Crystal Wilkinson is the author of several books, including the poetry collection Perfect Black (University Press of Kentucky, 2021) and three works of fiction. Wilkinson is the recipient of a 2022 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry, a 2021 O. Henry Prize, among others. She is a professor in the MFA in creative writing program at the University of Kentucky and an associate chair of English. In 2022, she received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. In collaboration with Louisville Public Radio, Wilkinson will initiate and host the podcast “Words for the People,” which is produced and distributed by Louisville Public Media. It will explore themes of community, socio-political issues, diversity, and healing through conversations and art-making with intergenerational guests, including established and emerging Kentucky writers.
Poets.org: What do you hope for the future of poetry in Kentucky, and what support do you hope future poets laureate in the state have?
Crystal Wilkinson: Kentucky is a sort of heaven for writers and poets. We have one of the richest literary legacies in the country, but there are still gaps. I was fortunate to have friends and mentors among the Affrilachian Poets—Nikky Finney, bell hooks, and the wonderful Gayl Jones. As well as Wendell Berry and George Ella Lyon. But those relationships took a long time to build. I didn’t have confidence in writing as a Kentuckian until I was out of college. I simply didn’t know any writers from Kentucky, and I especially didn’t know any poets who looked like me. I hope for a future wherein every blossoming poet will see themselves reflected in the face and the work of a Kentucky poet, and that they will then be able to lean toward the possibilities of what kind of future they might have. This can be done through community—pairing the established with the emerging—and simply by the poet laureate being present in the state and traveling as much as they can.
I’d also like to see poetry become more visible in our state. Poems on billboards and buildings, in bus stations, on barns, stores, and abandoned buildings. Poems have the capacity to heal. I’d like to see more opportunities for poets of all abilities and styles to make their work public in a more immediate way instead of waiting for traditional publication. I also think we can do more with diversifying poetry and letters in the state. We’ve made headway with our poet laureate program. Frank X Walker was the first Black poet laureate in 2014. I was the first Black woman poet laureate, and now we have inducted the first openly gay poet laureate— Silas House. U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, who is Mexican American, also lives in Kentucky, so we are blooming. I hope that future poets laureate in Kentucky not only receive the monetary support to carry out their mission, but that they will also continue to have the freedom and means to bring their poetry project ideas into fruition. Documentation helps with this process, and we have a very active Kentucky Arts Council which helps facilitate the work that the poet laureate does. I hope that the next poet laureate can have more help as they line up their projects over the next two years. I hope they can continue the groundwork laid by myself and other poet laureates in asserting that all stories matter.
Poets.org: How has being a poet laureate changed your relationship to your own writing?
CW: For so many years, my work as a poet was overshadowed by my work as a fiction writer. Being poet laureate has helped me fully understand what I bring to the table as a poet and to take more risks. Of course, before becoming poet laureate, I published a book of poetry, but I didn’t do so with confidence. Though I was already engaged fully in the form in a very private, personal way, being poet laureate allowed me to claim poetry as a part of who I am as a writer in a more expansive way. I joke that I always secretly considered myself a poet with a little “p,” and that I’m now a poet with a capital “P.” I think it has also made me more intentional about poetry. I start each day by reading a poem,no matter what genre I’m writing. I write really close to the bone. I write about family. I write about being Black and country. But I think being poet laureate has also made me think about the audience in ways that have moved my work forward. Not that I don’t continue to write about family and geographical space, but being this public has also helped me think about how a poem travels and where it travels to. To think more intentionally about how a poem expands and contracts, how it travels, away from me and my experience, curiosities, and imagination, and out to others. How my own experience might be a vehicle to facilitate someone else’s healing or understanding, not only of me and my culture, but also of themselves. Sometimes there’s a tension there, amid my particular culture and the reader’s but that, too, is part of the conversation that the poem incites, conjures, or meditates on. Of course, it was my intention to do those things before, but I think I’ve reached a deeper understanding of that with my work. There is also something in the role that voice plays, which has been a lesson for me. Before I became poet laureate, I wanted the reader to experience my poetry only on the page, but now I also think about the performance of the poem and how my reading of it affects the reader / listener.
Poets.org: How can a poet, or poetry, bring a community together?
