The Tucson Poetry Festival is scheduled to light up the greater downtown Tucson area on April 28th and 29th of 2017. The festival’s Executive Director Em Bowen, Advisory Board Member and former Executive Director Teré Fowler-Chapman, and President Johanna Skibsrud were kind enough to sit with me for a roundtable interview regarding the history of the Tucson Poetry Festival and what to look forward to in April, as well as their collective vision of poetry as public discourse. We sat down together at Cartel on Broadway, leaning in to hear each other over Lou Reed, and the following conversation transpired. This interview has been edited for clarity and length, with the approval of everyone present.
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Riley:
When someone asks you, “What is the Tucson Poetry Festival?” what do you say? And along these lines, what is the Tucson Poetry Festival to you? Or, if you prefer, how would you define the term “poetry?”
Johanna:
I’ve been involved with the festival only one year so far— working closely with with Teré Fowler-Chapman, and so really I was coming into the Tucson Poetry festival with their energy, and their vision, which has been and continues to be really inspiring. Last year’s experience was exciting because we saw a lot of things that really worked and a lot of things that we could improve on. It feels exciting to see how we’ll make use of what we learned last year to make this year’s festival as open and representative of the many, many different facets of the literary community and broader artistic community in Tucson and beyond. That’s a consistent conversation that I’ve been having with Teré and now with Em— we’re looking for ways that we can bring different poetry groups and arts groups into this festival and make them feel invested in it, make them feel that it’s truly a Tucson poetry festival, representing a lot of different communities and interests.
Em:
Along same lines as Johanna, I’ve gone to and attended the Tucson Poetry Festival, and I’m not, I would say, a traditional poet, coming from more of a nonfiction and journalistic background. So I’ve kind of dabbled in different areas of the literary arts scene. In envisioning the Tucson Poetry Festival and what does it mean to me, the vision is a similar thing— a platform that all of the preexisting organizations that hold up the literary community in Tucson can kind of plug into. We can have it serve our purposes as mirroring what is happening in society at large: within the city, within the country, and within the world. So being kind of cognizant of that and working together to put on the showcase that represents that to the public, not just other poets, but the public in general.
Teré:
So when people ask me about what the Poetry Festival is, I say that it’s a space of expression and it’s essentially [a platform one time in the city where it’s a celebration of people expressing themselves, but also introducing people to expression for the first time]. And what it means to me, as a poet, is it means having a platform to be visible and feel heard, and also to have a platform to be inspired, which I don’t know if that is something that I see as a person or as a poet or just really as a person in general.
Johanna:
I do think that poetry understood in broad terms is a way of thinking that challenges the expectation we usually have: that we need to know where we are going in advance, that we have to already have arrived somewhere. It’s an opening; it’s an invitation to have a genuine conversation and make genuine contact, and I think that’s really, really important -- to have a space in every community where we can think about and reimagine what the word “community” even means.
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Riley:
Tell me a little about the inception of the Tucson Poetry Festival? I understand it was founded in 1981, but I’m curious to hear more about who founded it and why it was founded at that particular moment.
Teré:
So, yeah, it was founded in 1981, and because the festival has always been this living and breathing space, with that amount of space, sometimes history gets lost, right, and history falls into a storytelling, like whatever is told via story is kind of what is.
Riley:
There was no internet then.
Teré:
Yeah, exactly. There was no internet then. I wasn’t even a thought in 1981— I came, like, seven years later. You know, I think without having the people here from 1981 it would be really hard to say exactly what they thought when they were creating and birthing this into existence. So I don’t have exact names or anything like that, but the essence is that this is a celebration of poetry, and that it was created from the idea that poetry should be celebrated, and that it should hold space in the Tucson community.
A lot of times, especially modern poets, we combat this idea that poetry is a dead art, and that we’re all chasing this romantic art that has expired, and I don’t think that that’s the case. I don’t think that’s the case now, and I don’t think that was the case in 1981, and so keeping that alive and adding logs to that fire so that it continues to burn is the history of the festival and continues to be.
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Riley:
I saw that last year, the festival hosted readings, poetry slams, workshops, and even concerts. Are their any highlights you recall with particular fondness?
Teré:
The biggest highlight for me was the fact that we hosted the reading at Mercy Gallery, and the accessibility of that space. You could literally come as you are and everyone was able to have the experience they wanted to have during that time. And so that was definitely a highlight because, you know, living in a downtown that was built before a lot of us were here that kind of left accessibility out of the equation in a lot venues, it was really hard to find that venue, and that was a highlight. I think that’s also part of what made the reading so magical too, which I thought was a conscious thing that we were thinking about.
Johanna:
Tere says magical, and it really was. The highlight was the reading itself. We had an incredible, very diverse group of poets reading from really different work, and the energy in that room— I don’t know. I’ve been to a lot of poetry readings, and I’ve never felt that, that energy. I don’t know how to describe it.
Teré:
Yeah. It’s like, speechless. There really isn’t a word to describe it. It’s kind of like, um—
Johanna:
—There were tears.
