Poet Laureate Fellow Spotlight: Louisiana Poet Laureate Alison Pelegrin

For the last days of National Poetry Month, Bookmarked teamed up with the Academy of American Poets to highlight three of their 2024 Poet Laureate Fellows. The fellowships recognize laureates’ literary excellence while enabling them to undertake meaningful and innovative projects that enrich the lives of community members, including youth, through responsive and interactive poetry activities. Each participating fellow responded to questions from Academy Content Editor Nadra Mabrouk. Today’s post features Louisiana Poet Laureate Alison Pelegrin.

What inspired you most about bringing poetry to your community as a poet laureate fellow?

I did not have a clear mission as Louisiana Poet Laureate until I visited the poetry group at Louisiana State Penitentiary. That gloomy day in February wasn’t my first visit to Angola—I had been once for the Prison Rodeo, a spectacle that made me so uncomfortable and sad that I vowed never to return. What I’m sorry for now is the reflexive urge I had to turn my back instead of standing to behold this thing I found so troubling.

To get to Angola, you have to drive past Baton Rouge to St. Francisville and then almost thirty bending miles on Tunica Trace. Only then will you see it: an 18,000 acre former plantation surrounded on three sides by water. Unless you live there, or you’re joyriding with the top down, or you have a reason to be at the prison, there’s no reason to travel this road. For me, the soundtrack for this ride is silence—to get my mind right on the way there and to process the visit on the way back. I can’t imagine what it would be like to travel these roads when Angola is your court-ordered destination, in a vehicle that could be mistaken for a white church van if not for the bars over the windows.

So where is the poetry in this? Poetry is miraculous in that it creates space for awe where none exists. It’s the flurry of joy and concentration, of wisdom and questions. It’s having a group of poets zeroing in on the meat of a poem instantly, on first hearing. It’s being reminded of both our individual and shared humanity. All of us. Everywhere.

 Holding hands, holding babies—arts market at the prison rodeo.

How do you think your work changed the way your community engages with poetry, both now and in the future?

 In addition to poetry workshops inside of Louisiana prisons, I included community events as part of my Laureate Fellowship. My goal for these events was to have participants discuss the same poems and write from the same prompts that I was using in prisons, the idea being that we would come together over a discussion rooted in the same language. Poetry is all about voice and place, and once I can establish that with a group it is much easier to crack open uniform environments and routines, to mine them for their beauty.

At these community events, I was heartened to see a genuine interest in the poets I had met in Louisiana prisons as well as in the subject of mass incarceration in the state of Louisiana. I also became aware of the many groups and organizations working to serve the incarcerated and paroled populations throughout the state of Louisiana, all of us haunted and buoyed by the things we have seen.

In limbo between prison gates slammed shut and rattled from tooth to toe.

 What partnerships were you most excited about when embarking on this project?

From the beginning I was excited to collaborate with the New Orleans Poetry Festival. In addition to helping with the Lifelines website, they designed my logo and helped to spread the word about the work. We will soon see the impact of something we have been working towards for months when we bring a group of eight poets for a reading at Angola as part of the New Orleans Poetry Festival RoadShow. Later that same week, Lifelines will be featured at their tenth annual festival.

An unexpected collaboration was with the Historic New Orleans Collection and One Book One New Orleans. The curators hosted a special viewing of the exhibit “Captive State: Louisiana and the Making of Mass Incarceration” for a group of poets, with the idea that poetry might be the only way to respond to what we saw displayed before us. We performed our work at the 2024 Words and Music Festival, hosted by One Book One New Orleans in the André Cailloux Center for Performing Arts & Cultural Justice. Our writing was featured at the Historic New Orleans Collection blog “First Draft,” and some of the poems will find their way into the exhibition catalog.

I should also mention the wardens, librarians and educators within the Department of Corrections that were receptive to Lifelines and made my visits possible. I hope to maintain these relationships and continue this work beyond the tenure of my laureateship. Most important of all is Marianne Fisher-Giorlando, a retired criminal justice professor, scholar, advocate and now my mentor—she was the one to introduce me to the poetry group at Angola.

Write down what you think while staring through the wall at what you know is night.

How has being a poet laureate changed your own writing and how you approach poetry?

Poet laureate duties definitely pull from my writing time. Creating the prompts and the prison cento sonnets is a kind of poetry work, and I have loved pouring myself into it. The prison cento sonnets are made from lines of poetry shared with me by incarcerated writers. With many of the poems, I could hear the voice of the author sharing it with a group or remember that particular day, the particular space—library, classroom, chapel, gymnasium—where the words came to be. While I can’t infuse those feelings into the lines, with the help of the New Orleans Poetry Festival I made three of these into posters. Here’s one of the poems:

This world has haunted my being all my life
I see the blackbirds fly and am jealous of their wings
The present is the only place that makes any sense
The smell of diesel on the water
The gray green of the bayou, the owl
Little minnows in the ditch
I see the mirage
I am not wise or relevant
Fenced-in aggression
Ripples up and down my body
Wherever I go there’s a gate to unlock
Shackled away from knowing
I am the red sinking sun
See the smoke flying from my shoes

As far as my own writing is concerned: with limited time and attention, I found myself turning to short poems. I bonded with incarcerated writers over haiku, the most portable, unintimidating and profound of poems. The haiku consists of seventeen syllables—usually divided into lines of five, seven, and five syllables. The poet Allen Ginsberg brought his own twist to the haiku with what he called “American Sentences,” which were 17-syllable sentences. I’ve seen American Sentence sonnets by Diane Seuss, and the next logical step was what I am calling Louisiana Sentences: 17-syllable poems that give voice to some of the things I witnessed on travels and visits to Louisiana prisons. (The italicized passages in this piece are Louisiana Sentences I have written throughout the year.)

Who irons all these shirts—chambray with creases—like the first day of school?

Is there a laureate whose work influenced you and your project? How so?

Stretching way back, previous poets laureate from Louisiana have long served as inspiration for me—through their friendship and poetry and the way that they used the position of the laureateship to magnify voices of other Louisiana poets.

The Poet Laureate Fellowship was a blessing to me in so many ways—of course the recognition and financial support of my work, but also the chance to meet the other fellows at the National Book Festival in August was impactful. I loved having the chance to celebrate the incredible work they are doing and the many ways they have dreamed of to bring poetry before atypical or reluctant audiences. I have spent my life chasing the high I feel when surrounded by the brilliance of poets—Louisiana poets, poets laureate, incarcerated poets—and it has been a great honor of my life to do this work.

We talk about birds, how they lift off at will and nest in razor wire.