Noted poets add worldly charm to poetry

by Taylor Coe '13
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR

On Saturday, April 2, in conjunction with a New Orleans-style brunch in Opus 1, poet Nicole Cooley will be reading out of her collection Breach, which deal with the reality of post-Katrina New Orleans.

Only a year after the hurricane, New Orleans native Nicole Cooley walked past the Big Easy’s iconic Camellia Grill—still closed in the aftermath of the hurricane—and noticed the hundreds of Post-It notes covering the building. Someone had left a bucket of Post-It notes and a marker with the message, “Write a Love Note to Camellia Grill.” As a noted poet, novelist and Professor of English and Creative Writing at Queens College-City University of New York, Cooley wrote down all the notes that people had left and incorporated them into a poem. This and similarly inspired poems make up Cooley’s collection.

Among the honors that Cooley has received are a Walt Whitman Award, a Discovery/The Nation Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Grant. In addition to her four works of poetry (Milk Dress, her fourth collection, is due out in April), Cooley has also published a novel, Judy Garland, Ginger Love.

Separately from Cooley, poet Naomi Shihab Nye will also be visiting Hamilton College on April 5 at 8 p.m. for a reading of her work. Nye has spent her life traveling the world and educating students of all ages in writing workshops; the traveling, in turn, has informed the broad, human strokes of her poetry. Fellow poet William Stafford has noted, “Nye is a champion of the literature of encouragement and heart” and that “reading her work enhances life.” The Grand Rapids Press offers similar praise, asserting, “Naomi Shihab Nye breathes poetry like the rest of us breathe air. When she exhales, the world becomes different. Better.”