- Barbara Smith has experienced real disruption and turmoil in her life, but she's found poetry in it.

In fact, this folksy grandmother and longtime college professor from Rock Springs says there's poetry in life for everyone, if we just know where to look.

I'm Steve Peck of Wyoming PBS.

This is Wyoming Chronicle.

(dramatic music) - [Announcer+ Programming on Wyoming PBS is brought to you in part by Wyoming Humanities, enhancing the Wyoming narrative to engage communities with grants and programs across Wyoming for more than 50 years.

We proudly support Wyoming PBS, - Barbara Smith, poet Laureate of Wyoming.

A lot of fancy talk there.

- [Barbara] Yeah.

- What's the job the title, the role as you see it?

- I always thought it might, in Wyoming it should be Poet Lariat, you know, but it's a voluntary honorary position, and because of that, I can do what I prefer to do, and people can ask me to do things like give readings or go into classes or judge contests.

I've been doing all of those kinds of things.

I like to get into communities and do readings, and the kind of readings I do, I kind of tell stories about how I ended up with this poem or that poem , or, you know, what caused me to come to that sort of thing.

I'm sort of a mag pie.

I just have all different kinds of interactions, and then I like to interact with the audience and get them asking questions or telling about their experience.

I've only been the poet laureate for not quite two years now, since Eugene retired.

- And this is Eugene Gagliano.

- Yeah, Eugene Gagliano retired.

- He had the job for the Post for some years, and viewers right, might remember.

We went up to Buffalo and recorded a Wyoming Chronicle with him.

His emphasis was on children's poetry.

- [Barbara] Yes.

- This very heavily rhyming.

Very, very rhythmic stuff.

- Yeah, I'm more a free verse.

- Yeah.

- My poetry, a lot of it is more narrative, or I get some kind of an image in the back of my head.

It might sit there for a few years, and then I get an idea and I have to just put the dishes aside and the papers aside and get that idea down.

That's how I work.

- While, you've still got the idea.

- Yeah, yeah.

And sometimes it takes, sometimes it takes a while.

There are some poems in my book that I think kind of sat there and stewed for a number of years and then turned into a poem that I thought was a poem.

You know, a lot of writing doesn't turn into a poem.

It's just sits there, but sometimes you catch one.

- Yeah, I've read some of your poetry and I'm certainly not a poet.

I'm not a scholar, but I'm interested.

- [Barbara] Yeah.

- And my, my grandmother was, my mother was, and so I've read it and it's, you can find some, at least it seemed to me, you could find some things where you were rhyming just a little bit.

- Oh, yes.

Poetry is a lot of sound.

It may not necessarily rhyme in a pattern.

- Right.

- But that doesn't mean it doesn't have rhythm and it doesn't have alliteration, and it doesn't have some rhyming to it when it's appropriate.

- I remember a class that I took in high school.

It was an elective class, but it fit within this group that we had to choose one.

And it was English literature, something that my teacher, and I'll say her name, her name was Betsy Kendall Brown.

And she gave a little introduction.

She said, "How many, raise your hand if you're not interested in poetry?"

And I didn't raise my hand, but several people did.

And she said, I bet you really are.

And that's what we're gonna do in this class.

- Yeah.

- Just gimme a chance.

- [Barbara] Yeah.

- What do you remember about poetry when you were in high school, say, or as a child, or?

- Well, I'm pretty old, so I was in high school in the early sixties.

And this is the truth.

All of us, we read poetry or teachers asked us to memorize.

You know, I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree.

And I remember when I was a, a sixth grader getting up and being completely mortified because the teacher made me recite a poem.

There is no frigate like a book and all these boys are falling on the floor because I said, frigging.

None of us knew what that was.

And so I grew up with Robert Frost and the thinking at the time and what I was thinking, oh, it's pretty, it's interesting.

And so on.

But poetry was something that dead white guys from England did.

And nothing that somebody in the state of Montana would do, you know?

And it just didn't occur to me.

I mean, I fiddled around and wrote some things here and there, but it didn't occur to me that people like us up there in Montana, in Wyoming, and so on, wrote poetry.

And my mother took me to a poetry reading up at Northern Montana College in Haver, Montana.

And there was a live poet, and I can't quite remember who that was, but it was a real eyeopener.

- Once you remember.

