A discussion with Jennifer Militello
Jennifer Militello, award-winning Goffstown poet and MFA Director at New England College, on being named New Hampshire Poet Laureate, to begin her five-year term in April.
What do you believe led to your nomination?
There is a process. There is a selection committee that goes through the applications, or nominations, and it’s made up of members of the different art communities around the state: New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, New Hampshire Writers Project, Poetry Society of New Hampshire. It is a pretty long, extensive process. Then they bring the name that they choose to the governor and he nominates that person and then the Executive Council finally approves it. I think I’ve just been doing a lot of work to increase the visibility of poetry throughout the state for a long time. I’ve been advocating for poets…. There are many excellent poets in the state and many people who could do an excellent job in this role, but hopefully people saw that I had started a festival, run an MFA program, invite visiting poets, and I am in schools a lot. Hopefully, it was a natural next step for some of the work that I’ve been doing.
What does the Poet Laureate do?
There’s no real definition or expectation or role. I think each Poet Laureate chooses the way they want to grow and support the poetry community individually. I think ideally it is someone who is really active in connecting with other members of the poetry community. Someone who is thinking about young people, who is thinking about schools, who’s thinking about libraries, who’s thinking about event organizing, and also who’s just increasing the visibility of poetry. I know there have been poet laureates who have started websites or put together anthologies with New Hampshire poets’ poems featured, there are people who have worked to support poetry in schools. One poet laureate I know created a conference and got together all the poet laureates from across … the different states and then had them do readings in different parts of New Hampshire for a weekend, which was really cool…. I think really it’s just the person who is like ‘poetry is here,’ and it’s amazing, kind of the poster child for New Hampshire poetry for five years. If people are interested in poetry or have questions about poetry they can go and shoot me an email and let me know and I’m here.
What is your take on the state of poetry in New Hampshire?
New Hampshire is in a really exciting place at the moment. One of the things that I always think about when I think about New Hampshire is the incredibly rich literary history of the state. There’s a foundation here. It’s a state full of poetry history. Robert Frost is, of course, the first person we all think of and then, more recently, we have Donald Hall, Jane Kenyon, Sharon Olds, who were all living here. I think now the poetry community in New Hampshire is … writing poems that are rooted in the poems of their foremothers and fathers, but … also looking to contemporary poetry to find out what a poem wants to be in the current moment…. It’s a really rich place, it’s pretty exciting.
What led you to the state of New Hampshire?
I was born in New York City and grew up in Rhode Island but I wanted to live in New Hampshire from the time that I knew that you could choose where you wanted to live. We used to come up to go camping when I was a kid, and sometimes skiing. I wanted to be a poet since I was really young and I always saw those two things hand in hand. I always wanted to live in the woods and write some poems and be in a place that felt like a place poets would live in my very young, naive mind, and Robert Frost wrote some of the first poems I was familiar with and loved… When I turned 17 I came up to UNH to study with Charles Simic. I have spent a few short stints away in other places but for the majority of my adult life I’ve lived in different parts of New Hampshire. … It’s an adopted role, my New Hampshirite-ness, but it is something that has always been a dream of mine to live here.
Do you have a favorite poem about New Hampshire?
This is so cliche but I really love ‘Birches’ by Robert Frost…. One of the great things about literature is that it can permanently change the way you see things. When I am here and I see birch trees, there are always moments from that poem. There’s one moment where Frost talks about the birch trees bent over by an ice storm as women who have kind of thrown, bent over throwing their hair over their heads, and I see that image in my head every time I drive through New Hampshire after a snow or ice storm and I have read it so frequently to my daughter that she has it memorized; it’s a really long poem. So yeah, it’s an oldie but goodie and I would say, just off the top of my head, it’s the one I think of.
What’s more important, the sound of the poem or the meaning of the poem?
I actually think a lot of times the meaning grows out of the sound, ideally. I always tell my students to think about songs on the radio that they love. The lyrics are important but the music is important and poems only have the language to accomplish both of those things. You are responding with your intellect but you are also responding with your instinct or emotions. For me, I really like it when a poem is an experience that hits me emotionally and then the intellectual aspects of it follow. So, I am a sound person.
—Zachary Lewis
Featured image: Jennifer Militello. Courtesy Photo.
