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U.P. poet laureate announced

Achatz

MARQUETTE — The Upper Peninsula has elected its third poet laureate.

Marty Achatz, who will keep the title through 2018, was awarded the distinction this week, after a voting process begun in December.

The Ishpeming native, a contingent professor of writing and film at Northern Michigan University, said the U.P. itself “generates poetry if you’re in it.”

“When you grow up and live in a place so centered on the weather and just the environment around you, it just sort of seeps into your poetry,” Achatz said.

He takes on the mantle from the 2015-16 U.P. Poet Laureate Andrea Scarpino and Russ Thorburn, who became the first in 2013.

Thorburn will host a Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) poetry event at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Marquette Arts and Culture Center on the lower level of the Peter White Public Library.

It will feature readings by Achatz; runner-up Kathleen Heideman; Beverly Matherne, last year’s runner-up; and Thorburn himself. Scarpino is unavailable.

Thorburn praised the readers and said Achatz and Heideman especially reflect the U.P. geographically, emotionally and historically.

“Marty will be a very engaging, compassionate poet laureate,” Thorburn said. “The poetry that he writes is of the earth, about growing up here, so he is rooted, grounded in the Upper Peninsula, and that’s good.”

Achatz said being poet laureate involves leading readings and events around the U.P., in which he hopes to incorporate fundraising for good causes.

He most looks forward to visiting schools, he said, where people may be surprised to learn that young children are often the most excited about hearing and writing poetry.

“That’s one of the really great, great joys of the position,” Achatz said.

After graduating from Ishpeming High School, Achatz received a bachelor’s in English, math and computer science from NMU in 1991. He received his master’s in creative writing and fiction from NMU in 1993, began Ph.D. studies in literature at Western Michigan University, then returned to NMU and graduated with a master’s of fine arts in poetry in 2003.

He has taught at NMU for about 18 years.

As a lifelong Catholic, Achatz said he draws on spiritual and religious themes in addition to natural motifs.

“But it’s a spirituality for me that’s sort of grounded in the human side,” Achatz said. “I like sort of exploring the struggle between the human and the spiritual aspects of people’s lives and the sort of tension that exists there.”

Achatz has published one book of poetry, “The Mysteries of the Rosary,” along with poems in literary magazines. Among other awards, he was twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2013 and 2014.

Achatz said hearing the announcement during this week’s filming of WNMU-TV’s “Media Meet” was nearly an “out of body experience,” since he was not expecting former U.S. poet laureate Donald Hall, one of his favorite poets, to have recorded the announcement.

“I told people it was almost like Charlton Heston going onto the mountain and hearing God (give) the 10 commandments,” Achatz said, adding it has been a strange and amazing whirlwind week.

He said he looks forward to bringing awareness to something often under the radar.

“Part of the job of being a poet is sort of being off by yourself and scribbling in a notebook, and just sort of operating in that … poetry bubble,” Achatz said. “But at the end of it, you want people to read what you’ve written and somehow respond to it, and I think that’s what’s great about the poet laureate position is it does focus people’s attention on an art form that really doesn’t get a lot of attention these days.”

But poetry is especially important right now, he added.

“It really is an art form about truth, and in this day and age, in this time right now, I think that we need people who are reading poems and speaking the truth,” Achatz said.

Similarly, Thorburn said, “You need poets to ask questions.”

Heideman quoted William Carlos Williams, who wrote, “It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”

Poetry aims to “put something into words about justice, the human spirit and truth,” Heideman said.

As a poet, Heideman is interested in landscape and environmental issues. Through projects with national parks and the National Science Foundation, as well as environmental activism, she said poetry is a way for her to express her endless curiosity about people’s complicated relationship with their natural environment.

Most of the time, she said, “I feel like I’m writing love letters to this place.”

Heideman’s newest book of poetry, “Psalms of the Early Anthropocene,” will be available in March, with a shared book release event in the works.

Other local poets Amber Edmondson, Janeen Rastall, Jesse Koenig and Milton Bates are also releasing new books, and more information about the event will be forthcoming, she said.

Matherne, NMU professor emeritus and internationally acclaimed poet from the Cajun-French region of New Orleans, said people might be surprised to learn that a total of 17 poets were nominated this year.

“I think it’s wonderful that the rest of the U.P. is being made aware of the many, many talented poets who practice right here in the U.P.,” Matherne said.“And so many of us, I mean we’re well-published and we’re well recognized. … It’s good for folks in the U.P. to know that this is another way in which we can celebrate the U.P.”

The U.P. Poet Laureate program was originally begun by author Ron Riekki as an effort — similar to the U.S. Poet Laureate position — to advance poetry in the region.

Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters, a nonprofit writers’ center based in Grand Rapids, aids in the nomination and selection process.

Achatz said the U.P.-centered distinction is fitting.

“I think Yoopers are independent thinkers like that,” he said.

For more information about Tuesday’s reading, contact the MACC at 906-228-0472.

Mary Wardell can be reached at 906-228-2500, ext. 248. Her email address is mwardell@miningjournal.net.

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