- That there were people who were writing poetry.

And then I started writing a little bit here and there, and I wrote some things, but the kind of poetry at that time that I was writing in high school and college and so on, I was just dabbling along.

But I wrote things that only I knew what I knew what they meant, but I didn't want to communicate.

I didn't want anybody else to know what I was writing about.

It wasn't for anybody else.

And I deliberately did not want people to understand me for one reason or another.

Who knows?

I might have been writing about some boyfriend or something, who knows?

But at the point where you want to communicate or you want to get some kind of reaction, that's what's fun about doing poetry readings, is to see people react to things.

My son, who was, I don't know, he must have been 30 or so at the time or late twenties, and he was in a pool league, you know, and the pool league guys were all down at the bar, and my son was leaving, and they say, "Where are you going?"

And he said, "I'm going up to the college.

My mother's doing a poetry reading."

And they said, "What?"

Because they also have this idea that it's Robert Frost and he's dead, you know?

- [Steve] Yeah.

- And so, honestly, these guys, you know, not the usual kind of guys that says, we'll, come with you.

And they all came up here, and I'm looking at 'em like, "What do we have here, you know?

And I read poetry.

I read poetry about superior Wyoming and Rock Springs, and the boom.

I have a whole list about, of poetry, about living here in this situation that's difficult.

And living in periods of rapid change.

That's kind of an interesting topic.

- [Steve] Sure.

- So he was sitting there with all these people, he says, I turned and I looked, and this one girl over there, she had tears in her eyes.

They went back and she said, that's where my grandmother lived.

And I spent time up there.

And that was really something, you know?

So what that was is subjects in these poems that surprised these guys, first of all, that they could relate to.

- Yes.

- And so I think a lot of my poetry is not as obscure as some writers do, because I write so that people would understand what I'm talking about.

And I know when I have a poem is when it it kind of surprises me, or I get into something that I hadn't maybe expected as I'm writing it, and sometimes it pops.

- Yeah, I've heard others say this in different kinds of writing.

You'll go back to it later and you think, did I write that?

- Yeah.

- You've experienced this.

And so you, of course, you know that you did, but it's, oh, you're in the, what would you call it?

In the zone.

- Yeah.

- [Steve] You don't realize, - Yeah.

- That it's actually happened.

- Well, I want to tell you about my first poem other than "Hickory Dickory Dock."

- Yeah.

- My mother read it to me, and it was called "The Eagle" by Tennyson.

- [Barbara] Okay.

- Speaking of an old English, white Englishman.

- Well, they were wonderful poets.

- [Steve] Oh, sure: - You know?

- And it's very short.

He clasps the crag with crooked hands, close to the sun in lonely lands, ringed with the azure world he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls.

He watches from his mountain walls, and like a thunderbolt he falls.

So it came to you.

- Oh, yes, I know that poem.

- And she read that to me 60 years ago, I would guess.

I still have it memorized.

That's not like this is the second.

- Right.

- I hadn't thought of it since then.

- Yeah.

- And it's one of the strongest memories I still have of my mother.

And it's because of a poem.

- [Barbara] Yeah.

- And I thought it was a great poem for a kid, and I want to talk to you about what you think makes a good poem, but it rhymed, which we know is not all important, but for a little kid that helps a little.

But it wasn't a nursery rhyme kind of thing.

It was, and it had an, and it was short and it had an eagle in it.

I could picture that.

And it had alliteration, clasped the crags with crooked hands, not claws.

And he stops there.

- Yeah.

- And then it had this action to it.

- [Barbara] Yep.

- He falls, and then what happened, you know, I was, I remember being that's it?

- Yep.

- And so the rest of it was sort of, it propelled me forward in my own mind.

And then it had a word like, I knew what clasp, crag, but it had the world azure, which she told me what that meant, which was blue.

He's up in the blue sky.

And so it was perfect.

- [Barbara] Yeah.

- And at the time, I didn't think of it in that way.

And I want you to talk and I'll quit talking, but it's just an example for me of how something like that, that I probably wouldn't have come to on my own.

And when I've thought more about it since then, it has these elements to it that were just right at the time.

- Yes.

And the poem didn't change, but you did over time and came to understand in a different way.

- And it still works for me.

- Yes, and it still works, yeah.

That is exactly the case.