CW: Language has the propensity to heal. Music has the propensity to heal, and poetry combines those two things. Kentucky has many Black and brown people and communities, but little is known about us. As the first Black woman to hold this position, what’s been interesting is that even when I’ve gone into places that have few Black people, I encounter people of all ages, faiths, and backgrounds who say that a particular poem resonates with them. Poetry is powerful in this way. I’ve read and spoken in places where arms were crossed in defiance, and then a softening occurs at that moment wherein we reach common ground as human beings through a poem; when I reach that line in a poem that allows them to open a space in their heart or even that space where they find common ground in some other way. Poetry can be a light. It can illuminate the dark spaces, the spaces where things make us uncomfortable, but it can also illuminate the basic foundations—joy, pain, fear, and hope—these deeper emotions that make us most human. A writer friend of mine says that when he’s trying to do community organizing, the first order of business is to make people equal by providing food for them to share. Poetry is food for the heart and soul. When it’s present at the table it better enables us to fully experience something outside ourselves, while simultaneously learning more deeply about who we are or who we want to be—individually and collectively.
Poets.org: What part of your project were you most excited about?
CW: What I was most excited about was this bridging of the gap, of having emerging and established poets on equal ground; of having young poets and elder poets on the same ground. We reached so many people with Words for the People. People listened with the idea of hearing their friends or a famous poet and stayed for the rest. We created community through the podcast. Emerging writers were heard for the first time throughout Kentucky, across the U.S., and we even had listeners from around the world. I am especially excited about having such a gap of experience on the podcast. The best examples of that are ten-year old King El-amin, who blew the audience away, and eighty-eight year-old Wendell Berry, who was also featured. What a world! What a world in which you have a young Black boy who has the confidence and talent to write and read his poem “Black Boy Joy” to a statewide, national, and international audience and to talk about bullying and how he’s tried to empower his peers. Then, a few episodes later, to feature one of our most revered American poets and writers, Wendell Berry. It was fantastic and exactly the kind of magic I intended to create. I’m also extremely excited that the podcast will live on through Louisville Public Media (LPM), and we’ve created lesson plans to go with each episode, so teachers can listen with their students and be guided through writing exercises.
Poets.org: What obstacles, if any, did you experience when starting your project?
CW: The largest obstacle was how to implement the podcast in a way that would produce quality. I originally came up with the idea because my tenure as poet laureate began during the pandemic and I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to visit all the schools, libraries, and community organizations that I really wanted to visit. I originally planned on doing the podcast just over Zoom. I wanted to try to have a platform that I could share with others, but once I made the connection with the staff and directors at LPM, we took the idea to another level. The quality of each episode, even the live episode, was absolutely amazing. I’m so proud of what we accomplished and how many people we reached—not only here in Kentucky, but all over the world.
Poets.org: Is there a poem on Poets.org that inspires you and your work in Kentucky, particularly when thinking of healing through intergenerational conversations, as your project encourages?
CW: Oh, wow. This is a hard one. There are so many poems that work with these themes. So I must cheat and choose two. I think it helps to have two poems that are in conversation with one another somehow. Nearly everyone has some memory of a parental figure or guardian, so I often begin a conversation with a poem about family. “My Father’s Geography” by Afaa Michael Weaver is one that I would use again and again. With this poem, I could enter a conversation with someone who is, let’s say, seasoned in life, someone older, as well as someone younger. The poem describes the parent-child relationship, but also the distance between them; perhaps it’s a distance in geography, education, or an understanding of the world; perhaps it’s just age, as in most parent-child relationships. The poem also depicts France, the French Riviera, and the internationalness of it all. There’s the child going away from home; the child having almost grown away from home in these learned ways that we often associate with education and travel. And then the father enters with longing, with a simple desire to have his child home, breaking the facade of what France is and all the freedom, if you will, that it stands for. He appears bigger than anything else in the poem with his love, his colloquial, straightforward love and voice, and breaks the French spell so magnificently. This poem could be set anywhere geographically and could be between a parent and child from any area. I’d start with that bridge between parent and child that we all stand upon in some way, that reaches across one generation to the next. The poem does the work of this. It shows us the wonder of parental love and how it penetrates every facade. I love that about this poem, and I love Afaa’s work.
A second poem might be “Daughters, 1900” by Marilyn Nelson. This poem provides a language for intimacy among family members. It’s a master class on how to present a group of people in a poem and give them each a life and an existence as well as personality and characterization on the page. This poem reaches back, yet is familiar because of the playful bickering between the siblings. Even the mother and father are there, but it’s the five daughters who shine here: in their actions, in their inaction, in dialogue at the end. In my own work, when I think of building a family into a poem, a large family, I sometimes reduce them to a single poem for each person so I can illuminate them in some way. But Nelson teaches us that you can put them all there on the page and allow them to come to life. She also says something here about things being passed down or taught by one generation to another. And the poem is buttoned up so elegantly and seamlessly as a villanelle. It's stunning.
These poems work in unison with one another when you think about what one generation might learn from another. They work beautifully in this way.