8 minute read
The Poetic Perspective
The Poetic Perspective
Louisiana Poet Laureate, Alison Pelegrin
Alison Pelegrin wasn’t drawn to poetry as a child. But she did like to write, filling small memo pads with her stories. “They’d start on the first page and end on the last page, no matter what was happening,” she said. “I enjoyed that.”
Like most teenagers, she wrote moody, brooding poetry in high school, but her early poems were so bad that even she didn’t want to read them once they were finished. It wasn’t until Pelegrin started college and was inspired by a particularly tough English professor that she began exploring the art form. Even then, it never occurred to her that poetry could be a career choice.
“I was scared to death of Professor Tim Gautreaux. I still am,” Pelegrin laughed. “He was reserved in his praise and liberal with criticism. I honestly thought he hated everything I wrote.”
Then one day, Pelegrin visited the professor in his office. “He hadn’t returned a poem all semester,” she said. “The semester was almost over, and I had no idea what my grade was.” She entered his office and found the walls papered with rejection letters from prestigious publications like The Atlantic Monthly. “His work was just being recognized at that time,” Pelegrin said. “He was just breaking through.”
Gautreaux’s first question stopped Pelegrin in her tracks. He asked, “Where are you coming from that you write like this?” He gave her a book by a former student of his named Sheryl St. Germain. The book was ‘Making Bread at Midnight’ (Slough Press).
“I loved every word of it,” Pelegrin said. “It was one of the first poetry books I read that really meant a lot to me, and it was the first time I realized a poet could be a living person, not just someone in a book.” Once Alison began her own poetry career, she and St. Germain’s paths began crossing at book festivals and writing conferences, and the two struck up a friendship. They’re still friends today, and Professor Gautreaux remains a mentor. “He has supported me throughout my career,” Pelegrin said. “He wrote letters for me when I applied for fellowships, but it’s still very much a teacher/student relationship, even now that he’s retired.”
Like many new writers, Pelegrin was obsessed with getting published. “When I finally sold a poem to a tiny journal somewhere, I thought, ‘That was then, and this is a new world.’ In a lot of ways, I’ve never been as excited about anything as I was about that first sale, not even with major publications. I was 20 or 21. It was nothing, and it was everything.”
All of this was before the internet became widespread, making it difficult for Pelegrin to access the publications she wanted to read. She did find an anthology of southern poets called “The Made Thing” (The University of Arkansas Press).
“It was mostly male poets, and there was a man called Jim Whitehead who was a professor at the University of Arkansas, which at the time had a prominent MFA program,” Pelegrin said. “It was the first time I realized you could actually study poetry.”
Not only did Jim Whitehead teach there, but so did Miller Williams, who was Bill Clinton’s inaugural poet. “I decided I was going to go,” Pelegrin said. “I was so naive. I had no idea how difficult it was to get into the program. I folded up my GRE scores, threw them in an envelope, and sent them off.”
Her naivety paid off when she was awarded a full ride to the MFA program at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. She had recently read a short story by Ocean Springs writer Ellen Gilchrist called “Going to Join the Poets” about Gilchrist’s own trip to study with this program.
So, Pelegrin put a sign on her car that read, ‘Going to Join the Poets’ and headed toward her future at UAF where she says she was eaten alive, especially in the first year. “All these other writers were very competitive,” Pelegrin said. “Everyone was out for blood. It wasn’t healthy. I really got piled on in workshop.”
Professor Jim Whitehead, however, welcomed her with open arms. “As soon as he found out I was from New Orleans, he embraced me,” Pelegrin said. “I’d go to his house, and he’d go over my poems with me. So, I had a mentor who was really helping me, I just wasn’t getting that from the other students. When I won a chapbook contest, it was for the very poems they’d been making fun of for two years.”
That chapbook award was just the beginning for Pelegrin. In 2007, she won the Akron Poetry Prize for her Katrinainspired musings in “Big Muddy River of Stars” (University of Akron Press). She was awarded a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, an individual artist grant from the Louisiana Division of the Arts, and an ATLAS grant from the Louisiana Board of Regents. Her books “Hurricane Party” (The University of Akron Press), “Waterlines” (LSU Press), and “Our Lady of Bewilderment” (LSU Press) all received acclaim and broadened her readership.
In 2023, Pelegrin was named Louisiana poet laureate. Until the end of 2025, she will serve as Louisiana’s literary ambassador, traveling the state and encouraging her fellow Louisianans to engage with poetry and the South’s vibrant poetry scene. She has taught at Southeastern Louisiana University for more than twenty years, inspiring other poets and serving as writerin-residence.
“As a poet, you don’t have many restrictions, but you don’t get much attention either,” Pelegrin said. As poet laureate, however, she was getting attention and had to decide what to do with it.
“People kept asking me what I was going to do, and I honestly didn’t know,” Pelegrin said. “Then, prisoner advocate Marianne Fisher-Giorlando invited me to teach a poetry workshop at Angola (Louisiana State Penitentiary). I loved it! Everything was stripped away, and for the first time in a long time, I was aware of the focus that poetry demands. I was reminded how important it is and how writing is its own reward.”
Pelegrin and her students could only accomplish so much in that first workshop, so the participants asked for independent work (requesting her not to call it “homework,” since the prison is not their “home”). “I made up a sheet based on the things we’d discussed in that first class and was able to return three months later,” Pelegrin said. “They’d all done the work and were eager to share.” The group is already planning their next class focused on sonnets.
The experience renewed Pelegrin’s enthusiasm. She applied for and received a grant from The Foundation for Louisiana to continue her work in Louisiana prisons. “I proposed a series of visits with a men’s prison, a women’s prison, and a juvenile facility to take place over the course of a year,” Pelegrin said. “Each visit will be followed up by a packet of independent work based
on the things that come up in our conversation. My next group will be juveniles, which will be a little different, but not really because looking at the world and really seeing it is the same no matter who you are, where you are, and how old you are.”
This summer looks to be a busy one for Louisiana’s poet laureate. As Pelegrin takes the summer off from teaching, her calendar is filled with literary festivals, poetry readings, workshops, book signings, and extensive travel. But what inspires her most is the time she’ll be spending in Louisiana’s prisons. “I’m finding it very rewarding,” she said. “Poets are usually invisible. Now that I’m poet laureate and occasionally get some attention, what better use can I make of my platform than to gently gesture to the fact that these are humans with voices that deserve to be heard?”
Experience Pelegrin’s poetry at AlisonPelegrin.com and find upcoming readings at apelegrin on Instagram.
As I Stand on a Paddle Board for the First Time in June, I Plan for October's Eclipse after James Wright
Knowing full well the folly of counting on tomorrow, I resolve to be on Bayou Castine for the eclipse coming in 100 days. I've got solar glasses and a flashlight to wear around my neck, and I'll pack a flask, because if you're not reading boat names and sipping bourbon on the bayou during the total eclipse, why even bother?
But now it is summer, and I live for darkness where it is cooler, roaming the yard in board shorts and Crocs. How do I, who barely have my balance, dare dream of gliding among cypress stoic in black waters?
Tonight's crickets salute the thunder moon. Those that will sing their confusion to the future have just taken root.
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN 64 PARISHES.