A poem kind of means different things too, to people.

The girl whose mother or whose grandmother lived out in Superior.

That poem really wasn't a very sentimental poem.

It was a poem about a woman during the boom who lived out in Superior, who did not particularly like these, the book I was suggesting to her, the title of the poem.

At the beginning I had the title of the "Academic Humanist Goes to the Ghost Town."

And that didn't work very well.

And so I titled it "Snakes."

- There we go.

- Because there were some snakes in, and it wasn't a very romantic idolized poem about living in Superior.

In fact, I didn't even think of it that way.

But she heard that poem and that the nature of that, what I was talking about, so reminded her of how it was out there in superior for her in this experience.

That it just touched a memory.

- [Barbara] Right.

- And it caused her to, it was a different weight for it to mean something.

It has to pop for you.

And it may not.

And different strokes for different folks, you know?

- It's interesting, isn't it, when someone speaks about something you've written.

- Yeah.

- And says something that you hadn't at least overtly thought about.

But it makes sense when you.

- Yeah.

- When you hear it from them.

- Absolutely.

- It's part the process of writing.

- It's great fun.

- Yeah, it's great fun to talk and people come up and say, well, I know about this place 'cause I've seen this, you know, and so on.

And I go, yeah.

- Well, I made that up.

But you write a lot about, at least in my dipping into your work, you write about women in these challenging circumstances through time.

- Yeah.

- I can tell you about how I really got going in Rock Springs.

I am teaching school and I get married and end up as a stepmom for three kids.

That was my wedding present.

And then I had twins on my third wedding anniversary.

- [Steve] Really?

- So I went from being single and happy to having a house full of kids.

And at that time, all of us up at the college, almost everybody up here, we were young school teachers all having families, but none of us were living in the kind of situation that many of us grew up in.

I grew up in North Dakota with all my relatives around me.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- You know, grandma's, grandpa's, cousins, double cousins, aunts and uncles, and a big support group for my mother with her kids.

So here I am in Rock Springs, Wyoming, in a Boone town with nobody and a bunch of kids.

And the town is blown apart by this industrial boom.

And Rock Springs was the poster child for a disaster.

Hey, there's gonna be thousands of people show up here all looking for a place to stay, you know?

And the people who lived here, their little town wasn't the same.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- And everybody was pretty well aggravated about the whole thing.

And here we are, young people, no supports, and, you know, so we became our own community, really.

And I, all of a sudden, now, I grew up around a grandma who loved to tell stories, and when she got married, they went and homesteaded up in Saskatchewan, Canada.

- [Steve] Wow.

- And she told these stories about the wolves coming, you know, and all these grand adventures.

And I was always sitting there listening to these tales, and she always seemed like quite a pioneer.

So all of a sudden I'm here and there's people from Oklahoma sitting out in the Pamida parking lot in the back of a camper with a dog tied to the wheel.

- Hubcap, yeah.

- Base, all pretty well ticked off about things.

And all of a sudden, I started to see parallels with the people who uproot themselves to go somewhere like Rock Springs, Wyoming, and start a whole new life.

- Not that much different from going to Saskatchewan.

- Yeah.

And it's not that different from the pioneers who came through here.

This is part of the Oregon Trail sort of thing.

And so I began to see parallels between us, those of us who were living through this rapid unexpected change and trying to live a life and dealing with all of this.

And so I have a lot of poems that relate to those pioneers.

And there are a lot of women pioneers and stories, because these were some of the stories that I was getting from those folks.

You have to be careful with a writer.

They'll steal everything.

People in Wyoming now, 20, 30 years later, this is still going on in different ways and change coming to a community and trying to figure out how to think about it or what to do about it so that you retain your culture or you retain your sense of who you are.

So I wrote about all of those kinds of things and people relate to it.

- Well, how about reading a thing or two of what you've been talking about?

- I have one called "Flyover Country," talking about the place where we are and what is it that people know about this place or wanna keep and what do people assume about this place?

So this is "Flyover Country."

- Okay.

- On the flight between LA and Chicago, a pilot might point out some feature below, like the Grand Canyon or Devil's Tower, but he won't mention our place on the eastern slope of the Rockies.

They call it flyover country, high deserts where rains rarely fall.

Some might say, what's to look at anyway, just miles and miles of Sagebrush prairie, small towns nestled in the bad lands.

