Though Pauletta Hansel reads and writes poetry and prose (and also teaches workshops for The Porch that incorporate both) it is poetry that’s always been the most creatively stimulating, the form that feels like the closest, most direct expression of self. 

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It’s been her chosen form since her early teen years. “That time of puberty and beyond is oftentimes when people will start creating art, because it’s a time when there are so many changes both externally and internally, in terms of people’s bodies and minds and emotional structure,” she says. “The art we choose is oftentimes the art that helps us make sense of that transition time, that doorway into adulthood.” 

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Now in her 60s, Hansel remains steadfastly loyal to poetry while consistently overcoming the blocks that plague writers across genre. She’s also helping other writers do the same. Here, we talk about those roadblocks and how writers who are new to poetry can find their way in a space that can sometimes feel intimidating. --Andrea Williams

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What was it about poetry, specifically, that spoke to you when you were younger?

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I think it’s almost impossible to say, really, because I think that we don’t choose our art forms -- our art forms choose us. I was an avid reader, but I primarily read prose and novels, and actually novels are still one of my big loves in terms of reading. But when I started writing, I started writing poetry. I think maybe some of it has to do with music. I grew up in the 70s, so the singer-songwriters of the 70s were certainly a big influence, I think, on how I experienced language, in addition to the reading I was doing. I think teenagers often will be drawn to poetry because it is a way of – it’s a very direct expression of self, and that is what is most needed at that time. But then I stayed with it. Poetry continued to be my primary art form throughout all of those years. It’s one of the closest art forms to the body, in a way, because it has to do with breath. The line breaks, that direct expression. But what can I say as to why a particular person might be drawn to music or drawn to visual arts? It’s ours. It chose us.

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In both of your workshops for The Porch, “The Power of Two Diptychs and Duplex Forms” and “Finding the Lyric Essay or Poem in Family Stories,” you talk a lot about writing about the self, about writing memory and experience. Why is poetry an ideal form for doing that?

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I think one of the things poetry does is create images in words. And so oftentimes our memories are not necessarily memories that are full-on stories; they’re not necessarily set in a complete scene with dialogue. You have a memory that is kind of an internal flash: A smell can trigger a memory; one person’s kitchen can remind us of our grandmother’s kitchen. Because poetry is often set up in those flashes, we don’t necessarily need to recreate everything around it in order to get to the heart of the memory. 

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In both of my workshops, we can move into memoir or poetry, depending on our individual inspiration. But if we move into memoir, it’s really sort of short-form memoir where we can really focus on the triggering image, and the memory and the emotions and the connections that that triggering image brings up for us. 

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You have a memory that is kind of an internal flash: A smell can trigger a memory; one person’s kitchen can remind us of our grandmother’s kitchen. Because poetry is often set up in those flashes, we don’t necessarily need to recreate everything around it in order to get to the heart of the memory.

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When you’re teaching, where do you often find roadblocks for your students as they are doing this kind of work?

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I think we all have the ability to talk ourselves out of it, to say that there’s more important things to do right now, or I can’t do this, I can’t get this to the place where I want it to be. So in my classes, and particularly in these short-form classes where we only have a short time together, I really encourage people to let that self-talk go, and to just respond to whatever external prompt is being offered, but then to allow that internal memory to come out and meet that prompt. 

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One of the nice things about writing together, and writing within a very short time frame, is that you don’t really have a lot of time to think, This isn’t right, or I could do this a different way, or I should be doing something else. You’re just right there; you’ve got your instructions; you’ve got your pen or laptop or whatever you’re writing on; and you just go. 

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There’s something about the energy of community, whether that community is in person or online. You know that other people are responding to some of the same prompts, the same ideas—that they’re also going down to that place of memory, and we’re all in it together. 

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Sometimes, non-poets who didn’t feel that early, distinct call that poetry is their chosen art from can feel really intimidated by it. So when you’re speaking about talking yourself out of it, are you speaking on writing in general, or poetry in particular?

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I think it’s in general, I really do. We can find roadblocks, whatever the form is. It can be because you’re not familiar with poetry. Mine might be that I can’t write a scene, and I’m not good at dialogue. All of those sorts of things that really don’t matter in the first draft form when you don’t really know what shape this is going to take. Even if I’m writing memoir, this may be more of a lyric memoir and I may need just a touch of scene, or a little more dialogue. And if it’s poetry, it may be a narrative poetry where the syllable counts don’t matter. 

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I think that is one of the beauties of just being willing to experiment and explore and play with language. You don’t know how it’s going to turn out and what your own expectations will be. 

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There’s something about the energy of community, whether that community is in person or online. You know that other people are responding to some of the same prompts, the same ideas—that they’re also going down to that place of memory, and we’re all in it together. 

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For writers who are intimidated by poetry in general, or maybe by the combination of writing poetry with digging into memory, into personal history and all that – what advice do you have? Are there any specific bits of advice, any specific forms that are maybe easier for poetry beginners? What would you say to that?

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I think that if you’re drawn to poetry, or if you just want to explore it to see if you are drawn to it, one of the best ways to do that is to read a lot of poetry. You begin to see that there are wide variations in terms of what poetry is. One way would be to subscribe to an online poem-a-day. Three of them I can recommend are The Slowdown, which is part of American Public Media, in partnership with the Poetry Foundation. Also Daily Rattle, from Rattle Magazine at rattle.com. And Poetry Daily. If you read even half of them, you start to have a real sense of what poetry can be. You start to get a sense of what appeals to you and what doesn’t appeal to you.

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The expectation you may have on yourself based on your own early experience of poetry may in fact be—and probably is, in fact—an expectation that is just a narrow sliver of what poetry can be. While there are certainly objective standards to good writing, what speaks to us is very subjective and personal. So reading, on a regular basis, poems that have been curated and meet certain standards in terms of the level of writing can give you a little bit of permission to play around with how you feel about it. Whether that’s, Yeah, I can kind of see that that’s a good poem but I don’t like it, or Wow, this really speaks to me even though it’s like nothing I’ve ever read before, or Wow, this makes me want to write. And that’s really the best response. That’s the response that poets are often hoping for, that this brings up such a sense of emotion or memory or thought that you need to put my own words down onto paper.

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You’ve mentioned that it’s always good to be reading a lot of poetry. Who are you reading—either now or during frequent revisits—that inspires you in your own work?

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Oh there are so many. I will tell you right now, for a class I’m currently teaching in Cincinnati, I’m doing a deep-dive into Ada Limón, who’s our current Poet Laureate, who is always a treasure and a treat to read. Another poet I’ve been reading a lot lately, who’s very different than Ada Limón, is Diane Seuss. She’s an example of someone who writes in form, although not always, but she’s done a series of sonnets. And then within that form she gets really, really wild. And that’s what I really like about her work, that she gives me permission to just be imaginative and wild in my writing, which is a kind of permission that I need. 

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