The following is a special presentation of WTCI, Chattanooga, North Georgia, and the Tennessee Valley.

But whatever.

So you do it for love.

And that's the only reason.

You know you do it.

You don't do it for fame.

You don't do it for recognition.

Words on a page bound for the curious to discover.

Ever wonder where inspiration for the millions of ideas or even a dialog formula may form that brings a writer into the profession of authorship.

Love of the work, Love those who of those whose lives you're telling and love for those who are going to read it.

This week, meet three unique authors I caught up with at the Arts and Education Council's conference on Southern Literature.

That's Roy Blount Jr, Rita Dove and Ellen Voigt.

Coming up on this edition of the A-list.

Rita Dove.

She's won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry.

She has served as U.S. poet laureate, the special consultant in poetry for the Library of Congress, bicentennial and as poet laureate of Virginia.

She is currently chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

15 years ago, I stood in the poetry office of the Library of Congress and looked across the way at the Capitol building.

Rita.

Welcome to Chattanooga.

Thank you.

Thank you for coming on the A-list.

It is such an honor to meet you in person.

I'm really thrilled.

This is fun.

When did you first know that this was a vocation for you?

That you are.

Good at it?

Gosh, you know, when I started writing, when I was I think as soon as I could read, I also began to write.

I just never thought of it as anything that you could do in life and make any money at.

And we recognize what I thought it was play serious play, but I was having fun at it and it wasn't until I was in college that I wrote all the time, wasn't till I was in college that I actually had a professor say that was good, you know, And it happened because my I was in a composition class and the professor got ill and the fiction writing professor was kind of commandeered to go over and teach the class.

So he came over.

I said, We'll just tell stories and meet everyone, start a story.

And I started my story by saying it is a spring day or something like that.

And he said, Oh, present tense.

That's really good.

So I thought, Oh, maybe I have something here.

But I didn't really think that.

I don't know.

I mean, I loved doing and I just didn't know that it was something that was permissible to do with an adult, I think, until I was in college.

What writers inspired you when you were young?

When I was really young, I read all the books on my parents shelves, so it was a really incredible mix.

And then as I grew older, I began to get inspired by poets who I thought were amazing for what they actually talked about in their poems and how they did it.

Like, Sylvia Plath was a very early influence and and Langston Hughes for the way she made things just dance across the page.

But of course, there were also the storytellers in my family, the people who could just sit back and say, Well, you know, they do that LITTLE Well, when they go on for like a minute.

And the pacing, just the pacing of a story, to realize that it's it's much about how you say it as what you say that can transform stuff.

So those were two of my.

Those two sides, I guess you could say, were really major influences.

Now, tell me about being named the United States poet laureate.

And I understand you were not only the first African-American to be named to this position, but so far the only one.

No, I mean, you know, I always believed that.

And I still do that.

Poetry in particular has gotten such a bad rap because people are afraid of poetry at some point in their life.

They may have run into a situation.

Usually in our schools, unfortunately, where they've been asked to interpret a poem and then told it was wrong, the wrong interpretation.

I was afraid of poetry when I was when I got to seventh grade and heard we were going to have a poetry unit.

But then I realized, thanks to a couple of amazing teachers, I realized that it was the fear that was keeping people from understanding poetry, not the poetry itself.

And I firmly believe you can read anything to grade school kids, and as long as they aren't afraid, they'll get it.

So that's how I created the poet laureate position, too.

I thought there's no reason to apologize for poetry.

There's no reason to talk down to anybody.

You just talk to them, you know?

You know, not at all, but to them.

So that's what happened.

What do you think the best lesson you learned from that was?

I learned, you know, that you can even though I thought I was doing I was listening and I was really doing this job right, that you can still have assumptions.

And there's a little story that goes along with this every other week, every other Thursday, we would have a poetry reading to poets I would invite, and then I would introduce them and they read for for free for an audience.

And every other Thursday, we would go by a homeless man on the streets right outside of the Madison building where the readings took place.

And I would say hi and then just go on.

And finally about I would say about, oh, about a month before my term was up, he said, What are you all doing in there?

You know, as we walked by, because it seemed like I think we were having fun, people were laughing and going, What you are doing in there?

And I said, We're reading poetry, said, come on in.

And I think at that moment I said that thinking he'll never come in my face.

And then it was my assumption and not that night, but the next Thursday that we were there, he came in, he ate the free food at the reception.

That was fine.

You know, I didn't, you know, was okay.

And the next week after that, he sat in the back room of the other room.

