July 5, 2022
Seven years ago this month, I was fortunate to have the company and inspiration of five other poets for two weeks at CSU Monterey Bay. CSU’s Summer Arts Program offers professors who teach at a CSU campus a chance to organize a class that gives CSU students a chance to work with other artists and writers who are not part of the CSU system. The challenge of being in charge of such a class is that one is required to do an immense amount of recruiting work. One is given a budget, and the job is to find enough students to enroll in the class.
I managed to sign up a truly all-star faculty for that course in 2015 and their presence enabled my course to attract sufficient enrollment. The five poets who taught in the course included Juan Felipe Herrera, Marilyn Nelson, Ellen Bass, Cecilia Woloch, and Douglas Kearney. I felt especially fortunate to have Juan Felipe Herrera agree to teach a couple days of workshops at the course before he was appointed the national poet laureate. Herrera was certainly a well-known and admired poet, but I don’t think anyone in late 2014 was picking him to be the next superstar.
At that time, in a similar manner, those of us in Los Angeles who knew Douglas Kearney’s work were very aware of how good a poet he was, and in being part of the faculty at Cal Arts in Valencia he certainly did have an institutional affiliation that supported that recognition. One of the things I had noticed about Kearney was simply how hard he worked and how generous he was in sharing his artistic energy and knowledge. Early in the past decade, the program of bringing guest poets to the CSU Long Beach campus had fallen into an abyss of non-support. The total budget the creative writing faculty was given for the entire year was $150. Douglas Kearney deserved a minimum of ten time that to read at CSU Long Beach, but he nevertheless drove all the way to Long Beach to give a reading in the evening after a long day of teaching. It was an extraordinary reading. Kearney literally radiated the full-throated dexterity of the vowels and consonants that pulsed within his poems. Along with Nelson, Bass, and Woloch, the class at Monterey Bay was a memorable convocation of poets enfolding each other within the other’s visions.
I have just learned that Douglas Kearney has won a major poetry prize, and I am utterly delighted to share this news, as well as a link to this brief interview.
https://www.mprnews.org/episode/2022/06/23/st-paul-poet-wins-2022-international-griffin-poetry-prize
Minnesota Now
St. Paul poet wins 2022 International Griffin Poetry Prize
Cathy Wurzer and Gretchen Brown
About Bill Mohr