A Master of the Living Art: A Conversation with Paisley Rekdal by Frances Richey

A Master of the Living Art

 

 It’s important for people to see this as a living art that is continuing to evolve and 
change as each different person and community works in these traditions.
Paisley Rekdal

 

A conversation with Paisley Rekdal about her new book, Real Toads, Imaginary Gardens: On Reading and Writing Poetry Forensically, and some of the moments in her writing life that have contributed to a body of work that continues to open our minds and expand our understanding of this strange, beautiful and tumultuous world we live in.

By Frances Richey

 

FR: How long was Real Toads, Imaginary Gardens in the making? It has the feeling of years of experience, years of trying things, saving things, compiling things as you developed these tools to examine how and why a poem works or doesn’t work, and then demonstrating how to put it all together.

 

PR:  It took probably two years to write, but twenty-five years to produce because I’ve been teaching since I was twenty five  years old. I learned to teach poetry while teaching poetry. Oftentimes I was looking for examples that were, for better or for worse, practical. The vast majority of people I teach have no desire to be poets. And if you think about it, that’s true for almost any creative writing teacher. We don’t actually teach people who are planning to be writers. We teach people who are interested in writing. Sometimes they’re there to get a good grade because they need to go to med school. And then you have people who really want to be writers. So I had to learn how to teach a variety of different kinds of learners. People who were avid readers of poetry already, and then people who didn’t have any interest in poetry and had to be convinced to like poetry, to understand poetry. I’m always looking for examples that I think will teach practical craft and at the same time that can be challenging for people who want to go a step further than just, ‘I want to know how to read a poem’. It took me twenty-five years to compile all of these lessons and to think like my students. I also teach graduate students how to teach poetry. Oftentimes people who are enthusiastic about their subject are actually terrible teachers of it because we go into the class trying to teach to our own skill levels and then when it doesn’t translate automatically, the class falls silent. This book hopefully teaches students how to think from the ground up about a poem. I don’t expect people to read this book cover to cover. I expect people to come into the book saying, “Oh, I have a question about lineation. What do we mean by line breaks?” And they can just go to that chapter. If someone says, I don’t understand anything about meter or rhyme, they can go to that chapter as well. But then, if you are somebody who is teaching a literature course, and you want to show students what we mean by a close-reading, you can show them how I close-read Robert Hayden’s poem, “Those Winter Sundays”. You can say, here’s the forensic guide. You use the book as you like, to help you understand how to produce an analysis of a poem.

 

FR: Because we were going to discuss the book, I did read it through, and as I read, I realized that each chapter was like a little book on its own. I loved the poems you chose as examples. There were many poems I knew. “The Moon and the Yew Tree”… Who did not love Sylvia Plath when they were seventeen?

 

PR: I know. Right?

 

FR: I’m going to go back and read her again. But the poem about the pearls, “Warming Her Pearls” by Carol Ann Duffy…

 

PR: Oh, yeah. I love that one.

 

FR: All through the book, along with poems I knew, there were amazing poems I’d never read. I thought you made great choices.

 

PR: Thank you.

 

FR: I appreciate that at the end of each chapter there are exercises and a list of suggested poems to read or use for exercises, and all the poems are easily found online on The Academy of American Poets and/or Poetry Foundation websites.

 

PR: This book would have been a thousand pages if I’d included all the poems as a mini-anthology. What I wanted to do was give people directions where they could go afterwards. If you’re somebody who’s a reader of literature, here are some critical exercises. If you’re a writer of literature, here are creative exercises. Or, you can move back and forth between those. And then, here are some extra poems that I think speak to exactly what this chapter discusses. If you want to do a little bit more research, here are some additional poems. Hopefully, one or two of those poems will spark an interest in reading that poet’s work.

 

I do want to say something about the selection of poems. Diversity is a word right now that seems to be much in consideration and reconsideration, but I think of diversity not just in terms of the identity of the poet themselves, but of the time period and aesthetic of those poems. I do think it’s important, if you’re a young poet and serious about your craft, that yeah, you’re reading some of the Cavalier poets. I think it’s important that you’ve read in the nineteenth century, and I think it’s important that you’re reading poets living today like Jericho Brown and Layli Long Soldier. It’s really important for people to see this as a living art that is continuing to evolve and change as each different person and community works in these traditions. I spent a lot of time thinking about what poems I would include.

