I have heard more than one practicing poet say, “Poetry is as necessary as breath.”
That has certainly been the case in my life. Growing up in the woods of northwest Indiana, some of my earliest memories are of standing in the midst of trees—oaks, sycamores, hickories, elms, and maples—awed by their presence and feeling that there was something larger out there to which my small individual self was connected. As a child, sometimes I could almost seem to hear their breathing, though I did not know how to express that sensation. Several decades later I wrote a poem, whose closing lines were, “There is a great breathing among the trees,” and I followed this some years later, publishing a book of poems titled, Something Beautiful Is Always Wearing the Trees.
Poetry has given me a way into my deeper self and a path into words to express—even sometimes indirectly—the seemingly unsayable.
Prior to retirement, I spent thirty-two years at Purdue University Fort Wayne (formerly Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne), primarily teaching poetry and creative writing, as well as literature courses in reading and understanding poetry. I would often marvel that I had “the best job in the world.” Why? I never took it for granted that my work was to delve into the mysteries of life, to bring these mysteries to the surface, and to help students learn to pay close attention to what’s truly important—moment by moment living through deep attention to the daily things in life, so that they might realize we are all living inside a great poem. And that great poem is the world and one another.
My two-year term as Indiana Poet Laureate (2014–2015) allowed me to bring this love of words and deep “seeing” to a broader community throughout the state. I sponsored a series of poetry readings throughout Indiana, influenced by my immediate laureate predecessor, Karen Kovacik (in which I brought poets from one part of the state to another in community exchange). Furthermore, my laureate website, The Wabash Watershed, served as a locus of activities—from my sponsoring of state-wide poetry contests; to publishing poetry features and interviews with Indiana poets; to coordinating the writing of a statewide collaborative group poem; to filming and posting 75 short poetry videos, filmed in my living room with my beagle-hound at my side, in which I would introduce, discuss, and read the poetry of national and international poets in a program I called, A Gray Barn Rising. Through these and other activities—some of which included appearances at colleges and universities, teaching community poetry workshops, and sharing with K–12 teachers methods to teach poetry in their classrooms—I sought to be an “ambassador of poetry” throughout the state.
My time as Poet Laureate of Indiana allowed me to deepen my practice of deep attention and to share my love of poetry with a wide swath of Indiana residents, beyond my university teaching position. It allowed me to give a gift—granting me the opportunity to guide people further toward a rich inner life, something we are able to sometimes articulate and sometimes not. In this way, I hoped people could see that “Poetry is as necessary as breath” and—in the words of one of my early poems—come to understand that “There is a great breathing among the trees.”
Written by George Kalamaras, Indiana's Poet Laureate from 2014-2015.