Before “Women of Troy,” there was “Upstate Girls.” How did “Upstate Girls” get started?

I had been working on a long-term project in my neighborhood called “Money Power Respect,” documenting several families. When the project was excerpted in The New York Times Magazine, they got a writer who also worked in that immersion-style reporting, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. She’s really terrific. We worked on that together and became very dear friends.

photo courtesy of Brenda Ann Kenneally

So when the Times excerpted Random Family in conjunction with its publication, none of the people in the book—although they had been written about extensively—had ever been photographed, and they called me to do it.

I knew about the story, I had read pieces of Random Family, but mostly my connection with Adrian was that we became friends. So I hadn’t read the manuscript in its entirety, and I didn’t realize that the family she followed had moved to Troy.

My father lived around the corner from there. When I left upstate New York—well, I left several times— I had a lot of involvement with the juvenile justice system, and I became an emancipated minor. I hadn’t gone back much.

After I photographed the family for the Times, the book came out, and Adrian moved on. Later, the oldest girl in Random Family called me and said, “One of the girls you met is my girlfriend, and we’re going to have a baby together. Would you like to photograph the birth? By the way, the baby’s father is my cousin, and he’s in jail, and his father is in jail. And so is her father—he’s been in prison her whole life—and so I’m going to step in and be the father.”

I had a conversation with Adrian, because it was her story. So we decided that I would do it, and maybe she would write about it later, maybe not. But that’s how it started. I photographed the birth and then really got to know the family of that girl that actually delivered the baby. That was the girl that made me think, “This was me if I didn’t hitchhike out of upstate New York.” I felt almost drawn back into my own childhood.

I think all the time about class, and so everything I look at has an eye to the unseen separation that we work so hard to keep in this country under the guise of being equal. And then of course, staying in Troy, I quickly got to know the young women from Random Family, and I really just followed the girls on this one block.

At what point did you get involved with Lu Olkowski and Ted Genoways, the creators of the multimedia poetry program “In Verse”?

Ted had seen my presentation of “Upstate Girls,” which is the work that this particular segment of “In Verse” was based on—work that was already done. Two summers ago at the Look Festival of Photojournalism, I presented a multimedia piece. Ted e-mailed me after and said, “I’d love to find a way to use this material.” I joked, “This is the project nobody wants, and those are the ones I never stop doing.” Ted said, “We think we could find a home for it in our magazine. We’d like to.” I was once again in foreclosure in my house, because that’s how I paid for the stuff, by refinancing. He paid me for it immediately.

The idea was  at first, that we would use Virginia Quarterly Review as a way to start fleshing out this graphic novel—that’s the way I’m preparing the book. A year passed, and we had many phone meetings, but he could not get a handle on how to present the number of photographs in VQR and be true to the spirit of what I was doing. Then I got a call from Lu Olkowski, saying she was writing this grant, and Ted suggested it as a way to finally get the photographs out.

Since you had already done that work, did you head back with them when they went to Troy?

There’s no way they could have done this without me. Imagine poetry as the distilling the facts and distilling until you get to the bone, or the very essence of the bone—the bone dust. To do that in the three weeks that Susan was there would have been impossible.

Susan is an amazing poet, and she could have written poetry, but she would not have been able to get to the bone. Imagine figuring out the history and the irony of the working class and what the working class has become in the United States based on what they were told hard work would get them. Based in a city like Troy, which revels in being the home of Uncle Sam, the birthplace of the first female labor union, to get to that would take a lot longer than three weeks. And then to actually get into the bedroom of some person to be able to write about them, think how long that would take.

I don’t mean to sound like a pompous asshole. It’s really just like great reporting—if you want to report deeply and well, time is the only answer. Working this way, it’s like I was the team that went in first and got it ready. But Troy’s very difficult. I’ve worked deep, deep inner city, and I have to say Troy is much more difficult to negotiate the interior of.

In what way?

In the inner city, with MTV and the whole rap phenomenon—it’s a whole bona fide culture, I don’t discount it at all. Cameras and stardom—people in the inner city are actually very savvy about those kinds of things, because white journalists and journalists in general have been using the inner city as a template forever, since the FSA at least. So they’re very savvy. In Troy, I don’t want to say they’re clannish, but there are a few old families and they all know each other.

Also it’s the idea of accepting art is probably another layer of restriction, the idea of understanding the value of art. The inner city, even at its grittiest, gets that more than the working class Catholic community. It doesn’t recognize art the same way.

Do you worry about having your life so bound up with your subjects’? Does it make it harder to have them as subjects in your photography?

I don’t feel a conflict of interest because I’m not doing this for anybody. I know that sounds like a really stupid answer, but I think history will care, and I’m doing it for history. If you’re deep into a family history, you can almost never stop. You almost owe it to them to check in and record where they’re at. Where are you going to leave these people stuck in history?

So I don’t feel a conflict. Anything from my past or who I am that’s tied up with who they are is just like research, like years I spent in the field. I understand perfectly that for single mothers, the law is like a parent, but it’s the bad, beat-your-ass parent, lock-you-in-your-room-for-the-rest-of-your-life parent.

