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My name is Roger Reeves and I am an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Illinois
at Chicago. This poem is called "Before Diagnosis." "The lake is dead for a second time this January.
And no matter how many geese lay their warm *** against the ice or fly across its
hard chest, it doesn't break, or sink, or open up and swallow them. The ice is frozen
water. There is no metaphor for exile." Poetry is always a conversation with itself even
if it doesn't seem as such. All poems are being written because another poem was written.
All works of art are being made because other works of art were being made. So we're in
this really large continuum, right, and that can be quite intimidating for students, but
it's also quite freeing because what you are doing is adding on to something that is really
quite a long poem. You're adding onto the epic of poetry. I am teaching this elegy class
and what I am going to do is look at a poem by John Milton called "Lycidas" which is an
elegy to a friend of his that died and pairing that with "God Bless the Dead" by Tupac and
looking at how they are both entering into the elegy—how it changes when it gets
to America and in particular into a music form also. UIC chose me in a lot of ways.
They were looking for an assistant professor of poetry, I happened to be a young poet and
not yet a professor and I applied for the position. I got here and one of the things
that really attracted me was that it's an urban campus being in Chicago. Also, the literary
history of Chicago is amazing. You have Gwendolyn Brook, you have Ernest Hemmingway born not
too far away from here, you have the Poetry Foundation. So this city to me was just a
logical progression to me becoming more of a poet and also becoming a teacher—I'm
going to class! What I want is to encourage students to takes risks. Try something. Normally,
you take a risk when the poem wobbles. That's where you are playing the most. That's where
you are trying something that you have never tried before. I think about like the swings.
When we're kids and were on swings and we swing higher and higher—we feel like
we're going to a new place right? I think my goal is to always remind folks that when
you are writing poems when you are writing, precision comes from experimentation and what
we have to do is try something that we haven't tried before, which is what play is. I think
what excited me about UIC students is actually how creative most of them are. I get a really
creative lot of students. They also seem to be sort of mature in their creativity. They
seem to have vision, which I think is also hard to teach—is to have vision of what
you see your work doing and what you want the work to do. If you want to write, if you
want to be a writer, you have to love literature. You have to sort of understand what you're
endeavoring is a very large and wide and vast country and what you're exploring is territory
that has been trampled a bit, but nevertheless it's territory that is quite unknown. So what
I think—what I am interested in is getting students to think about what is it that brings
them to want to write. This is discovery. This is a poem. This is learning. This is
fly. This is LAS.