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Ariane True is Washington's poet laureate in a two year appointment by Governor Jay Inslee.

She describes herself as an excitable person, and we're excited to have her here next on Northwest now.

The Poet Laureate program is sponsored by Humanities Washington and the State Arts Commission.

The Poet Laureate appointment runs for two years and the selection is made based on the artist's history and poetry commitment to reaching diverse communities and experience in promoting poetry.

It's a big job that involves lots of public readings, workshops, lectures and presentations all across the state of Washington.

True is a member of the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations and has been teaching and mentoring poets all around the Puget Sound region.

She's done three poetry fellowships, including at the Jack Straw Cultural Center and is an alumni of Hedge Brook and the Masters of Fine Arts Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts and was the Seattle Rep's first Native American artist in residence.

Aryan.

So nice to have you.

Here is the new poet laureate for Washington State here on Northwest now.

I wanted to start with something I saw in one of your bios and ask you about this quote.

She can be found playing banjo with her rats near the edge of the woods.

I have to ask, is that poetry?

Is that some poetic license there?

Is that the actual case?

That was the actual case.

That is an older bio.

And it was true at the time.

I was living for a time in the neighborhood I grew up in, and we were right on the edge of a ravine.

I do play banjo and I had roots for a number of years.

Anyone who has roots will know that they do not live very long.

So those roots are no longer with us.

But.

But they did seem to enjoy your banjo music.

yeah, they were great.

Yeah, they're very sweet.

Talk to me a little bit about your your bio here.

When did you start with poetry?

And I'm always interested in this question with art as to when did it click over from Hey, this is something I do for fun to, you know, something, I'm really going to pursue this.

What was that switch?

Yeah, it happened, like to a couple different levels.

Like I think a lot about I don't know how familiar you are with chemistry and like the energy that it takes for electrons to switch state up.

I feel like it's kind of like that where like you get to like one thing where like, I'm going to take this seriously and then you're like, Ooh, I'm going to actually take this more seriously.

I thought I was like moving towards it, but I was still holding on to this other thing.

But I started writing when I was like in middle school, just like the way that kids just do arts like I did.

Also a million other like art things.

Just because it's fun.

And then in high school, my girlfriend at the time invited me to a writing group after school where I met a mentor, Roberto Escola, who is still a very good friend of mine, and started getting more connected with the Seattle writing community, which has a lot especially, and this was in the arts and had like a lot of incredible opportunities for teens to get writing.

And I started doing it a lot and competing in slams.

And then I thought I wanted to be a research biologist and I would just like write on the side.

And then I was like, I want to be writing more.

And so I like dropped the research biology at the end of college and flirted with like ten different job paths or career paths until that show was like, I just keep coming back to this.

That's really something, though.

That's an interesting tidbit because, boy, you were really pulled between a real left brain thing and a real right brain thing.

I mean, heavy hardcore math and biology and cell science and all that for that one dream.

And then a very, you know, artistic and creative piece and the poetry thing that's interesting that both of those reside within you.

They don't everyone is always like positive.

And I'm like, they don't feel that different to me because to me they both are fundamentally about like curiosity.

I like just like being curious and wanting to see what you can do.

Like what?

Like in biological research, it's like you have a question you want to try to find answers to it, and then you answer that question or you try and you have more questions.

And that's very similar to poetry for me of like what would happen if I tried this?

What would happen if I use this person's technique my way?

So it feels more similar than to me than it does to a lot of other people, I think.

Yeah, interesting.

It's also interesting to your living situation.

You grew up in Seattle, moved back to Tacoma.

Now apparently you're living in Seattle again, but trying to get back to Tacoma.

And the reason I ask you this is not so much you don't have to explicate your your residential draft, but because I really I want to know your thoughts about Tacoma as an incubator for the arts in a place where maybe more so than Seattle now, because of costs and everything, other things and artists can come and pursue their thing.

Is my thesis on point or what do you think?

I can speak to my experience, which is that like I had to leave Seattle because I couldn't afford to pay rent there anymore.

I literally could not afford to live in my hometown.