 

FR: Did you have to take some out that you would have liked to include?

 

PR: Oh, yeah. It gets expensive fast.

 

FR: One of the things that I read you said, and if I’m mistaking this, please tell me, it was the sense that in everything you write there is an obsession with change and transformation. Did I get that right?

 

PR: I have no idea. One of the things that interests me about poetry is that it is one of the genres that is best suited to responding to change because of its lyric qualities. Lyric allows us to be in the present moment, but also in the past and potentially in the future, as we leap forward in moments of time. It allows us to experience the transience that makes up human life. And the transitory nature of our existence is something that I think a lot of people struggle to come to terms with. We give things a beginning and middle and end to give our lives a sense of coherence, and poetry offers us both that possibility of coherence, but also, I think, the deep sense that we all are in a world of time. We can’t escape the fact that change is always upon us.

 

*

 

FR: I found it interesting that originally you were a medievalist, and perhaps you still are. It’s like if you’re a dancer, you’ll always be a dancer, even if you do other things. And I also found it interesting that you, as a writer, seem to have a real love for research. Below what we see, there’s all this additional work.

 

Do you want to say anything about that? About the research?

 

PR: Yeah. I just love research. I feel very at home there. To be a good researcher you have to ask creative questions. In that sense, it’s not unlike being a poet or a writer. A lot of people tend to look at criticism and research as antithetical to the creative process, but for me it is the bedrock skill for creativity. I could write about my life, and I certainly do in every single book at some level. I find my life interesting in so far as it touches on larger moments, whether it’s artistic inquiry or scientific inquiry or historical inquiry. I see myself located, all of us are, in time, in history. I think about larger topics, and hook myself into those in surprising ways. That’s what fuels my writing. I very much love an archival project.

 

FR: I haven’t read Intimate yet. I’ve been reading your new book, along with Nightingale and Appropriate: A Provocation. But Intimate is calling to me as the next read! It looks to be, among other things, an archival project. I think there could be a whole class on Paisley Rekdal. Like a semester. “Yeah, try to read all these books in a semester, we’ll see.

 

PR: Yeah, good luck.

 

FR: Laughter. Getting back to being a medievalist, when did you become interested in that world. Were you a Tolkien fan?

 

PR: Laughter  It’s funny. Yeah, half the people in medieval studies come to it via fantasy and Tolkien. Then there are people like me who have not come to it that way. My ex-boyfriend was a big Tolkien fan. I have no disrespect for that at all. For me, I was studying in Ireland at the time and I randomly picked up this anthology of medieval visionary women’s poetry. I was taking a class on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Pearl poet at the time, so I was reading medieval literature. In this anthology I read a poem by Mechtild von Magdenburg. I won’t go into the poem that she wrote, but I had had a dream that was exactly like it. It was so shocking to me. So I started reading the anthology. And I started reading criticism about medieval visionary women’s poetry, and learning about the circumstances in which these poems were produced and written. Oftentimes, they were having their visions transcribed for them by confessors. And so that presented a kind of particular interesting challenge. Only people like Hildegard von Bingen, who were literate, were writing their own work without that kind of intercession. That’s not the case for so many of the other women poets. I started reading about them through the scholarship of Caroline Walker  Bynum. Suddenly, this whole world opened up in which gender was being explored in these very strange and wild ways. It was just the most embodied kind of literature I could imagine. It’s hard to describe if you don’t read that literature. Wounds are leaking blood and milk, Jesus is growing breasts, it’s really wild literature. That’s what hooked me. Interestingly, at the time I was studying medieval women’s poetry, there were scholars who were scoffing at all those young women interested in visionary literature.

 

FR: What was the time period?

 

PR: I was twenty-one at the time. I think my interest stemmed from the fact that I was close to the age these young women once were. These teenage girls and young women were trying to claim a kind of power and agency for themselves that the marital and patriarchal systems they were trapped in weren’t going to give them. Religion and visionary literature, visions in general, were a way of seizing control of their lives, and of their bodies. So I think that would be attractive to people who are coming into their own and trying to understand who they are.

