SPEAKER_02 0:00

B E H D, the frequency.

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Happy Friday, Boulder. I think we're in for a nice day today after some snow this week that we've needed desperately, right? Today we're featuring an interview with Shay Castle and Lafayette's new poet Laureate, Michelle Batiste. Enjoy and have a great weekend.

SPEAKER_02 0:25

I'd love for you to start by introducing yourself. Who are you and why are we talking today?

SPEAKER_01 0:31

Sure. So my name is Michelle Batiste, and I am the newly appointed poet laureate of Lafayette, Colorado. I was appointed in in early April, which was a really good timing because it's the beginning of National Poetry Month.

SPEAKER_02 0:49

I would love to know how you feel about being named a poet laureate of Lafayette, which is, I assume, where you live.

SPEAKER_01 0:57

I'll go back a little bit, but I moved to Colorado in in 2009 with my Ben husband and kiddo, who was about 18 months, to start a PhD program at CU Boulder, which was wonderful. And I lived in student housing in Boulder. And after a few years, my husband and I decided to separate. And I dropped out of the PhD program to go back to work and really wanted to figure out a um a long-term place to be in Colorado, loved Boulder, but it wasn't quite manageable. And I had visited Lafayette for a couple of their sort of holiday celebrations, Easter or Halloween. And I really loved the small town feel. I loved the celebration plaza. Um there was so much I loved about it. So I moved to Lafayette in 2013 and bought my first home ever. Some first-time homeowner in Lafayette. I fell in love with Lafayette before I moved there. And my love for my community has just grown. And then when this opportunity to apply for the poet laureate position opened up, I really thought that it was time for me to apply. I thought now, now is the time. Now I feel like I can really give the energy to this position that it deserves. It is a very different position than poet, you know, full stop, right? It's about the community, right? So the poet laureate position belongs to the community. And it's been wonderful because if you tell somebody you're a poet, they ask you questions about you. What do you write? What do you like to write? Have you published? Do you have any books? Where can I read your stuff? When I tell someone that I'm the poet laureate, they tell me about their relationship to poetry, or they tell me about their relationship to Lafayette, or they tell me about their history. It is a very different paradigm and a very different relationship to poetry. And it really is not about the poems that I write or myself as a poet, but it is about how our community connects to poetry and the role of poetry in our community, and what I can do in this position as Poet Laureate to really help my neighbors and community members connect to poetry in a way that's meaningful to them and strengthens their relationship to Lafayette and strengthens their relationships with their other neighbors and strengthens their relationships with our shared history and our shared future. Well, so far, so good.

SPEAKER_02 4:12

That was absolutely beautiful, the way you explained it. And you're totally right. As someone whose job is to ask questions, that's exactly what I would ask. So that's fascinating. Good observation. So are you a full-time writer and poet?

SPEAKER_01 4:29

I am not. I am a full-time fundraiser for the Nature Conservancy in Colorado, which has its offices in Boulder, just on the corner of Wolsom and Spruce. And I've been with the Nature Conservancy for 10 years. I am very passionate about nature conservation, and I'm very passionate about my job. And I'm also a mom and a wife, a daughter, all of those things which take up a lot of time. I have managed to do a lot with poetry, even though it isn't what I get to do full-time. I've just written my fourth book. I do workshops and presentations. So it is a big part of my life.

SPEAKER_02 5:20

I'm gonna give an anecdote before I ask my next question. I read once about a Balinese meditation that focuses on the four spirit guides that come with you into this life and take you into the next. And the four spirit guides were strength, intelligence, friendship, and poetry.

SPEAKER_01 5:40

Oh wow. It makes so much sense to me because there are connections between poetry and prayer. There are connections between poetry and song. There's a connection between poetry and spell casting, right? And I think of spell casting and prayer to be very similar things, which is we are trying to bring something into this world, right? If we think about prayer and if we think about spell casting, and if we think about chanting and song, it very often includes language. It very often includes a lot of things that we think about when we think about poetry, which is sort of the rhythm, the evocative nature of poetry, of language, right? When we speak it, it becomes real. More and more I think of poetry having this very critical role in being that sort of entrance to a place where we are open to awe, open to wonderment, open to new possibilities, open to things being different than they are, open to imagining anew. And it gets a little woo-woo, right? But it also is so important because whether your church is a church or a temple, or your church is a forest, or your church is a community, or your church is a concert, when we go there, we go to uh experience a different state of being. And what helps us get there is the language that we use, the call, response, the rhythm, the images. That I think is the role that poetry plays in my life and can play in other people's lives and does play in other people's lives, whether or not they they realize it.

SPEAKER_02 8:01

Tell me about your relationship with poetry throughout your life, you know, start at the beginning and how has it how has it evolved over time?