And then very and I gave a reading at the very end of my term there I was supposed to give my farewell reading and I gave my farewell reading and sat there to sign books.

And suddenly the man he was there with a book to be signed.

And I, I think I don't know quite what the lesson with the lesson was to always reach out to people, to always never assume that someone is not going to like something or they can't like it or, you know, but to look at them in the eye and say, come on in this life.

My grandmother told me there be good days to counter the dark ones with blue skies in the heart.

As far as the soul could see.

She holds a master's of fine arts degree from the University of Iowa and she currently serves as a Commonwealth professor of English at the University of Virginia.

What is the best piece of advice you could give to aspiring poets out there?

First of all, I would say read.

And second of all, I'd say read.

Third of all, if they read, if they.

I would say to them, if you do not love to read poetry, if it does not, as Emily Dickinson said, take the top of your head off other people's poetry.

You do not belong here in this playing field.

Then you are trying to write your ego out, and that is going to be a very lonely enterprise and no one else will want to read it.

So the first thing is that you have to read, read, read.

You must love what you're doing.

The other thing I would tell them is to listen to the language around you and not just other poets, but listen to people on the street as they go by the tempo of your life, because that's the backdrop against which your poetry is going to find a way to soar.

I would be honored if you would read something for me.

Okay.

Let me see.

I read this poem, which from Sonam Malaka, which is spoken in the voice of Ludwig van Beethoven.

It's called the Composer's Coda.

I wanted fame.

I wanted love.

I deserved bliss.

But bliss scarce easily.

I fled bonds dreary to rain for Vienna's grave.

Knelt.

There I learn to cherish even the gaps.

The static fame became moot.

Love, a strategy.

Beauty was what I couldn't seem to hang on to.

Beauty would discharge her.

Blandishments then retreat to observe the effect.

Now, I know none of this is real.

None of this exists.

That next moment shimmering before you wink.

And it will either astonish you or be gone.

You have made my day.

Oh.

And thank you so much for being with us today.

It was my pleasure.

Thank you.

Ellen voit, born and raised on a farm in Virginia.

Much of her early life and interests centered around her musical talent playing the piano.

Attending Converse College for its music conservatory, Ellen says she discovered the aspects of performance versus music were far different from one another, thus changing her direction to poetry, Mastering and Fine arts at the University of Iowa.

Ellen developed and directed the nation's first low residency writing program at Goddard College.

Thank you for joining us today on the A-list.

It's a pleasure to meet you.

Glad to be here.

Well, at what point did you decide that this was going to be a career choice for you, that you thought?

I never decided that.

Really?

Have you decided yet?

Because I think you're doing well, five books.

I mean, there might be a time when you could decide this is this is a good career choice, you know?

Yeah.

It's really a piece of writing poems is not a career.

I mean, you can't live on it.

Not a career choice in that sense.

It.

It is what you decide to spend your best time and energy doing.

I mean, a poet really is just somebody who makes poems.

It's as simple as that.

And so if you spend most of your your days and nights trying to make poems and that's what you invest yourself in, then over time you become a poet until such time as you're no longer making poems.

If you're no longer making poems, then you're no longer a poet.

So it's it's not really an identity.

It's not, you know, you put on the black cape and, you know, swish around down the street or something like that or that.

You get the check in the mail, you know, every month that says, you know, written out to the poet.

Ellen has a long list of followers.

After publishing five volumes of poetry, including two trees, Kyrie and Shadow of Heaven.

Ellen says there's no real formula, so I can't help but wonder, how do you teach poetry to aspiring writers.

If you're just reading the poem?

Hmm.

You are responding to the impact that the whole problem has made on you because of all the choices.

And if it's working, it should look like it wasn't any.

It wasn't hard at all.

It should look like it just appeared that way.

It's the most natural thing and only about trying to imitate it.

Do you understand that?

No.

This was worked out.

Oh, and so that kind of apprenticeship, I think, is is a very good thing for young poets to do.

What you hope is that you come out of the other end and understanding something about what a poem is and how poetry works, and then having some angle of vision that is your own and having some sound that is your own.

It's like, you know, when they do those little graphs of a voice, you know, when they take it off the take it off to the recording machine or something, they say, Oh yes, we can identify this person.

Even we can't hear what that person is saying.

Because if you know how the inflection of the voice goes like that, that's what you want to get on a page.

Do you big do big red eyed.

Not bread, not very well, not pumpkin bread, maybe banana.

Bread, but none that you have to need.

Have you ever had.

I do.

I make I make a cookie that my grandmother told and.

I have to.

You go.

Well, if you kneading the dough, you know, you start with whatever your your your starter and then you keep adding flour.