 

FR: Have you ever had visions yourself?

 

PR: You’re trying to get me to interpret that dream…

 

FR: Laughter. Here’s where I’m coming from. I did hospice volunteer work for five years during the height of the AIDS crisis, probably around the same time you were reading those medieval visionary women poets. During that time, I was also practicing yoga and meditation regularly. I started having visions and dreams about patients who had passed. In our support group meetings I found out that most of my fellow volunteers were also having visions and dreams. Mostly it was patients telling us they were okay. The so-called  ‘I’m okay dream’. I think all people have visions. It’s just that some people dismiss or deny them because they don’t think it’s normal.

 

 

PR: That may be true. I’m writing an essay right now about many things, about darkness in the American West, and it touches on this question of visions and conversations I’ve had with people about visions and what a vision is. Augustus used to believe, and Avicenna too, that if you see a thing, it doesn’t just get registered by the eye, but that it literally hooks itself into your body and becomes part of your body. It was a serious philosophical debate: were you dreaming something that doesn’t exist or were you dreaming something that is now physically a part of you, and if so, then sex dreams aren’t just innocent flitting fantasies, they are actions of the body that have been at some level undertaken. So you can, in some ways, be culpable for your dreams. It’s not unlike what early classical philosophers thought, which is that what you experience has a physical effect on you that goes beyond a kind of sense memory: it becomes cellularly a part of you.

 

FR: And you’re working on an essay about this. Is this a book long essay?

 

PR: No, it’s just an essay, part of a collection of essays about darkness and the American West.

 

*

 

FR: You worked in prisons.

 

PR: I did. I don’t do it anymore.

 

FR: Did you do it for a long time or short time?

 

PR: Well, both short and long. When I was in college I worked in a work release for the King County Prison System and I did that for a couple of years. Then I picked it up again very briefly when I was Poet Laureate of Utah. I taught in the prisons very briefly.

 

FR: Did you work with men or women?

 

PR: Both. When I was working with the work release, they were all men and they were all drug dealers.

 

FR: That’s tough.

 

PR: Not really. I mean, they’re really charming. They’re drug dealers. They’re salesmen. They’re wonderful conversationalists.

 

The women were kind of interesting too. The difficulty of working with prisons is you imagine you would see them regularly, but actually, many of them missed classes because they were in rehab programs or workshops. Or something would go wrong and they wouldn’t attend class for that day. So even in prison, it felt like a fairly itinerant population.

 

The work release was a little more steady because they had to be there. They had to show up every single time or their CO would get them in trouble.

 

FR: So these were grown men.

 

PR: Yes. All ages. I’m trying to think of the oldest person I worked with. A lot of them were close to my age. Some were nearing forty. No one older.

 

In the women’s prison I worked with a woman who was probably seventy five or something like that. She’d been there quite some time. You know, you don’t ask them what they’ve done, but they’ll tell you, so you know there’s a fair amount of fraud, drugs, some domestic violence.

 

FR: When you were working with them, how was their work?

 

PR: They didn’t write poems. I was there as a literacy teacher. I worked as a literacy coach for the work release guys. A lot of them really needed to pass written exams so they could drive forklifts. It was really tough because no one trained me to do that work, so I learned badly, on my own, how to teach that kind of material. Initially I said, well you’re more likely to read if you’re reading something you want to read. So I let guys choose what they wanted to read. One guy chose the Bible, which I should have nixed because no one needs to use the word “firmament” in any situation.  He needed to learn how to pass a particular job skills training test. Firmament was not going to come up. So it was frustrating for him and a waste of time for him. I think I did him a disservice.

 

With other people, once we knew what tests we were trying to aim for, and we knew what kind of skills we wanted to go for, then we were able to narrow down some of the writing exercises.

 

With poetry, a lot of the guys that I worked with, many of them were already writing poems, so it was just about giving them the same exercises I would give any of my undergraduates. There was no difference. I didn’t choose poems that were written by incarcerated students, I didn’t choose poems that were speaking to the incarceration experience, because I figured they’re here for literature, I’m going to give them everything and that will include some of those poems but not be guided by those.

 

FR: Was this volunteer work?