And I have a piece that was commissioned for the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods that is me talking about that.

It's called Seattle Sonar.

It's online.

But yeah, I moved to Tacoma because it was the place I could afford to live.

And I really loved it because it reminded me of the Seattle I grew up in, where, like, it just has a very different vibe.

Like there's not these massive, massive companies taking over, changing the culture, jacking up rent prices, one neighborhood driven, more neighborhood driven and like, yeah, and like smaller art spaces and smaller communities.

And if you had to describe your area of emphasis, what would it be?

And this is in terms of your writing, what what are there some specific specific things you're writing about the nature, the natural world, the urban natural interface?

I pick up a little bit in your work.

I got this question at a library event on Sunday, actually, so I can give you a similar answer to what I told the folks there, which is that, like many people have described me at different times as like a nature poet, which I reject and resist because I think for me what I'm trying to do is take an experience like mostly I am writing when I want to share an experience, and often I want to share experiences because I have as like I belong to a whole lot of very marginalized identities and very invisible as identity identities.

And so, like, sometimes I want to share an experience because I know a lot of people, especially a lot of people who are in positions to do things about it, don't have that experience, and I want them to see it and I want them to feel it and understand this is how bad it is, This is what it's like, Please feel it, please do something.

But underneath that lies this desire for connection.

I think.

I think this human connection and talk about the role of poetry in making that connection.

I think poetry is really good at that because poetry is it kind of goes like straight to you.

I feel like it goes straight to your body.

I know a lot of people find this, especially people who have only encountered poetry in like their high school classrooms can find it.

Like poetry is about analyzing something until you understand this magic cryptic code.

And I'm like, No, poetry is about whatever you feel and whatever hits your body when you read or hear it.

Like the times when people go to poetry outside of school are like weddings, funerals, births.

Like those times when, like, everything is just too much.

I think poetry helps contain that too much ness.

And just like let you feel and connect on a deeper level without having to be brain about it.

Good.

On that note, I want to go to one of your readings here.

This is a poem called Pandemic.

While Home is an Outbreak, we pass a graveyard.

This country has a way of forgetting the dead.

Of making me forget to.

I read about other places where dead are visited and headstones washed.

Places where altars bring them home to us once a year or always.

Growing up, I heard not to breathe.

Passing graveyards or what?

No one ever said.

I've only stopped doing it this year.

I don't know where my three gone grandparents are not their remains.

The fourth wants to be ash on the ocean.

I have never been to the grave of someone I knew, and we have no place in our homes for the dead.

They find places to come any way out and around.

Chloe chuckling at me on a bus over the university bridge.

Come on by my desk or driving out of town.

Amy.

Mark and Ed.

Nadine.

We have no idea what to do with the bodies.

They end up chemical and coroners by the highway with the soft feet of caretakers, the held breath of passing children.

It is most of a forgetting.

We left the dead behind to come here, my people, to a decade on foot.

Guns and graves at our backs.

Graves at our feet.

Who visits them?

I haven't yet.

And the tall northern villagers who came on steamships.

The bodies, flowers, songs.

Now an ocean away.

My dead like trail side and across the salt ocean becoming lands I have never walked Don't have the right names for hope to tread and will tread with reverence Will breathe.

When I pass and will pause will trust the hands I feel in my back.

Dozens almost solid where they make contact.

Of course, we have broken how to be with death when the old earth of their bodies is too far to fall, to know where to kneel and queen.

Sometimes no names to call or the wrong words to call them.

And losses we can't name in the language they happened today.

I am scared for names.

I know loss.

I'm afraid to become fluent in under which tender bodies whose poems I have pressed to my lips.

Graves may open, but this week, after months of blue fingertips, there is just enough warmth in the damp spring to leave the window open a breath at night and wake up every morning.

When we do wake up to birdsong.

Talk a little bit about your process.

Some poets I've talked to, they they get a thought.

They have to get it out on paper right now.

They got to bang it out.

Others, you know, don't attack it like that.

It kind of works on them and they think about it.

And a poet, a poem emerges over time.

What is your process?

How does it come to you?