SPEAKER_01 8:10

Absolutely. I mean, I always loved poetry, the sing-songiness of it. And I think I I wrote my first poem in in fifth grade, and it was a terrible poem, and it was called A Box Marked Summer. My dad, he died when I was 15, and he was a very stoic, sort of short-tempered guy, and did not express emotions and was very slow to give praise. He was like, This is good, this is good, you should do this some more. And that's really all it took, right? Is just one person saying, You're pretty good at this, maybe you should you maybe you should do it some more. And which is why I think like the encouragement for young people at a young age is is such an incredible guiding tool. And so I wrote a lot. I really sort of in high school identified as a poet. My first poetry publication was in our high school literary journal. I still have it. It is cringy, so cringy. It's a poem about like turning 17. And just it was always a part of my identity, even through college. I did not do like a bachelor's in fine arts or something like that, but I took creative writing courses and I got a lovely award, which again is sort of affirming, right? And it made me think like, hey, I am a good poet. This is part of my identity, this is what I do, right? And I think this makes sense through my teens and my twenties. It wasn't about what poetry can do, it was about what I can do. And somewhere in my mid-twenties, I started playing, paying closer attention to what my contemporaries were writing and reading a lot of contemporary poetry, right? Because like through high school and college, I'm reading poetry that we study, right? Like um all the great canonical poets, like I'm writing something so differently. When I started reading more widely among my peers and among poets that were publishing, it became very clear to me that I was not a good poet. Like I was a bad poet. They were not great poems. I mean, they were mediocre poems, they were okay poems. I was getting like an occasional poem published. But I just remember sort of reconnecting with somebody from high school, Ariel Greenberg, who is also a poet. And we reconnected, and she shared a poem of hers with me. And I was like, oh my God, this is amazing. This is such an amazing poem. I do not write this well. And I was having that experience over and over and over again. So I had this period sort of like in my mid, maybe to late 20s, right? Like this went on for a while. So mid to late 20s, where I kind of came to this conclusion, like I may identify as a poet, but I'm not a I'm not a good one. So I have two choices either I stop, find something else to do, develop my identity in a different way, or I get better. And what that meant was taking it from what I always experienced to be sort of like this internal practice and making it an external practice and reading even more widely. And that's when I started figuring out it's not about me, it's about the poetry and what poetry can do. And how can I make poetry that creates a space where people can experience things anew, right? It's not about my moment of discovery, it's about the reader's moment of discovery, and that was a big shift. And I've been working on that for a couple of decades now, right? And you think about your journey, like you journey to mastery, and my journey has been a journey to service, like service to poetry, service to the people who read poetry. That's ultimately that is my goal that I create poems that offer up a an opportunity for people to feel some wonderment, not at the poem, but at the world around them.

SPEAKER_02 12:54

Was there a point where you felt like, oh, I I am good at this again? Have you?

SPEAKER_01 13:00

And when was that? I was living in New York at the time. And I was working for an organization called Helen Keller International, which was another nonprofit organization that did micronutrient supplementation and vision health in developing countries. Very meaningful work, and again, sort of took a lot out of me and um didn't have a lot of time to write. But and when I did write, it was on the subway to and from work. So it was this really dedicated, fabulous time to write, which was probably, depending on the subway ride, an hour to and an hour and a half a day. I would get in this rhythm so that as soon as I got in the subway, right? Like it was just sort of like I'm in writing mode. And I started writing this series of poems about a mother and daughter, but uh it's actually a ghost story. The daughter doesn't exist. And it it was fun, right? Because the first poem's like, you really think it's about this like kind of cloying relationship between the mom and the daughter, and then it evolves and you realize that it's much more psychologically complex because the she doesn't really have a daughter, but she's haunted by one. And working on that series and working on it daily and sort of working on this poetry that was outside of myself, because at the time I was not a mother, that's when I realized that that I could do this in a way that I hadn't been doing before.

SPEAKER_02 14:33

I'd love to know about your process when you're writing a piece. Does it all just flow out in one? Is it a hard chipping away? Do you edit a lot? Do you revise? Like, what does your process look like?

SPEAKER_01 14:45

Processes change as our lives change. Nothing flows out of me these days. I have to like pull it out by its hair. And that's not true. I have to get my butt in a seat and say, okay, I'm going to write. Once I start writing, the process can sometimes be kind of flowy. Like it might come out in a way that feels easier. Sometimes it doesn't. But I will say the real craft always happens in revision. My friend Erica Meitner, who's an incredible poet, talks about like two different types of poets or two different ways of writing. And one is sort of the project poet, and that's the poet that you know creates a series of poems about something or wants all their poems to do a certain type of thing, right? And it's a book that's built around a certain structure or a theme or something like that. And then there's the mixtape poets who like write poems, like this poem is about this, and I'm gonna go write a poem about this, and uh, I'm writing a poem about this, right? And and at the end, they they kind of when they put their book together, they find the ways that those pieces speak to each other and talk to each other and connect. And I have very much evolved into a project poet. My second book, which is a book of linked narrative documentary poems about the Soviet occupation of post-World War II Budapest. And then my last book is a collection of linked poems about this made-up haunted mountain town called Elsewhere, but it also functions as an oracle deck. So it's the poems, and then each poem has an oracle and they're connected to a card. And each poem is a person, place, or thing in the town of elsewhere. So then the poems are about elsewhere, but the oracles are about the reader. So that also was a was a project. And when I am in between projects, I kind of struggle a little bit to write. And so now I've got a new project. I've got a new poetry project, and it's a lot of fun. It is a play on the sort of meme or joke, that's what she said. The title of every poem is that's what she said. And the first line of every poem is something that she said, you know. So I'm having um, I'm having a lot of fun with that.

