How did ”In Verse” come to be?

It’s really just a collaboration between poets and photographers and a radio producer—me—to report stories about the working poor. That was the initial idea. The project was conceived in November 2008, which was just about two months into our economic crisis. And there were a lot of stories at that point pulling apart questions like “What are credit default swaps?” And there were a lot of stories and worries about the super-wealthy not being wealthy anymore, and worries about the middle class slipping a notch. The group who created this project thought it was a good opportunity to look at the people getting less coverage—those further down the economic ladder, who’d already been in trouble before the collapse.

What has your role been in the project?

I created the project with Ted Genoways, the editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review. It came about because I was invited to apply for a grant, the Makers Quest 2.0. The grant itself, from the Association of Independents in Radio, was created to ask individual producers to come up with ideas to lead public radio into a realm of public media.

Everything is melding together—print people and television people. Radio people are often writing for print now in a way they weren’t before. All the media seemed to be getting combined online. They created the grant to give individuals an opportunity to explore, and I was one of eight producers given a grant. I had long loved VQR and had wanted to work with Ted. So when this grant came up, I called him up and said, “Let’s use this as an opportunity to do work together.” He and I had a series of conversations that led to “In Verse.”

He commissions poetry on a regular basis. This seemed like an opportunity to do something he was already doing and to do it a little more deliberately, using more than one medium. So Ted was just huge—he had been thinking about this for a long time. I was lucky enough to see that he had a special idea, and I knew how I could make it work.

Why poetry?

Poetry was in it from the beginning. Ted spoke in passing about wanting to have a corps of poet reporters. I’m not a poetry reader— but something about it made so much sense to me. I could see and hear how it could work, how nice it could be to hear news or things that we think of as news from a really difference perspective. I felt validated and wonderful when an Israeli newspaper gave and issue over to poets and fiction writers for a day. Poets wrote the weather and stock quotes, everything.

Were you thinking of other examples?

C.D. Wright’s book One Big Self, about the prison system in Louisiana. There was also LiveHopeLove from Kwame Dawes. So there is a tradition, which Kwame Dawes realized so beautifully.

It’s a very contemporary combination of audio, print, and images, yet the poems make reference to classic literature via the “Women of Troy” title.

My understanding is that in “The Trojan Women” play, the men go off to fight the war, and they’re killed. With the absence of the men, the women are left. And there is that odd similarity to the city of Troy, N.Y., where a large part of the male population is incarcerated. There is certainly a middle class and there are educated folks, but in this community of women, men are not part of the household and daily existence.

One reason I like this project is that poetry sticks with people. There’s a reason people still do it. It can reach into a psychological state of being in a way that a traditional journalist couldn’t get the time to do or wouldn’t do. It’s a story about generational poverty. There’s little change from generation to generation. In traditional journalism—I don’t know if it’s the expectation on the part of readers, listeners, editors or reporters—a lot of the reaction is “Why is this? How can we stop this?”

I think what a poet can do is to not ask why, but to see it, and record it, and present it. I think the poems are very true to Billie Jean and DJ. I spoke to them recently. It took a long time to get them the piece, because they had moved. About a week before Christmas, I was waiting to hear back from DJ. First she sent me a text: “I got it now. I’m crying.” And then I think she just sent, “OMG.O-M-G.”

I asked, “What does that mean?” I asked if it felt right. I was worried she wouldn’t come across tough enough. Or too tough. But she’s a really strong person. When I asked her if it felt right, she said, “Yes. I listened to it with the kids, and the only part they didn’t like was when you talked about the nits.” That was the complaint. I don’t really know why she cried—maybe she just thought of her grandma. But it touched her.

You said in a post on Transom.org that you imagined that “like Joe [Richman]’s diaries, these pieces would be narratives rooted in scenes.” Can you talk about how the pieces work as narrative nonfiction stories in each medium?

If you think about “Just a Girl,” there are scenes. There’s the parade [for Flag Day]. It’s really a holiday most of us don’t celebrate much anymore, but this was an epic parade, and she got all dolled up.

When Susan and I were out, we co-reported everything. We prepped together, we did the interview together, and we debriefed together. I don’t think that kind of true documentary work happens much anymore. You just follow people around and do what they’re doing and document their life. Which is not to say, “Hey, I want a scene in the New York Office of Temporary Assistance.” You say, “What are you going to do today?”

We spent just a tremendous amount of time with these women; Susan can tell you this. I think she was stunned by how much time we spent. For her, she would see some things and say, “I have enough,” but as a radio person, where not much is going on, I love it. I need to record that, too.

I think in that “Just a Girl” piece, you feel that you’re at the parade with her, because we were at the parade with her. The poem with DJ and her mom, we spent a lot of time at DJ’s home and her mom’s home, we spent a lot of time just being there—you can hear that. You hear her making dinner, making pork chops.

What has the response been so far?