 

PR: It was all volunteer.

 

FR: Do you want to say anything about why you chose it?

 

PR: I have no idea why I chose it. It was a way to give back to the community at some level. Most people who are wanting more opportunities…I think the prison population is filled with people who are wanting more opportunities. It’s always good to help people who need that help.

 

FR: I think sometimes those things find you, for whatever reason.

 

So you were pretty young.

 

PR: I was young and I was old. The last time I did it was right around COVID.

 

*

 

FR: I’m going to switch gears here. Do you ever wake up with a poem in full? And you have to hurry and get a pen and paper and get it down before you lose it?

 

PR: It’s happened a couple of times, but almost always they’ve turned out to be pretty bad, in retrospect, which is really sad. But sometimes, when I’m very conscious and awake, a poem will come to me quickly. And it usually comes unbidden and I can feel it before I know what it’s going to be. As soon as I feel a certain burning in my thorax. The Greeks used to call this place your thumos, which is like your heart, though they saw it as closer to your belly. I feel a burning in my thumos. I immediately rush and write it down.

 

FR: If something like that happens, and you feel it coming, do you stop everything you’re doing when you feel that?

 

PR: I try to. But there’ve been a couple of times when I couldn’t, for whatever reason, and I’ve had to let it go. A surprising number of those have happened when I’m in a faculty meeting and it just looks like I’m taking frantic notes.

 

FR: When I was reading Real Toads, Imaginary Gardens, the word anxiety came up several times in some of the discourse. It referred to people reading poems, and maybe not getting what the poem is saying. So I wondered what your perspective is on it, both as a reader and a writer and having students who feel some anxiety when they’re reading poems.

 

PR: I think the creative writing classroom is a place full of anxiety. Ideally it’s a place filled with joy, but underneath that joy is a nervousness and sometimes that bubbles up into anxiety. If you love poetry and you’re excited to write it, you’re anxious because you’re sharing your work with strangers. And that’s natural. If you’re somebody who doesn’t write poetry and you’re in a creative writing classroom and everybody else seems to be getting it, and everyone has to perform their work in front of other people in workshop, then, that may be anxiety producing too. They’re thinking, “I don’t know what’s happening here, and I don’t know if I’m any good, and I don’t want to be bad at this thing I don’t understand.” And every single time I’ve had a conversation with strangers about what I do, I normally lie. I don’t tell them that I’m a poet or even a teacher of creative writing, I just tell them I’m a teacher. But if it does come up, the very first thing anyone says to me is, “I never liked writing. I didn’t like it. It was scary to me.” And I find their attitudes towards poetry to be very defensive. So, obviously, I think a lot of people associate poetry with anxiety. The sense is that poetry should be meaningful, everyone is telling them that this is the most meaningful kind of writing that there is and they’re not getting it instantly and so what does that say about them except either they’re morally obtuse or just plain dumb? And, that’s not what that means. Poetry is a difficult art form at times, and it’s easier for me simply because I’ve spent my entire life in it, and reading it. I know how to read it. But, even then, there are whole swathes of Shakespeare I’ll read and I’ll think, did I understand that? And you have to go back and you have to spend some time, get used to that language, get used to those rhythms, and even then, there’s definitely contextual knowledge that’s not available to the contemporary reader. And that’s also true for contemporary poets. There’s a lot of private symbolism, references to other poets, little jokes that other poets might get but general readers won’t get. I think lots of people come to poetry feeling like there’s a whole raft of information that’s being consciously withheld from them. And that, to a certain extent, is and is not true. And getting people to feel comfortable by slowing down, by noticing and taking stock of what they can take stock of is one way to help build these skills, so that you can say, okay, what I don’t know about the poem I can find out by reading this, or asking this kind of question or going into this kind of resource. And I say, in the book several times, there are moments in a poem that I don’t understand, that I can’t explain, and I will admit this when I’m doing an analysis of a poem. I’ll say, I don’t know what the poet’s saying here exactly, but I understand what’s being said overall and I understand why this is happening. I want to demonstrate to people that reading a poem and loving a poem does not require that you’re in complete mastery over every single part of that poem. What makes a poem great to me is that there is something that escapes our complete comprehension. We can go back to that poem and see something new again. If I can completely encapsulate and understand that poem I suspect that that poem might cease to interest me. A poem has to have mystery in it at some level. And it’s okay not to be able to fully articulate all of a poem’s mysteries.