You just keep adding flour and you keep turning it under and pushing it around and you keep kneading it, keep adding flour until you get to the place where the dough will not take any more flour.

It won't.

It'll start shedding it off.

You just have these, you know, these tucks of flour will go off to the side.

It will not take anymore.

It's like that with the palm.

If you if you draft many drafts, which I do a do not write quickly.

So if you you know, if you've done 60 drafts, 70 drafts, and you're at the place where you're putting in a comma, you're taking out a comma, that's like when the dough is telling you this is all you can do with me.

The poem is telling you that this is all you can do with me.

Now go learn something else.

Go get some other technique or, you know, then try again.

But this is all you can do.

And what would be your best piece of advice to give to an aspiring poet?

Reid.

Reid.

Reid.

Reid.

Reid.

Reid.

Reid.

Reid.

Reid.

I think I said that ten times on a ratio of like 10 to 1.

You know how much time you spend writing?

It's been ten times that amount of time reading because there's no prescription for what a poem must be or even can be.

So the only way to learn about the possibilities is descriptively, to just see example after example after example after example, all these different voices, and then then you will have some notion of, Oh, then I could try this, I could try that.

And what kind of impact do you hope your poems have on the reader?

Oh, what kind of impact?

I hope it makes the reader feel something that the reader had always felt, but didn't want to acknowledge.

And I don't think there's anything new in the world to be, you know, discovered or put forward.

And especially with the emotional life, which is that that's the center of all poetry is the the emotional life, the complexity of emotional life.

That's what poetry focuses on.

And I think that what a poem can do, what poems that I read that, you know, by other people, the poems that I care about, is that they make me stop and and feel again.

And they make me feel in a complex way.

And I can't let you go without reading something that you've written.

This is a lesson.

Whenever my mother, who taught small children for 40 years, ask a question, she already knew the answer.

Would you like to meet?

You would?

Shall we?

Was another.

And don't you think as in.

Don't you think it's time you cut your hair?

So when?

In the bedroom, in the strict bed, she said you want to see her hands were busy at her neckline, untying the robe, not looking down at it, stitches, bristling where the breast had been, but straight at me.

I did what I always did not weep.

She never wept and made my face a freshly whitewashed wall.

Let her write again whatever she wanted.

There.

Perfect.

And thank you for joining us today.

My pleasure.

Roy Blount, Jr.

He's an original member of the Rock Bottom Remainders, a group of authors who put down their pens once a year to play a benefit for literacy.

I can easily say this writer has dabbled in just about everything.

He's a humorist.

A sportswriter, a poet, a performer, and even a lecturer.

Roy, welcome to Chattanooga.

Thank you, Alison.

It's good to be here.

We're thrilled to have you.

Oh, thank you.

You are quite well known and I'll say well liked.

You just got to say that even that is true.

It's okay.

I figure I've read enough of your work and about you to know that it doesn't matter what I say, that you'll believe what you want to believe, right?

No, you are.

Everyone I said I was interviewing you today was very jealous.

And.

Very excited.

Oh, good.

So I've heard people call you a literary chameleon.

Meaning that I think you've kind of.

You changed with the times.

You change according to your whims and the things you want to write about.

How do you respond to that?

Well, I don't know.

I think I've always really written about the same things, you know, the same essential things I've written about relations between the genders and races and species.

I mean, I've written about animals and women and men and black and white and and and I still, you know, I write about language or I'll write about Southern humor or I write about living in the North and being Southern in the north.

And the same things come up, really same things I've always been interested in.

But I just sort of go to different places to write about.

Now, I would think for especially a male writer who loves sports, that Sports Illustrated is kind of the mecca of all sports writing opportunities.

So what made you leave there and seek other things?

Well, I didn't want to just write sports.

I wanted to write other things.

And also when you're on the staff there, they mess with your sentences too much like the editing.

So I went and I had other things I wanted to write about too, besides sports.

So I quit, started freelancing after seven years, and I'd been planning to do all along and make little notes about how I could make enough money to do it.

So I always wanted to be a, you know, independent writer.

When did you know that you had this voice that was actually humorous?

Oh, gosh, I don't know.

I wrote things in my third year, that 10th grade English teacher who encouraged me to be a writer.

And I would I was just sort of perverse in that when you're supposed to write about what you did last summer, I would write about my pencil, which I didn't always want to write about the assigned topic.

And she appreciated that perversity and then gave me all these American humorists to read.

Robert Benchley and S.J.

Perelman and James Thurber and E.B.

White and said, I could write like that someday.

