DARRYL LORENZO WELLINGTON
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SFLR Speaks with Darryl Lorenzo Wellington
Darryl Lorenzo Wellington is the 2021-23 Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico. An uprooted Southerner who is now a New Mexican, he has been a professional journalist for over 20 years, with articles, fiction, and poetry appearing in The Nation, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Boston Review, and many other places. He is also a playwright and performance artist. His essays on poverty, economic justice, race relations, African American history, civil rights history, and post-Katrina New Orleans have appeared in The Nation, The Progressive, The Christian Science Monitor, The Atlantic, Dissent, Crisis (The NAACP magazine), The Guardian, and others. He has appeared as a guest on the Tavis Smiley Radio Show and is presently a Writing Fellow at the Center for Community Change in Washington, D.C. In the arts (and sometimes in life) he loves playing with fire. His recent full-length collection, Psalms at the Present Time (Flowstone Press), was released in November, 2021. SFLR: Sometimes, it seems like folks are afraid of—or intimidated by—poetry. Others dismiss it as an unimportant or irrelevant genre. Many leave high school or college and never look at a poem again. As a poet yourself, what’s your response to this phenomenon? DLW: We all have our interests, strengths and weaknesses. That isn’t the point. The point is that primary school is where you receive foundational knowledge, like basic knowledge of math, science, and history—all of which is supposed to make you an able citizen: able to do income taxes, understand Newtonian physics, and appreciate the democratic process. I conduct workshops with an appreciation that teaching poetry and the arts to high school students activates a different set of receptors, having to do with becoming what I like to call “a responsive human being.” A responsive human being has cultivated another kind of training. This person is responsive to aesthetics—and accordingly responsive to feelings like concern, empathy, understated humor— capabilities fostered by having an imaginative curiosity.
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Volume 17 • 2022