SPEAKER_02 17:38

But where can people find your work? Where can people find you? I know the poet Laureate has, you know, responsibilities and makes appearances and things, but how can people find you and your work and support you?

SPEAKER_01 17:49

Absolutely. So I have a website, it's my name, Michelle Batiste.net, and I list my events on there, and I also list my books and where they're available. My latest book I know is at the Boulder Bookstore. Um, I am working with um Rachel Hansen, who is the director of arts and cultural resources for Lafayette, to really start thinking about how I can start, you know, either piggybacking on some existing programming or do some existing programming. We're going to schedule sort of like a public reading in Lafayette. I would like to do workshops. I would also like to do do some activities at Art Night Out. So, for example, Zee, I know, and we'll probably continue, does typewriter poetry at Art Night Out, where if you give them some uh cues, they'll they'll create a short typewriter poem on the spot. I was thinking more about doing some actual engaging the poet in the people and maybe doing some you know mad poems, like you know, taking a an existing poem and taking out some of the nouns and verbs and having people co-write a poem with a famous poet and do some fun stuff like that. And I think people surprise themselves if they just give themselves a little bit of freedom to play in the end or in at the beginning, right? Art and poetry and music is all about just giving ourselves permission to revert back to sort of like again, that kind of openness to discovery and newness.

SPEAKER_02 19:35

I would love it if you are willing, if you have a piece or two of poetry that you'd like to share.

SPEAKER_01 19:42

I can read the poem that I wrote for the city of Lafayette. So this poem is called Anne Still, and it's an ephrastic poem. So it's a poem in response to an image, a piece of art or an image. One of my friends here in Lafayette is a gentleman called named Ted Floyd. He's the editor of Birding Magazine. He's one of the preeminent ornithologists in North America. He's a really big deal. He took a photo at Wanaka Lake on an afternoon that both he and I were walking around the lake. I often see him walking around the lake, and a lot of people were walking around the lake because it was a beautiful late January afternoon. The sunlight was golden, the temperature was warm, and all of a sudden, amongst all these people walking around the lake, a coyote walks onto the ice. And Ted, who's an incredible photographer, captured a photo of the coyote. And he also managed to get in the foreground this gorgeous green-winged teal floating in the foreground. And the the idea that we share this space with all of these other creatures is one that makes me really think about what it means to live in Lafayette. So I'll I'll read this. And still. A coyote walks onto the half-frozen waters of Wanaka Lake, and the winter sun, as startled as the people circling the shoreline, pauses its slow creep behind the mountain and stares. Its last gasp light, slanted and golden, clings to the animal's coat, turning her form to treasure. Tempting, maybe, to imagine a time when wild things wandered a landscape not staked or claimed or platted or mined, before playground and parking lot, frisbee golf, and the thwok, wak, thwok of the pickle balls. Just shh. The sucerant wind drifting across endless plain, first people's footsteps. Steps breaking tall brittle grasses, and a coyote walks onto the half-frozen lake, but the past won't behave, refuses to humor our longing for a landscape that did not exist, and insists that the lake, like history, is man-made. A spring dammed in 1865 for thirsty farmland, and a coyote walks onto the ice. The lake soon, wider, deeper, the keeper of water needed to steamp power a plant, electrifying the night, and again a coyote walks onto the ice. And it's easy to imagine pimpricks of luminescence pushing back the darkness from Longmont to Denver, the strength to sustain candescence moored on the south shore of the lake, our lake, its waters half frozen, tempting to forget the men who hauled coal from beneath our town to feed the plant, its power, the progress, a radiance we can't deny, and it's beautiful, our history, ugly too, what we claimed, those we exploited, excluded, the slag piles left behind. Or are they a monument to what we must remember? And still, as a green-winged teal drifts the surface, unaware of danger behind him, not thinking of what comes next, a sun-golden coyote walks onto the half-frozen waters of Wanaka Lake, like it belongs there, like it did before, like it will again, like it will outlast boathouse and pavilions and people circling the shoreline, staring in wonder as the sun slips at last behind the mountain. The past owls. But now listens. The future begins to sing. Thank you. That one took a lot that was a lot of revision.