of poets, and you start to realize how extensive it is in Las Vegas, and you start to put your name out there.

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Yeah, and I do, at West Charleston Library, I do an open reading once a month. And it has been really growing. I mean, it started with like five people, and the last time we did it, and again, this might not sound like much, but for a poetry community, it is, we had almost 20 people there. Oh, that's huge. Wow. That's huge, yeah. And they're dedicated. And they're dedicated, and it's so welcoming. We have a lot of fun doing it and there's all sorts of poetry from people who have never gotten up and done aloud, given their poetry to the community aloud, to people who have tons of experience doing it. And you learn from them, you learn from their poetry. You learn.

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Yeah.

0:27:36
It does make it sound so amazing.

0:27:38
It is.

0:27:39
I was going to say Bruce Isaacson also has a Saturday series at Winchester and that's another huge program.

0:27:47
And that's both Zoom as well as-

0:27:49
Zoom and in person. And that's totally free, isn't it?

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Yeah.

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All three.

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All of our programs are completely free.

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So you can just turn up. And that free-ness also includes the sessions at the Barrick. I know we need to wrap this up fairly shortly, so I'm just going to put in a very quick plug for the next series that we're going to have there in full. It's going to be in collaboration with our next series of exhibitions. Our current exhibitions end at the end of next week. Sorry, we're recording this earlier than we're actually putting it out, so not at the end of the next week. By the time you hear this, they'll already be closed. But next we're going to have an exhibition called Contemporary Ex-Votos, Devotion Beyond Medium. And we're going to have a Window Gallery installation by the local artist Jeannie Hua. And we're also going to have a collection show that's going to focus on the idea of looking at mothers and looking at other figures who are women. So if this sounds appealing to you, and I hope it does, and if making poetry sounds appealing to you, which after hearing this it should, please do come and take part in that. Okay, so I think we should wrap up now, Charlene and Izzy, thank you so, so much for taking the trip into the station and being with me today. This has been fantastic. It has, and thank you.

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You've been listening to Special Programming, aired in collaboration with the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art on the campus of UNLV. The content of this program did not reflect the views or opinions of 91.5 Jazz and More, The content of this program did not reflect the views or opinions of 91.5 Jazz and More, the University of Nevada Las Vegas, or the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education.

Transcribed with Cockatoo