For me, it's very poem by poem.

Like for that poem I had a pen.

Houston, who's a writer, uses the term glimmers, which I find really helpful of.

Like sometimes you're just like, going about your day, doing your stuff, and you see an image or a moment or have this feeling that you're like, that's going to I want to write that at some point and you like, get that down.

And so I collect glimmers on like a note on my phone.

And I had a couple of glimmers from I wrote that poem at the very beginning of the pandemic in Washington.

It was like March 2020.

And we were like my partner at the time, and I were like, going down to Shelton to pick up a desk from a guy on Craigslist because she was going to have to work from home now.

And there were just all these little images along the way that I took home.

And then for that month, I happened to be the writer in residence for the Seattle Review of Books.

And so with publishing a poll number, you give them and they let me use my last spot, I was like, Hey, I just wrote this new poll and kind of publish it.

And so I spent like a whole day just conglomerated with these glimmers.

And with that one specifically, I was like, I want to express the complexity and nuance I feel and maybe offer some comfort to the people in my life who I see really, really struggling with the uncertainty right now.

I really like that thought of collecting poetry as a collection of these glimmers that you get.

I mean, yeah, I do like that.

You ever get writer's block?

Some writers complain about it, others kind of say, You know something, The most important thing to fight writer's block is just to start writing, throw something up against the wall and then work on it.

What's your approach?

Do you ever have it?

What's your approach to it?

So this is like my one of my most controversial hot takes is I don't believe in writer's block.

I think that writer's block is when you feel that you have to write something good and you never have to write something good.

Most of what I see with writer's block and students, cause I get this question from my students constantly is when they feel like nothing they write is good enough, and so they don't feel like they can put anything down.

And so like the solution that I give them when I'm like, I don't think this problem exists is just write something bad on purpose.

Yeah, Make yourself feel like I'm going to try to write the worst poem that I can.

It's going to suck.

It's going to be wretched and I'm going to do it on purpose.

I could pass your class, then it's fine and you won't get passed by class.

It's good just to hang out.

Good.

We talk a lot about STEM science, technology, engineering and math.

The humanities are always kind of something that can always be.

It's always on the chopping block potentially if budget figures don't work out.

But you know, the folks who send their kids to private schools don't cut out the enrichments, though.

Those don't go away in those schools.

They do.

They're always threatened in other situations.

What are your thoughts about the importance of the humanities in education?

And I would say even more broadly, the importance of literacy.

I don't know how much you can convince people.

I think you can show them and give them experiences.

I worked as an experiential educator, but I don't know if you can convince people because if I try to use the logic of someone who doesn't believe in the humanities, that's not sincere for me.

I can just, I can show them, I can walk people and like what I have done is like especially for poetry, a lot of people feel very like they can't access it.

Like it's very scary.

I've had English teachers who are like, I am too afraid of poetry.

What You can teach my class when we do poetry stuff and you say poetry, this is a quote from you.

Poetry's for everyone.

I think it's for everyone.

Yeah, because of that, like hitting your body first thing.

But like, I have found that working with people who are afraid of poetry is one of my favorite things to do because you just guide someone through a poem and believe in their experience and validate their experience reading it, and they start to realize that they actually are having an experience with it.

They do know.

They've just been told.

They don't know.

Yeah, and maybe it facilitates their learning in STEM.

You don't have to be a professional poet.

Maybe, but maybe it facilitates your learning in other areas.

That's my thesis.

I think it's just all it's just all good.

I like, why not be interdisciplinary?

Why not study a bunch of different stuff?

It's all fun and interesting when you get to approach it in a way that works for your brain.

I want to go to another reading now.

This one is titled The Gravity of Joy.

We bought the sled in August after seeing the hills we live near.

Even though the chance of snow was months out tonight, we didn't bring it with us.

Bundled and cantering through the first few inches our feet, inventing patterns to carve that.

Surely you've invented two rows of foot tall, smiley faces and in front of a stranger's house, a yo with an so wide, it looks like a cheek pulled out and stretched taut.

And I start to let go of our fight from this afternoon, the particulars fall away and are slowly, quietly buried.