And I said, okay, great, I'll start doing it now.

He has an undergraduate degree from Vanderbilt, a master's degree from Harvard, and he's been a contributing writer to several publications, including Sports Illustrated, Atlantic Monthly, GQ, National Geographic and even Rolling Stone.

So do you think growing up in Georgia and being a Southern boy kind of gave you the inspiration in that pathway in your writing?

Yeah, I mean, I've always liked Southern talk and stories and that sort of thing.

And so, yeah, there are a lot of athletes, a lot of ballplayers are from the South and grew up in the country.

And so I could connect with, you know, connect with a lot of sports people that I might not have been able to connect to if I had gone to the, you know, Eastern Prep schools and universities.

So, yeah, I got to you know, I think being from Georgia was an advantage in that in that sense.

Was it ever a disadvantage being from the South?

Oh, yeah.

I mean, people are prejudiced against people from the South.

People in New York think that you're dumb luck.

Random, not here.

So, yeah, no, I think there's a it is a it is a hindrance in lots of ways.

But it was good for talking to people, talking to athletes.

But is there one piece or one particular book that you're most proud of?

Well, my last my most recent book, Alphabet Juice, was a book that I always wanted to write.

I always wanted to write a book about words.

And so, you know, I've talked about it so much now that I'm not as thrilled by it as I used to be.

But I really enjoyed writing it and and I think it's something that nobody else has done exactly the way I did it.

And so I feel like it's a very personal book and I was able to just sort of skip around and create my own structure.

And then I enjoyed writing it.

And I'm really pleased that also the anthology I edited of Southern Humor is supposed to be the Norton Book of Southern Humor, so I could go around saying, you know, I did the Norton looking Southern humor, but then they changed it to Roy Blunt's book of Southern Humor, which is sort of like, you know, if you get into Harvard and they say not only get in, but we're going to change, we're going to name the university after you, you know, somehow and I don't think I'm getting any s t you know, you're right.

But so but that, I think, is a book that nobody else could have done as well, because I hadn't read a whole lot of Southern humor.

And I brought together a huge amount of things and I had to pay too much for the rights and that, but I just did it as a real labor of love.

And and I'm proud of that book.

And they're all pretty good.

They are 21.

I know you have another one in the works.

Oh, yeah.

Two more laws.

Yeah.

I'm writing a sequel to Alphabet Juice, which I guess I'm going to call Alphabet Juice and write a short book about Duck Soup, the Marx Brothers movie.

From NPR and Chicago Public Radio.

This is Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me.

You may know them as a regular panelist on the NPR program.

Wait, wait, Don't tell me.

And he's even traveled the mighty Mississippi as part of a PBS documentary, The Mainstream.

He's reached acclaim for his humor, his voice, and his penetrating, perspicacious vantage point.

Who's back in the early eighties?

I was to make a speech in some out of the way place in Pennsylvania.

A driver picked me up at the Pittsburgh airport.

He was an affable sort, but he kept saying things that seemed oddly off.

Somehow we were going to pass by Gettysburg, he said.

That didn't seem right, especially when he said that was where they spent the winter.

You know, without any shoes.

Feet wrapped in rags, if they even had that.

And we think we have it hard.

And I thought, oh, he means Valley Forge.

Then I asked him about a sign in front of a private home.

We passed barbs, big pies.

Oh, yeah.

He said that lady bakes famous lemon pies.

They're real big.

Like a chef's had the meringue part alone is this thick.

He held his fingers about an inch apart, which didn't seem particularly thick for a meringue, especially on a pie comparable to a toque.

Then he started talking about his wife.

I made her a valentine for her birthday, which seemed real with later a valentine for her birthday out of Styrofoam and copper wire.

The heart went right to the middle of the arrow.

Well, you could, after all, look at the depiction of a pierced heart that way.

But I was still trying to sort out what seemed askew about that image.

In fact, I was beginning to wonder about being way out in the middle of nowhere with this man when he said she's smart, You know, we grew up together.

I wasn't good in school at all.

She was Oh, yeah, She was a who?

She was a who.

I'm sorry.

I said who?

You know, who's among American high school students?

We got where we were supposed to go.

He was good at what he did.

But I hadn't realized that anybody's dyslexia extended as far as pie or reflection or writing.

Well, thank you so much.

This has been a pleasure to meet you.

Coming up next week, meet a man with a wide scope of interest for the environment.

The I have I have a message and I'm.

In a rush.

Meet T Boone Pickens.

Coming up on the next edition of the A-list.

I'm Allison Leibovitz.

See you next week.