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Writer-In-Residence Helps Demystify Poetry

Nicole Cooley was a writer-in-residence at Chautauqua Institution’s Writers’ Center. Submitted photo

CHAUTAUQUA — Getting students to write prose may be a difficult task, but getting students to write poetry may be an impossible task.

By demystifying poetry, Nicole Cooley shows her students how poetry connects to their lives.

“I think a lot of what you have to do when teaching poetry to anybody is demystify poetry and show people that it’s not scary, and show people that it relates to their lives and that it has relevance,” she said.

Cooley was a writer-in-residence last week at Chautauqua Institution’s Writers’ Center. She said the students she teaches have interesting and diverse backgrounds and different ages.

“I really think that is good for everybody,” she said of the different ages.

Being able to teach at the Writers’ Center is very transformative for her.

“I just treasure this place in this community. It’s really magical,” Cooley said. “I said to my class this morning I’m overusing the word magical, but I’m here, but it’s true. It’s a magical place. It feels so magical to me.”

Studying other poets is also essential in her classes.

“I think you honestly cannot be a real writer without being a reader,” she said.

At Chautauqua, the five-day, Monday through Friday workshops are taught in a small group setting by different writers-in-residence each week of the summer season. All workshops are held on the second floor of the Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall, according to chq.org. Weekly prose and poetry workshops have been the core of the Chautauqua Writers’ Center for decades.

Writers-in-residence are selected not only for their national reputations and the quality of their work, but also for their ability to equip developing writers with important tools and insights for their writing in just a few days.

When not teaching poetry classes at Chautauqua, Cooley is a professor at the City University of New York where she directs the MFA program in creative writing and literary translation.

At CUNY, she applies the same methods as she does at Chautauqua. Most of her students at CUNY are first-generation college students where that population is very diverse in terms of ethnicity and race. Sometimes, she said, she finds that some students may not find their lives can be valid material for poetry.

“So they have an idea that poetry needs to be this very lofty subject matter like, or it needs to be them looking at a tree and nature and they don’t live experience of nature where they live,” the poet said.

That’s where her demystification kicks in. She shows students how poetry can liberate them, validate them, and also be cathartic for them.

“I think one of my goals is to show them that their lives are material for poetry, and their lives are important,” she said. “Their family experiences are important. The truths that they want to tell are deeply resonant and relevant to the world we live in.”

Currently, she said, it is the most exciting time of contemporary poetry. It’s inclusive, and it’s diverse. Even with some of its issues, the internet, she said, has made poetry more inclusive. There are more online magazines, and there are more people writing because of online MFA writing programs.

“I think it’s a great time in American poetry, and I think it’s key to showcase those new voices to students,” she added.

When not teaching, she is working on a new project — a book of poems about trash. The project started during the pandemic and involved her taking long walks in her hometown in New Jersey. She said she started staring at the ground, and looking at what people threw away onto the ground. It has morphed into a project which looks at the role of garbage in environmental crisis.

“Because I live in the New York area, that’s a huge, fascinating place for trash. … So it’s so I’m writing poems related to trash — both the personal observation of trash on the ground, and in garbage cans and stuff. But also it’s a historical look at trash in the New York metro area,” she said.

She has published six books. Her most recent are two poetry collections, Girl after Girl after Girl (Louisiana State University Press, 2017) and Of Marriage (Alice James Books, 2018). She has published four other collections of poems, Breach, Milk Dress, The Afflicted Girls and Resurrection, as well as a novel, Judy Garland, Ginger Love, a chapbook, Frozen Charlottes, A Sequence, and a collaborative artists’ book (with book artist Maureen Cummins), Salem Lessons, according to her website, nicolecooley.com

Her awards include The Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, a Discovery/The Nation Award, an NEA, a Creative Artists fellowship from The American Antiquarian Society, and the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America.

Her scholarly work includes serving as co-editor “Mother” issue of the journal Women’s Studies Quarterly as well as publishing essays in At Length, Pilot Light: A Journal of 21st Century Poetics, American Poet, Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, The American Poetry Review, Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition and Culture as well as in the edited collections Devouring Institutions: The Life Work of Kathy Acker and We Who Love to Be Astonished: Innovative Women Writers and Performance Artists. Her non-fiction essays have recently appeared in The Southern Review, The Rumpus, The Feminist Wire, and The Atlantic, the website noted.

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