Something like a hush.

You can watch it fall flake by flake and surely they are so small and so delicate they could never cover my raised voice.

But they do.

You can see the shape it makes under the snow.

Then a brass band we hear it walking home.

I kid you not.

We hear something like a brass band and I think someone is putting their lips to metal.

It is 27 degrees sometimes you do get pulled nose first or ear first.

Heard something you can't see.

We're not the only ones.

Pairs of us drawn to the park trusting melody.

You can see the gravity of joy tonight, the way it weighs down unseen dimensions.

And we are feet following behind fall towards We get denser, closer to the sound.

Even so, late hours pass than any of us would go here any other night.

It's not a brass band, but it is a trumpet and a backing track.

Standing in black on the hill with a dog with a light up collar, running in circles with sledders, hiking up to the right to go again.

And snowboarders, bless them, squeaking in three sixties off hand, piled ramps on 100 meter hills.

A teenage boy lounges really he lounges in head to toe denim in the snow, taking video of the trumpeter and leaning back on an elbow like the swirl of Earth is a swell of sand and wave.

I want to dance with you, but the dance song is over and I am trying not to be sad about it.

Hold you instead your back against my front and both of us taking in what feels like a small miracle.

It is close to midnight, but the light off the snow takes us out of time so we go home to get the sled.

You say the music will be gone when we get back.

And I am trying not to be sad about that now.

It's not the first time the trumpet is gone when we get back with the sled.

But the park is not quiet, at least not silent.

Impossibly small children scream something like words at the bottom of the hill before running back up the snowboarders bless them again, thunk gently sliding down the rail they've made by lining up four of the park's picnic benches.

I want to play jazz off my phone, but no, it's not the same.

We bring our sled to the top of the hill and tuck our two adult bodies into it.

This ends up being the only way it works.

The plastic is too thin for less than £300 of downward pressure less, and it warps and turns around, my shirt soaked from the snow that shoveled up my coat on those first runs alone.

We bought a crap sled, but we ride it almost 2 hours and when we take breaks, we put chocolate from our pockets into our mouths and think about kissing.

Sometimes I put it right onto your tongue.

There's a minus tied a mile off down at the water and the smell of fish, seaweed, salt makes me breathe deeper.

You start to rest and I look up into the snow.

Stinging tornadoes and the light from the park's vintage streetlamps.

This isn't a snow.

It's a winter storm.

And my face and hands want to crack from it.

They might by tomorrow, but the snow blows sideways in front of old buildings and new buildings that border the park.

It blows against the trees where I hope the squirrels are tucked so deeply away.

It blows against my body, which is so sick this winter, but is so protected right now that the chill doesn't even come in at the cuffs.

And maybe the news I got on Wednesday will be okay.

And maybe you will be okay and I will be okay.

And maybe you and I will be okay.

And maybe here is a good place to be.

I don't know what comes after the snow melts, but it might be okay just to watch it swirl in light from old old lamps to take a couple of runs down the hill on my own again.

And when this flimsy green sled warps, catches, faces me wrong to throw my weight out of it and bale arms, pinwheels and body rolling and laughing like I haven't in weeks.

You work with young people, you're going to be coaching and mentoring in this area.

So here is a tough one for you to all I would say all but a lot of the people you're going to be working with are going to be right here with their thumbs in the phone.

It's the Internet and social media helped or hurt poetry.

In some ways it spread it, but in other ways, you don't have to create your own thing anywhere.

You can just sit there and take it all in.

What are your thoughts about it?

I think for some reason people get really attached to the internet and social media as this like thing that is different than anything that's come before.

And there are ways that's true, but it's also it's just a tool.

It's just about your relationship to it.

Like people can have an unhealthy relationship to anything or a healthy relationship to anything.

I know that social media companies are intentionally predatory on psychology, but I think there's so much cool stuff that comes out of the internet.

Like I love my poems being published online because then anyone can access them without having to pay.

I don't want my work behind a paywall and I love seeing there's like the like insta poets, like people who post their work on Instagram, So many people who would not read other poetry read their work, and that means they're reading poetry.

