North Carolina's Poet Laureate On New Language In Transformative Times

North Carolina's poet laureate says this is a moment for putting pen to paper. Jaki Shelton Green says, as an artist, she is observing and resetting during the pandemic. And she's gathering material in the journals she keeps. Green spoke with WFDD's Bethany Chafin about how to document and stay connected to our stories.

Interview Highlights

On poetry in the midst of a pandemic:

I think the question for myself is, 'What does it mean to be human during this time, and how do I be very, very present to my humanity?' The word grace is a word that my grandmother used a lot when I was a child. And the word baffled me, to be honest, until my 40s. I could not wrap my brain, my consciousness around the word grace. And when I think of a time like this, and I have been thinking about this time, there is a lot of grace in this moment. And I think as the artisan, as the writer, as the maker, I think part of my responsibility is to remind myself and to remind others that it's a graceful time. And how do we lean into the dance of all of this? How do we use a different kind of language, you know? How do we find the transformation inside of all of these transitions that have been just dropped upon our laps?

We woke up one morning and life demanded something else. But I think that inside of that something else is where we need not be afraid to go but to see how we can stretch it and widen and expand it through our humanity. And to me, that's where the poetics begin.

On the phrase, "What we keep, keeps us":

I believe as writers, as artisans, we're always mining. We're always cultivating, we're always digging, we're archaeologists of our own anthropology, and we're keeping that anthropology. I have a friend who keeps her great grandfather's Civil War uniform. And it became the genesis of all of her short stories — coupling that with the letters that came home, the diaries. So I just invite people to look at these things differently, because if you don't really understand the stories they're holding, why are you keeping them? So I go in search of 'Where it does come from? How did you get it? Why do I now have it? Who did it belong to when it was originally passed down?' Because I think of storage, it's sort of like the passed down stories, and I think that they're carried in all of these artifacts.

On ways into the world of poetry:

This is a great time to pull out old photographs ... old scrapbooks. You know, it's a great time to pull out those recipes written down on pieces of paper that are old and greasy and wrinkled because they've been used so many times. I've often talked about poetry with people in terms of how you arrange the furniture in your room. If you had a blank canvas, what's the first thing you would put in the room? What's the first idea that pops without you unconsciously thinking about it? Write it down. You know, when you go for your walk today with the kids or without the kids or your bike ride, what are you hearing that you hear for the first time, or you hear differently? Write it down. Sometimes people just say things that stick with you. One line; write it down. That's that gathering process. That's using a journal as a bank account. You hear a piece of music that speaks to you. It brings tears to your eyes because it just seems it fits so much where you are right now, emotionally. What are the lines that pull you in? Write them down.