People are liking it, loving it. Which is really, really gratifying. I think people want to see more. I want to do more. I’m speaking to two radio stations who are interested in doing installments in their communities. In that case, I’d work with Ted to find a poet—Ted’s been the one to cherry-pick and recommend the poets. That’s one of his jobs on this project.

This grant was a beautiful grant, but it was a modest grant. I was given $40,000 and required to use it over a five-month time period. Gulfport [the second installment of “In Verse”] and Troy both happened within a five-month period.

What did you change in doing the second installment?

Both kind of happened at the same time; there was great overlap. Troy started a little bit earlier, but they very much happened at the same time. With such a particular deadline, it is difficult to build a real relationship to get intimate tape and find subjects in a small window. When Ted and I were planning, we looked for collaborators to work with who already had made inroads into the communities.

I truly believe that Brenda [Kenneally] may be the best photographer in the world. She has an amazing talent. She can take a picture of a young man looking at a bag of Doritos. Something that is so simple, but it’s riveting. She can capture that kind of longing and secret wish. She really has the tenacity and the talent—a lot of her strongest work is framed simply. Like on the Huffington Post, they did an article, and there was one photograph Brenda gave to them. A baby in a car carrier set in front of the TV on the floor, and on the screen is SpongeBob. There’s not a lot happening, but it says a lot. She’s saying a lot with her choices. And it makes for great commentary on American life.

She had been shooting this group of women for the last six years. Ted had seen her work and wondered, “How do I peel off part of her giant project for use in a magazine?” We couldn’t have done it without her. We would not have had the immediate acceptance from all these women without it.

Natasha [Trethewey] is from Gulfport, Miss. She wanted to go to Gulfport. She had written about Katrina. We went to Troy because on that one the photographer was our lead, and we modeled things to her work. In the other, the poet was kind of in the lead, and things came into place from there.

What’s next? Will you try anything different?

I don’t know. We could certainly do it again the way we have. Each of the poets said, “If you ever do it again, give the poets more time!” It took a lot of time as it was. I collected the tape in Troy, and then had to sit and wait until the poetry was done.

My instinct would be to see if it’s possible to do something more immediate, where the poetry could happen more in the moment. My thought is that we could do it opportunistically. Let’s get a poet and just go and actually report, the way you do an interview. You couldn’t do a suite of poems that way. But if there were an event, a breaking news story, it could be nice to cover it the way a reporter would. I’d be interested in seeing how that might work.

[Check out our commentary on "Women of Troy" and see more examples of poetry in journalism. Or read our interview with Virginia Quarterly Review's Ted Genoways on recapturing a documentary role for poetry.]

As editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, you’ve been making use of poets as reporters for a while. When did you start, and why?

I guess it started semi-formally by sending poets out to do nonfiction pieces. There are a fair number of poets who understand that poetry is not a livelihood and supplement their income by doing other kinds of writing. There were some poets who I felt were excellent reporters—I had used them for nonfiction purposes.

From there it started to make sense to explore the possibility of sending the poets out in the same way but asking them to write poems instead, or as well. After those discussions, Kwame Dawes took it upon himself to write a whole suite of poems based on his trip to Jamaica, looking at living with HIV in Jamaica. Those poems along with the photographs that were shot by Josh Cogan, turned into a remarkable site, www.livehopelove.com, that featured the poetry and included the videos that were shot for “Foreign Exchange” on PBS, the story he wrote for The Washington Post, and the essay he wrote for us. But the poetry is what’s out front.

I thought that the poetry served as a marvelous gateway to a complicated subject—it’s a way to start by humanizing the subject. Kwame’s poems and the outstanding photos served as a great way to draw people in before taking the next step into more complicated policy issues.

How did you and Lu Olkowski turn those early ideas into “In Verse”?

We decided to try what had worked before. We sent Josh out again, this time with Natahsa Trethewey, a poet who had written in prose for us before. They went to Gulfport, Mississippi.

For the other project, “Women of Troy,” Susan Somers-Willett is someone whose work we had published previously. I had just become familiar with Brenda Kenneally’s photography through Look3, a photographic exposition here in Charlottesville. I had seen her give a talk with a lot of her images from New York, and I thought it would be a jump on one of these projects to work with someone who was already connected to a community.

So we paired Susan and Brenda up with Lu. We planned to use photos Brenda had taken for her “Upstate Girls” project, and have Brenda take Susan and Lu up to Troy to meet the women there. It was Lu’s job to go out and produce the audio of these stories and to co-report them—to provide all the material that would become the multimedia version while she was also reporting on it herself for Studio 360.

There were a lot of moving part to this, but in some ways it was as simple as could be: to send three people who were experienced as reporters and artists to go out and meet people and, each in their own medium, tell their stories. We were delighted by what came out of the project. Each of the individuals did a great job, but the fully-realized versions are the multimedia versions, in which you can hear the voices and see the faces of everyone involved.

You get thousands of poetry submissions each year—

We do.

But there is a chunk of the reading public that hears the word “poetry” and rolls its eyes. Did you have those people in mind at all, or had you written them off?

