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State Poet Laureate Plans to Show Louisiana the Power of Poetry

Tulane.edu

Every two years, Louisiana's governor appoints a poet laureate. In August Governor Jindal appointed Peter Cooley. Cooley is the director of the creative writing program at Tulane University, he has authored ten full-length collections of poetry and has been published in magazines such as the New Yorker and the Atlantic. He gave his inaugural reading as Poet Laureate earlier this week.

Ann Marie Awad: So, I did want to ask, you are actually from Detroit, is that right?

Peter Cooley: Yes.

AMA: But you've spent most of your life in Louisiana.

PC: I have been here over half my life, yes.

AMA: How would you say Louisiana has shaped your work?

PC: Well at first - as I've said in many interviews - when I've  when I first came here from Wisconsin, I thought I would be writing about all the flora and fauna and so on, and I found I could write almost nothing. I was so overwhelmed by the climate and the locale, but it has definitely seeped in and influenced almost everything that I write. For one thing I think there's a kind of liquid which has entered my poems through living down here, through just absorbing Southern speech and from the slowness of life here compared to the Midwest. And then the weather and the light has affected my poetry profoundly. I love the light here, I love the always shifting light, which I've written about another poems. The sky is never still her. When I lived in Chicago, evening would set in around 3:30 [laughs]  and night  would be there around five and that was it, right? And then the morning might come around 10 a.m.  [laughs] "The good grey city," the president of the University of Chicago called it once. But here, the sky is always shifting and changing and I love that.

AMA: And New Orleans itself has actually changed quite a bit since you've been there.  I know - I was actually reading something about how you lived through Katrina and that seems to have had a profound impact on  your work.

PC: Yes. We did not lose our house. We had the roof re-done, we had a new floor heater put in. We did not suffer major damage but living here and I'm staying in our house during that time - which we did - certainly made me realize the preciousness of life and it accelerated my writing, actually.

AMA:  You told The Advocate couple months ago that you had written some 30 poems following Katrina.

PC: Yes.

AMA: And almost immediately upon returning to your home, is that right?

PC: Before returning to my home. We were we were staying in the Chalstrom House of the Episcopal Church [on] Carollton Avenue.  That first poem, I wrote in the Chalstrom House, and the second poem I wrote when we returned to our own home, but I was reading right after Katrina.

AMA: As Poet Laureate, what do you hope to accomplish in your two-year term?

PC: I've had a lot of experience teaching creative writing for over 40 years and I've worked in poetry in the schools in Wisconsin, I've taught in a mental hospital, I thought in a prison - so I hope to do community workshops in various places. I think one of the things I'd like to do in this term is to show people - through the editorship,  through giving readings,  through doing workshops - how essential poetry is, how much much a part of our lives it is, whether we choose to see that.

i_see_a_city_in_tears.mp3
Peter reads "I See a City in Tears"

third_heaven.mp3
Peter reads "Third Heaven"