But this plane follows the Oregon trail, the scar across the land still visible from the air as thousands of hopefuls walked the west following wagons or pushing hand carts in search of something else, California or the Fertile Valleys of Oregon.

Some stopped along the way, claimed this place as their own.

I once walked the continental divide on a short trek, watched contrails of planes crisscrossing the sky, saw a sego lily blooming alone on the trail.

The only sound, the wind whistling tales of long ago, a creaking of immigrant wagons on South Pass echoing in ruts cut shoulder deep."

So there, huh?

You know, people say, well, what's over there?

You've heard stories about people saying, no, there's nothing out there.

I heard a story once where they said, well, they oughta just put a fence around Wyoming and put all the criminals in there, because there isn't anything there.

It's the big empty, - I've lived in Wyoming all my life.

So what you're saying to me is, I'm nothing.

- [Barbara] Yeah.

Where I live is nothing.

What I've done is nothing.

- And that's not true, no.

And that is not true.

- Are you working on poetry now?

- Sure, I'm kind of a scattered writer.

How I write is, I get an idea.

A lot of guys have a regular routine.

- [Barbara] Yeah.

- They get up at five in the morning, you know, do their jog, have their coffee and work until noon.

You know, and when I hear that story, I always know, you have some keepers.

You have a wife, or you have someone who gets the kids to school and so on.

And then I hear other people who say, oh, I write in bed at night.

I write about this and then I stick it under the bed and then I pull it out later.

And I go, no, that's, you're joking with me.

I don't know.

I think a lot of women tend to have to be a lot more flexible.

And I have a lot of scrap.

If you look at a junk drawer of mine, I have scraps of ideas here and there.

And some of these poems took a long time to write because I didn't realize that I was having, I had this idea and tucked it away, and then something else came back.

Or I have two or three parts.

And I know I have a poem when something starts to surprise me and I make a connection that I hadn't anticipated.

I make a joke that sometimes I don't exactly know where I'm going.

Somebody once said that writing is sort of like driving in a fog with headlights on.

You can see as far as the headlights.

But you can make the trip all the way.

- Eventually you'll get there.

- Yeah.

- Eventually you get there and sometimes, you know you have a poem when something really surprises you and you pursue that.

You can decide to pursue it or not.

- Read one more for us.

- This is one of the early ones when the boom was going on, it's called "Sisters."

- Okay.

- "The wind blew down the valley from Green River in the afternoon, about 2:30.

She looked at the clock, the usual time.

The dust sifted in through the sliding glass doors, lingered a bit in the air, settled softly down to rest.

She wiped the top of the dishwasher and thought of other women.

Back then when the wind blew, what did they dust?

The side, the shelf on the side that served as a cupboard?

The handmade table, the dirt floor.

What did they dust, those women?

She remembered pictures of pale whisk blonde women, not yet grandmothers, homesteading, standing by the sod with aprons blowing in the wind, hair twisted in a knot, arms folded tight under their breasts.

Bellies big, under full skirts.

As usual, they stood tall.

She bent over to pick up a toy.

The baby pushed back hard under her ribs.

A strand of fine hair fell across her face.

She remembered a story told often when she was young.

Two pioneer women would dance together around and around their kitchen when they visited.

They danced twice in five years.

They saw no one.

What did those women do when the men were gone in the fields and the wind came every day at 2:30.

She sat down at the table by the sliding glass door and watched a dust squall whirl its way into the subdivision.

She didn't know her neighbor.

She wondered did she dance?

She drove off every day in her new car.

Some pioneer women took Laudanum them for headaches.

Some died in the long afternoon.

Some waited five years to dance together, and dream.

Sisters, she thought, we're sisters."

- Where can someone - [Barbara] Yeah.

- Who wants your book, get it?

- I think you can get it on Amazon still, but it's better to get it.

- At your local bookstore.

- Deep Wild Press or ask at the local bookstore.

And it's in a lot of the libraries and so on, but it's called "Putting a Name On It" and there's a lot of Wyoming in it.

- It's by Barbara Smith, Wyoming's poet laureate.

I could talk to you for another hour.

- Yeah.

- I really could.

I want thank you for being with us on Wyoming Chronicle.

- Yeah, thank you.

(upbeat music)