 

FR: Do you have a favorite that fits that category?

 

PR:  There are moments in Robert Frost’s “Directives.” It’s beautiful and mysterious and I’m not sure exactly what I’m looking at at all times. And there are passages from John Ashbury where I don’t know if I understand all of it. Susan Howe is a poet that I can’t possibly say I understand. Also, she’s not always working for comprehension in those ways. I think she’s working to let us into the experience of what she’s looking at. There are parts of Gerhard Manley Hopkins, a poet I adore, and I’m like, do I understand every nuance of what he’s getting at? Absolutely not. I’m not going to look up every single word that he’s written in this poem, but I trust him enough to know that, wow, if I did that I think the poem would open up further and further and further. I sense deeper and deeper theological discussions and debates that are  happening under the surface of many of his poems. “Pied Beauty” would be a perfect example.

 

Pied Beauty

     BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

 

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

 

Source: Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics, 1985)

 

 

FR: For John Ashbery, if you chose one of his poems for a student to read in the same context that we’re talking about, what would that one poem be?

 

PR: Well, probably his easiest would be a poem called “Summer,” which I think is beautiful and has an air of mystery to it that’s just something you can’t articulate easily, but it’s also not as terrifying as a poem like “Daffy Duck in Hollywood”.

 

FR: Do you want to say anything else about Real Toads and Imaginary Gardens that we haven’t covered?

 

PR: Yeah. I should say that when I was reading in literature classes, I was given poems to read for content, which is to say how do we understand the themes and tropes that make, say, a romantic poet a romantic poet. But rarely did we talk about the formal constructions of the poems themselves. And then, when I got to workshop, where we were writing poems and I thought we would talk about the formal qualities of a poem, even there, those conversations were largely constrained to subject matter. And it meant for me–and I say this in the book–that when I loved a poem, all I really had to talk about were questions of content. As a young writer I knew that that was insufficient. Content wasn’t the whole thing. Writing this book was the product of so many years of filling in that pedagogical gap that I experienced, which is:  What is the relationship between form and content, and how is it that we know a poem is actually good and working in the ways that that poet may want it to work? This is not something that I felt I was getting in either my graduate level workshops or my undergraduate workshops at the level I wanted. Or my literature classes, either. And as a teacher now, I have lots of conversations with students where they ask questions like, “Why does this element of a poem matter? Why do we have these line breaks? What does it mean that they would choose this word versus that word?” There are reasons poems do the things they do. And there is a reason you feel the way you feel when you read a poem and you love it. It’s not by accident. There’s magic to it, yes, but a magic that can be used by a wider group of people and appreciated by a wider group of people. It’s a spell that can be shared.

 

*

 

FR: I really appreciated your additional reading suggestions in the back of the book. There are a lot of books out there that address the same issues you cover in this book, and you go that extra step and share with the reader/poet those other books you think will be helpful. It’s very generous. I have James Lauderbach’s book, The Art of the Line, and have never read it.

 

PR:  Oh, it’s really good

 

FR: I’m reading your book, Appropriate, right now. You dedicated that book to your father, and I wondered if you wanted to say anything about the influence he had on you and your work. Your dedication says: for my father, who opened my mind to a world of books

 

PR: Well, he was a huge influence on me. My next book of poetry is going to be very much about my relationship with my father, so I won’t say more than that. He was somebody who really loved scholarship, learning and he gave me a love and appreciation for the written word. He got a PhD in constitutional law. He ended up working at a trucking company and then when that trucking company went under he worked as an administrative assistant at the University of Washington. He really appreciated learning. And he blamed, to a certain extent, well, to a large extent, the fact that he didn’t become a teacher to the fact that he volunteered for Vietnam and was in the war. He is a non-combat veteran. My uncle is a combat veteran.

 

FR: Did your uncle make it back?

 

PR: Yeah.

