WAUKESHA – Wisconsin’s first state poet laureate will speak at the University of Wisconsin-Waukesha on Wednesday, April 17, during National Poetry Month. Ellen Kort will read some of her work and talk about the writing of poetry at noon in the UW-Waukesha library, located in Northview Hall on campus at 1500 N. University Dr., Waukesha.
Part of the Visions & Expressions series sponsored by the campus University Convocations Committee, her presentation is open to the public at no charge. The student Literary Club and the English Department also are co-sponsoring the event.
Wisconsin was one of only 14 states without a state poet laureate until Kort assumed the role in December 2000. Several groups, including the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and the Wisconsin Regional Writers, among others, convinced then Governor Tommy Thompson to appoint a poet laureate for Wisconsin. When Kort received the call, she was surprised to get a call from the governor but admits, “My daughter had already phoned me after hearing it on TV. Still, I was surprised.”
A Wisconsin native, Kort was born in Glenwood, raised in Menomonie, and lives in Appleton, where she raised her six children. She heard her calling early in life. “I wrote as a kid. Writing was a part of my life,” she recalls. When her children were young, she found a way to retreat to some personal time by writing.
Serving a four-year term as our state’s official poet, Kort has begun to define her role. “The first year has been wonderful. I travel across the state taking poetry wherever I can.” She writes poems for special occasions as well as reading work she already has produced, and she continues to write new poems for her own growth. Many aspiring poets contact her, and she attempts to answer every one. “I hope to do a good enough job so that the state will see how important this position is and will keep it going,” she says.
She has undertaken a couple of special projects. One is Interestercials, a collaborative project with the UW Extension and 4H. Rural kids from across the state do readings of special interest to them, and these will be aired on public television through April.
In another effort, she has gathered up some of her books and talked friends into donating theirs for a Read-It and Pass-It On Project. She leaves books behind at restaurants, gas stations, and other public locations for people to pick up and read and then leave behind for someone else. In each she has inscribed her name and address so the readers can contact her with their stories of finding and reading one of the books.
Kort is the author of 11 books, including The Fox Heritage: A History of Wisconsin Fox Cities, and seven books of poetry: Bear, Sing Back My Bones, If Death Were a Woman, Notes from a Small Island, Uncle Jake, Letter from McCarty’s Farm, and There Is Something Ancient Here. Her most recent book, Wisconsin Women and Their Quilts: Stories in the Stitches, is in its second printing.
She has won a number of awards and has had her work incorporated architecturally into the Midwest Express Center in Milwaukee, the Green Bay Botanical Garden, and Fox River Mall in Appleton. Ellen Burstyn, Ed Answer, CCH Pounder, and Alfrie Woodard have recorded works by Kort, and the New York City Dance Theater performed her work. Among her awards are the Pablo Nerud Literary Prize for Poetry, the Mel Ellis/Dion Henderson Outdoor Writing Award, the 1998 Sesquicentennial Poetry Award, and the 2001 Dr. Hanns Kretzschmar Excellence in the Arts award.
A talk show host in Appleton, Kort has appeared on Wisconsin and National Public Radio and taught classes at UW-Green Bay, UW-Stevens Point, and UW-Oshkosh as well as the Oklahoma Art Institute and the Rhinelander School of the Arts.
She carries a bucket of glow-in-the-dark chalk in her car so she can write poems on city sidewalks. |
