Kansas Poet Laureate Traci Brimhall is in her final year in that role and will also close out the Kansas Authors Club Poetry series Petals & Poems this Wednesday, April 22 at Botanica in the Shakespeare Garden. This is the final event in the monthlong celebration of National Poetry Month.
Brimhall and KMUW’s Julie Ann Baker Brin will read together that evening, starting at 6 p.m.
Brimhall, whose essay collection, “The Grief Artist,” will be out this fall, recently spoke with KMUW about her tenure as laureate and more.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.
This is your last National Poetry Month as Poet Laureate for Kansas as 2026 ends your term but I’m curious how you found out that you were going to serve in that role?
One thing that is really cool about our state and how that position is decided is that there is an open call for submissions. It’s not a state where you wear your trenchcoat into the alleyway and bump elbows with the governor and then they appoint you. With that open call you put together your packet and submit it and then a panel scores those. They invite the final three or four finalists to give a sample talk. The panel convenes and talks and decides.
At least during my time and I think this will continue to be true, no past poet laureates are involved in the decision making process at all. It’s not a who you know kind of thing or that trenchcoat alleyway meeting that I mentioned. It’s a nice open call, a nice democratic process and the people who accessed me were librarians and people who run book festivals and community art centers and people who might invite a laureate to their community to share poetry.
It sounds like one of your responsibilities with the position is that connection with communities, getting out, meeting people and talking to them about poetry. What’s it been like to be an advocate for this genre that you love?
One thing that surprises people a lot is that when I got out into communities, unless I’m specifically requested to, I’m never reading my own poems. I’m always reading poems by other poets, usually Kansas poets but maybe there’ll be some others thrown in there. Mostly I’m trying to share the love of poetry as an art form with people, not make it the me, me, me show. I’ve made it to all sorts of corners of Kansas that I’ve never been in before and met Kansans and gotten into conversations that without that position of laureate, I don’t think I would have ever been invited into those spaces or made connections with those people.
I’m sure that you’ve had the experience of going out into a community and there’s some 15-year-old who has never met a poet, never really experienced poetry but they discover something they love about it via a living poet.
Yes! That it’s not a study of the dead, right? I can still name more dead painters than living painters. [Laughs.] But, yeah, realizing that it’s living and that it’s vital and that there’s talent everywhere. I love seeing what people make in an hour together, which is something that’s so deeply cool about poetry to me. It is something that you can spend an hour with people and see their progress or something they’ve made or a beautiful line that they’ve written. I think that that’s a pretty magical experience.
I also think that one of the reasons I ended up a poet is that [although] I love paintings and I love visual art and I wish that I was a visual artist, I didn’t feel like I could ask for the money for classes or for materials growing up. One of the things that I love about poetry is how democratic of an art form it is. It’s an art form that doesn’t require a lot of materials. Training can shape a poem and strengthen it but I also think that a lot of things that we see and think and experience in a day can go into a poem and speak a truth that we want to share with people.
I love that it’s a pretty democratic art form. It’s affordable, it’s something you can easily share in an hour. It would be hard to be the novel laureate. That’s a tougher gig, I think. [Laughs.]
I think there’s something really lovely about that.
There’s this event coming up at Botanica that involves you reciting a poem about nature from your own work?
Yeah. That’s one of the things I’ve really liked about laureateship too: Lots of people have requested poems for specific events. Those aren’t ones that I might put in a book or that I might keep or read at other times, they’re for those moments, those specific occasions. I think that is actually kind of nice to just offer somebody what they’ve asked for and experience that exchange of emotion and meaning in a moment and then let it be done rather than feeling every draft has to has to find a final draft or that things have to be tortured into their final form and then hung on the wall. So much of the pleasure of art is the pleasure of process and the pleasure of connection. Eternity lacks a sense of connection in some ways. I don’t think that art needs to something eternal. I think maybe it’s something even better when it’s momentary.
Hopefully people will be down to have fun with me and give me some lines and let me fold some of that into a poem I share with them of the evening and from the evening.