 

FR: I was in high school when that was brewing and in college I watched boys go. They had a lottery at that point, and the low numbers had to go. They didn’t say deploy back then. It was horrifying to go on a picnic or to a dance and hear the boys talking about their numbers. I’m looking forward to reading your essay on Vietnam. When you had the Amy Lowell Scholarship was that the project you were working on? Going to Vietnam?

 

PR: Yeah. I went, not with any thought that I was going to write about the war, but I ended up living right next door to the Vietnam Military History Museum. It had this incredible sculpture of these planes, homage to Vietnam’s victories in the French and American wars. All of these plane parts from both those wars were stacked up in a huge heap that was the base of the sculpture, which I used to visit almost every day. I was struck by how many emotions I felt, looking at it. I was born a couple of years before Saigon fell. I have no memory of Vietnam myself, but this new book of poetry really thinks about legacies of war and about my father’s ideas of wars in history and what that means. In some ways I think I’ve been surprisingly shaped by Vietnam.

 

FR: I believe that what’s happened to the people closest to you before you were born, that does get passed on to you somehow.

 

Are you writing about the times we’re living in now?

 

PR: Well, in my book, West: A Translation, which is all about the Transcontinental Railroad, it becomes very much about what’s happening now. And I had not planned to do that. I thought it was going to be completely historical. There were so many parallels between the late nineteenth century and the civil unrest, everything from the authoritarianism threat that the president represents, to disease outbreaks. You know, they had a pandemic then, which was cholera, as well as mass waves of labor protests over immigration and the economic depression caused by railroad magnates. Writing about America in the late nineteenth century turned out to be a very contemporary project.

 

FR: Prescient. I really didn’t think that our country would do this again. But here we are.

 

As I mentioned earlier, I just read Nightingale. I was raped when I was in my early twenties, so Nightingale means a lot to me personally. It’s a hard subject to talk about, and yet, in groups of women, I’ve found that many, if not most, have been raped.

 

One of the things that struck me was the moment when you said in the book that that experience of the attack might have been what caused you to become a poet.

 

And there was the silence. I remember that silence. I didn’t fight the way you did. I disassociated. It was like I was dead and then it was over. My first thought at the end of the poem was that I was glad this girl in the poem lived.

 

PR: Me too.

 

FR: You must have been a teenager…

 

PR: No, I was twenty.

 

FR: That’s still young.

 

The interesting thing to me about the way you wrote about it was that those moments when you were actually going through the attack, those moments were embedded in your interpretation of Ovid’s story of Philomela

 

PR: I went back and forth on how graphic to be. And I still don’t know. Did I tell too much? I didn’t want to sensationalize it. It was already sensational. At the same time, you have to know what the stakes are. I’m writing about it again in a different essay in a very different kind of context. The thing that was horrifying to me was that every second of that account counted. It wasn’t like it went by in a blur. Every second was very clearly articulated to me and I was trying very hard during all of it trying to make the best calculations I could, because there was only one guy when I was attacked. But there were two others nearby that could have joined him. Time just seemed to stretch out and I felt extremely alone and I felt extremely aware that all the choices that I had to make at that moment were only going to be made by me, really and finally, even though somebody else was involved.

 

FR: Nightingale meant something to me. I’ll never forget reading it for the first time. And I’m certain it has been meaningful to many others. Those who’ve had similar experiences, and those who would be otherwise ignorant about that kind of attack.

 

PR: Well, thank you. I didn’t write it until twenty five years after it happened. Longer. My husband didn’t even know. He’s learned about it because it was published. After it was published, a number of poets came forward and said, this happened to me. Not as many as you would imagine. I was disheartened to see that a number of people had gone through this, but it does open up a kind of community.

 

*

 

1. Thank you so much, Paisley, for this interview, and for your new book.  I did want to mention, I always read the acknowledgements and I don’t think I’ve read anything more lovely than that little piece you wrote about your friend. I’ve never seen anything more warm and genuine in the back of anybody’s book.

 

PR: I’m going to go walking with her next Thursday and I’ll tell her.

 

 

Paisley Rekdal is the author of four books of nonfiction, and seven books of poetry, most recently, West: A Translation, which won the 2024 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Reading the West Poetry Award, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. Her work has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, and various state arts council awards. The former Utah poet laureate, she teaches at the University of Utah where she directs the American West Center.