And how cool is that?

Yeah, yeah.

And that's why it's a hard question because it, it really democratizes it and exposes people to this.

Because another quote from you, you've talked about that you actually feel that people have a right to poetry, not just not just that it's for everyone and that it's something they should participate in, but they have a right to it.

And if you follow that thesis through, being exposed to it is is crucial.

Yes.

And being exposed to it in an environment where you are not immediately told if you don't think about it the right way or wrong.

I think it's so important for people, especially people's early exposures to poetry, to be like the point is to experience it.

The point is not to have a certain answer.

There isn't a certain answer.

It's just to have a relationship with the piece.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's where a lot of formal education, maybe some in some places breaks down would hear.

What are your thoughts of these thoughts?

What are your thoughts about teaching poetry right.

I think that for me, I mean, I could give my like Best Pro tips for the things that I think have helped me most in the classroom teaching poetry.

One is believing that your students interpretations are worthwhile, even if they're not what you think.

Another is reading living poets and like reading poetry this half minute because there is so much like I have truly a gigantic book stack of like current poetry that I can't get to because there's just so much that I can never get through it because so much good stuff is being published all the time.

And when you read that stuff, you're like, This poem is so cool.

I want to share it with my students.

And so having that fresh work, having work that you are genuinely excited about, I think a lot of teachers I know a lot of curriculum is very highly regulated and is very like, you have to teach this poem to all of your students the same way every single year and they have to get the same thing out of it.

And I think that is very restrictive for something that is so open ended.

Yeah, the poet laureate's job is a big one.

You're you're on this job for two years.

It's got pluses and minuses.

Like you said, it's it's great to actually get a paycheck and get paid for for poetry which is a stable income, is truly life changing.

I've never had stable income.

Yeah.

So that's a that's a great thing for an artist.

But the other piece too, is that it's a lot of work.

You're going to be doing lectures and mentoring and going not just here in the Puget Sound area because you're close here today, but I mean, Walla Walla.

I mean, so talk a little bit.

What are your plans and do you have a goal for these two years?

At the end of two years, you want to look back and what do you want to say?

I accomplished this.

This happened.

Yeah, I think I mean, I'm six months.

I think six months.

And it's a position so far.

And it is it's a lot of work.

It's a lot of time.

This is one of four events I have this week around this job.

I think in terms of like goals, like I have specific projects.

We have another question about that later.

Or is this the time to talk about it?

Yeah, go ahead.

Okay.

So every poet laureate does a project and my like official project is open right now.

We're open for submissions.

I'm creating a queer poetry anthology, so it'll be online.

It's going to be fully free to access for anyone who can access the Internet of poetry by queer writers on any topic from Washington State.

So it'll be the hope for that is that it'll be kind of like both like a showcase of like, look at all these wonderful queer writers and including people who are professionals and people who are maybe trying poetry for the first time.

So you're going to cure rate that, probably write the intro and that that will be something that you actually hand over or thump on a desk when it's also it will never be physical.

Okay?

It's going to be fully online calling it anthology, but it's a little bit more like a database because the cool thing about it is that every poem is going to be tagged with like and this will be in collaboration with the writers.

So all of the identities that they want to have and however they want to describe their location or relationship to place in Washington.

So if you're like I want to read writing by Trans Youth in Spokane, you can select those tags and then find poems that are by those demographics.

Yeah, and the hope for that is also like folks here and folks in other places where there's not as much access to queer visibility and things like that will have a resource where they can at least go online and be like, No, I am.

I am seeing people like me are here.

Good.

Well, I hope your last 18 months are productive as the poet laureate.

Thanks so much.

Great conversation.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

With so much going on in the world, it's hard to make time for something like poetry.

The bottom line.

That's exactly the point.

If we stop making time for beauty, peace, understanding and art, what are we really here for?

I hope this program got you thinking and talking to watch this program again or to share it with others.

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That's going to do it for this edition of Northwest.

Now until next Time, I'm Tom Layson and thanks for watching You already watched Northwest now on television Friday nights at 730 on Etsy.

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