We definitely had them in mind. I think that there’s something that can be accomplished for poetry out of this, too. One of the reasons people roll their eyes is because they think that all American poetry does it talk about the inner thoughts and deep feelings of the poet. Poetry may not seem important or significant or even to be reaching out to a general audience.

If we can convince people to get over that initial hurdle and draw them into the story that’s being told, they might find that the medium actually has quite a lot to offer. Poetry is incredibly well suited to the radio format. It’s compact enough you can hear a whole piece in the relatively tight time constraints of a given program.

What journalistic contribution does “Women of Troy” make?

At a moment when journalism is in such flux, and there’s so much discussion about what journalism’s next steps will be, one of the things that I wanted to see happen was a kind of storytelling that focused on the individual, the humane, and in some ways personalized larger, sweeping stories. Certainly that’s what we’ve always done with the literary journalism side of things.

But it seemed especially important with stories that had been widely reported—Katrina, the economic crisis—to try to make the stories new and bring them down to a level that’s comprehensible. It’s one thing to look at the statistics for a city like Troy, New York—and those numbers are important for getting a sense of scale. But they don’t give you a sense of what that community looks like, who lives there, and how it is to live under those economic pressures.

On top of that, we’re not trying to make these people emblematic of anything—these are just people who are important and interesting and not very often talked to or talked about. So in that respect, it just seemed a different way of coming at things. I think in a series of profiles of individuals in prose, we would expect some overarching argument. In the sequence of poems, all the poems are asking is that you listen, that you pay attention, and if they’re working correctly, that you come to care about who these people are.

What do you think “Women of Troy” adds as literature?

I think first from a more philosophical standpoint, it does help to stake out some terrain for poetry that has been more or less ceded, which is the role of the poet as a documentarian, as someone who has some social role, and I think it expands the possibilities for the medium and for practitioners of the genre, and that’s not a small thing.

More than that, the poems themselves are an exciting take on what has been thought of as a kind of collage poem, where there are voices coming in other than the poet’s voice, where there’s a kind of layering of imagery. I think that the poems are vibrant and exciting, and yet I do think that their full expression is in those audio versions that Lu put together. You’re not just reading the different voices, you’re hearing them. You’re hearing the poet in dialogue with the real world. Listening to the audio poems in that format really sounds like something new to me.

So they open up possibilities, but I also just think they’re incredibly affecting. Like the audio version of “In the Office of Temporary Assistance”—that gets me every time. [Scroll below the print version in the link to hear the audio version—Ed.] Hearing Susan’s poem built out of the bureaucracy of the Office of Temporary Assistance as it’s juxtaposed against the voice of someone going through and filling out those forms is incredibly moving and poignant and wouldn’t ever make its way into a traditional journalistic piece, but it tells an important part of the story.

“In Verse” bills itself as a collaboration between poets, photographers and radio producers to create a new model of storytelling journalism. Do you think this new storytelling model can realistically be implemented more widely?

I hope so. I really, really hope so. I hope it’s something that poets and photographers and multimedia artists will take up on their own, to recognize that this is a fairly inexpensive brand of reporting, that it can be carried out almost anywhere. Trying to find someone who has an interesting story that reveals something about a larger story—that can be done in any community in America. It can be done on any street corner. I would love to see poets and photographers and radio producers and multimedia producers take this on.

Susan Somers-Willett has written about slam poetry before. Can you imagine improvised poetry or slam poetry working with the “In Verse” model?

One of the things that’s great about this idea is that it’s wide open to any style of poetry.  I think that slam poetry absolutely could contribute, and experimental verse could also work—as long as the focus is on looking outward and bringing those particular elements of craft into play to find new ways to tell someone else’s story. The possibilities are limitless. The slam poets in some ways might have an advantage—they’re used to performance and using spoken voice as a major part of how they communicate.

In what ways does the Gulfport series make similar or different offerings than “Women of Troy”?

With the Gulfport story, Natasha took maybe a tad more personal slant on things by looking at a place she was from and looking at family and people she knew. And yet I think that knowledge gets to many of the same places that Susan goes. Rather than juxtaposing this public voice with a private voice, we’re hearing a dialog between private voices in the Gulfport series. And that has its role and its place as well—those poems take us into conversations that I don’t think we would ordinarily be privy to. It starts out as an exploration of what happens to community after a natural disaster. But it goes so many directions—the fault lines of race and class and the ways in which so many things are de-facto segregated in Gulfport. It really is a kind of sociological study.

What are your thoughts going forward?

We’re still trying to figure out what all the possibilities might be. I do hope that other people will see this as an opportunity and will try this on their own, that they will come up with projects of their own, that seeing these things will inspire ideas.

We’re already starting to hear from poets and photographers asking, “What if I went with this person and took photos of this part of the community? Here’s what’s happening there.” I think encouraging artists to think of their art as something that has a public audience and a public good that can be accomplished though it, that’s an exciting thing. It’s something I hope will spread. We’ll see.

[Check out our commentary on "Women of Troy" and see more examples of poetry in journalism.]