Teré:
Happy ones.
Teré:
Another highlight on the administrative side was creating welcome bags and including things we appreciate as locals here— this is where we like to go for coffee, here is some local honey. By the end of it, they felt like they were a part of Tucson.
Teré:
And the music aspect. The fact that we held space for music in the festival is important. Music is poetic. It’s poetry. We were challenging the conception of what poetry is by intentionally making space for music. We consciously reached out to musicians we have felt inspired by—and we consciously made a bookstore a music venue. Poetry is fun, so there were a lot of fun moments.
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Riley:
What does the programming look like for this year? What new directions is it taking and with what hopes in mind?
Em:
Basically we have invited three nationally established poets, and three local poets, and of those three, one to two are emerging.*
Johanna:
And that’s a difference from previous years— the focus on local and emerging poets.
Em:
We have a nice mix of those associated with academia, spoken word, different forms, established, not established.
Teré:
We’ve always held space for established poets and internationally and nationally recognized poets, but rarely have they shared the same stage at the same time. Now, rather than having a local’s only event, we might have the Tucson voices share the same stage as the national voices. You can expect music and emerging voices and established poets to be a part of that conversation— you can also expect poets that don’t even consider themselves poets to be part of that conversation.
Em:
And the two-day structure as opposed to the three-day structure, the great thing is that, if they’re still there Sunday, there’s Words on the Avenue, which is an open mic, so they have a local stage on which to engage. And the poets have certain things they are committing themselves to, but we encourage them to participate in other things in the community. We figure, let’s get a lot of sweet moments and then want more rather than trying to get everything out of everyone that we can. We want to leave space there for future moments, and to be respectful of everyone’s time and space and health.
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Riley:
How is the Tucson Poetry Festival in conversation with other Poetry-related happenings around the country? How is it like or unlike other literary gatherings? How does it fit within the bigger picture of contemporary poetic discourse?
Teré:
I think one of the biggest things on a national level is bringing the poetry festival into consciousness that— not an assumption that people are having a good time, but an openness to ask people how they are feeling during the time at the festival. And I think that we’re seeing that not just in poetry, but we’re seeing that in other non-discrimination and anti-harassment policies that are being placed on other poetry festivals and just in the arts in general. But this is very much an issue within our community as well. And a lot of times when you think of poetry, you think of openness, and that comes with vulnerability; you have to be responsible for that vulnerability. So in a very big way we are aligned nationally with the responsibility we’re seeing other projects take on. For instance, we just got an e-mail the other day from a poetry festival in Austin that’s actually using our harassment policy as an outline to create their own.
Johanna:
The poets that we’re bringing out, the caliber of their work and their exposure on the national and international stage, continues to be, really excellent. We’ve been re-imagining the structure of the festival, though, in order to make the best use of having that talent infused in the city. We’re especially trying to reimagine how we’ll do the panel discussion that has traditionally been a part of the festival, and to keep thinking of the festival -- not as a text -- but as a living, breathing space.
Teré:
Another great thing is collaboration, re-imagining what that collaboration looks like, and turning it toward the conversational. So it’s not just about looking to other people to hold space for what they do at the festival, but to also about talking to other organizations in town, like POG is a great organization that we’ve collaborated with, and the Tucson [Youth] Poetry Slam, Words on the Avenue, Casa Libre, and the Poetry Center. These are organizations that are doing their own things in their own communities and bringing poetry together in their way, but using the Tucson Poetry Festival as an umbrella to capture all of that at once, we are having those conversations and allowing them to actually have a say and voice in who we even bring to the festival.
Johanna:
I think that’s fairly unique— this effort to really bring together a lot of really different approaches to poetry that don’t often share the same spaces. I think that that’s something that is fairly unique and that’s really important to us.
Em:
One of the things I think about is when you go to poetry readings, whether in Portland, Oregon, or here, or New York City, is the time length. Like we’re gonna go up there and read for twenty minutes, and that’s just how it’s traditionally been done. You have the mic, and you camp out, and you keep reading and reading, and you have the floor, so everyone’s gonna listen. And that, I mean, that scientifically does not work because the human brain can’t pay attention for more than about ten minutes. So I think the question is, How can we get people engaged for the most amount of time? How can the reader and the poet— you don’t want to write to your audience, right? It’s coming through you whatever it is— how can you also be respectful of the audience’s time and ears? So I think the extra consciousness of shorter reading times, not to limit the poet, but to maximize the engagement of the audience, is significant.
Riley:
How does the Tucson Poetry Festival engage the community and how can the community get involved?
Em:
We just did the first step, where we figured out as a board who we are inviting. We had those discussions with other organizations in the community. Another thing we’re doing is ideally having fundraisers and doing outreach. We’ll be frequenting events and spaces that are not typically poetic spaces, but are community spaces, and invite different types of individuals into those spaces. It could work; it could not work, but we’re willing to go there. We want to think of new ways.
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For more information and updates as the festival approaches, visit http://www.tucsonpoetryfestival.org.