I do feel a conflict in loyalty. Even when Susan and Lu came, I had to take a side, and the side is always on the side of the women. Oral storytelling is a big part of the culture there, and once I show up on so-and-so’s porch, it’s already out. I have to explain what I’m doing.

Most of the women I know there are very sensitive. Since their lives are interwoven, since there’s family feuding going on, if you’re at someone’s house, your social graces have to be razor sharp so you don’t offend anyone and keep access to everyone. That kind of stuff was really hard, because when there’s another person in the mix, some of the women would say, “Well, if you’re not visiting me today, then I can see Lu.”

Was it hard to let the poet, Susan Somers-Willett, and the producer, Lu Olkowski, in on these relationships that you’d built across the years?

I’ve worked with some journalists before, and that part is always hard, because it’s the struggle between doing the work and having something down for history. You need to care about getting the work out and disseminating it in meaningful and accessible and beautiful, intelligent ways. Which Susan and Lu wanted to do, too.

In one way, getting something on public radio, NPR, and Public Radio International as a journalist that has any kind of self-preservation, I should jump at that chance. But to me it felt like an extreme intrusion. I say that in a way, because it’s a metaphor for my own experience in those bedrooms and living rooms like the ones you see in the photographs from Troy. Wanting to stay there—even those women dream of going larger, but it’s comfortable in the place that they know.

I come from that stock, so the kind of ambition that may be instilled in other photographers and some of the people in my “profession,” even the kids my kid goes to school with, there’s a sense of ambition you have to have to get anywhere—I don’t mean Susan and Lu.

I don’t have that ambition, so it was incredibly hard. I kept shooting myself in the foot all the way, yet trying to remind myself, “You need to do this. Otherwise hanging out in Troy on a porch the rest of your life is a way of not doing anything.” The work I do is what has pulled me out of the life that I look at though my camera, and yet it is the same one that pulls me back into it though loyalty to it.

[Check out our commentary on "Women of Troy" and our talk with poet Susan B.A. Somers-Willett about her work on it. Or read interviews with radio producer Lu Olkowski about this unusual collaboration and Ted Genoways of the Virginia Quarterly Review on recapturing a documentary role for poetry.]

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.]

Cohn notes that there is nevertheless no shortage of poetry. And it’s true that people are still writing it in droves—as witnessed by the overburdened submission box of at least one literary journal. Slam poetry competitions similarly flourish nationwide.

In addition to serving as paired metaphors for irrevocable decline and financial struggle, however, poetry and journalism can work together in other ways. Poet/journalist James Fenton actually used earnings from his poetry to fund his reporting, which doesn’t seem like a career path most of us could replicate. But sometimes poetry can be a more direct vehicle for narrative journalism.

This week’s Notable Narrative, “Women of Troy” is an innovative multimedia collaboration between poet Susan B.A. Somers-Willett, photographer Brenda Ann Kenneally and radio producer Lu Olkowski. The project documents working-class women of Troy, N.Y., and narrates moments in the women’s lives, from a Flag Day parade to intimate domesticity. Delivering a more nuanced, and lively, picture of the working poor than we often get from journalists, the unusual combination of media helps us see with fresh eyes.

This project exists in this form because it was funded by Public Radio Maker’s Quest 2.0, an initiative of the Association of Independents in Radio. However, “Women of Troy” and “Congregation” (the second installment of the ”In Verse” collaborations) have company. Olkowski pointed us to an experiment unlikely to figure in future news re-organizations, in which the Israeli newspaper Haaretz had poets and novelists cover the day’s events, including features, stock reports and TV reviews. In November, The New York Times also commissioned commemorative poetry for the 20-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, including work from such luminaries as C.K. Williams.

Somers-Willett, who wrote the poems for “Women of Troy,” talked with us about the ways in which doing documentary poetry felt different to her:

“With this project, I was interviewing these women and writing about them, and I knew they would hear the product. I really needed to try to include everything and be accurate about what happened and in what order. I was working under the narrative constraints—or really, narrative boundaries—of the radio format, too.

I was trying to convey, say, in a poem about DJ Guerrin, that she’s a certain age and has seven kids, but only four of them live with her, while one is with her mom, and the other two live with their respective fathers. It’s very difficult to say all that in a compressed format such as poetry. You can say it in prose, where you have the space. In poetry you have to be really subtle about finding new and inventive ways to relay information.”

In an interview with Nieman Storyboard, Virginia Quarterly Review editor Ted Genoways mentioned Kwame Dawes’ site livehopelove.com, which chronicles life with HIV in Jamaica, as a powerful example of poetic collaboration for journalistic purposes. Olkowski similarly noted poet C.D. Wright’s work with photographer Deborah Luster on One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana.

These projects, along with the two installments of “In Verse” produced so far, show that it is possible for a tightly focused poem to embrace a very big picture, even a documentary one. Poetry seems unlikely to replace standard print narratives and even less likely to supplant the inverted pyramid, but its future and the future of news may be bound together at the margins. We are just beginning to imagine how both will evolve and the ways in which they might work together in narrative reporting.