Click Here to Listen:
Tempest is a student-run podcast that focuses on UNE’s School of Arts and Humanities. Podcaster Chloe Boulle uses each episode to narrow in on topics including clubs, events, internship opportunities, extracurriculars, and the vibrant community that makes up UNE’s Biddeford campus.
Transcript (lightly edited for readability):
Chloe Boulle: Hello, and welcome to Tempest, UNE’s Arts and Humanities podcast. If you walk around UNE’s campus, you’re bound to see a bulletin board filled with flyers and posters for the events taking place throughout the semester. Sometimes, going to these events, especially as a freshman, can seem a little overwhelming. However, every junior and senior I’ve spoken to wishes they had attended more events sooner. That’s why I wanted to take you to one of the Arts and Humanities events from last year, the Poetry Out Loud event.
Anjana Govindaraj: Hi, everyone. Good evening. How are we doing? Yay. My name is Anjana. I’m the president of Creative Writing Club.
Skyler Thomas Garcia: And I’m Skyler. I’m the president of Zephyr.
Govindaraj: And we’d like to welcome you to our 3rd annual reading event. Yay.
Boulle: Every fall semester, students have the opportunity to participate in an event called Poetry Out Loud. The event is run by the Creative Writing Club and UNE’s literary magazine, Zephyr. It’s open to any UNE student. You can bring your own original poem to read, or you can read any poem you enjoyed in the Zephyr Magazine.
Garcia: The Axe and the Tree. I don’t forget the things you said, the words, the way they hurt me, the fear and heartbreak that I try to keep from surging into anger. We all hold the ax, but it’s up to us whether we chop at other trees with words and subtexts, a piercing thought, a wounding belief. It’s easy to do without even having to think. But all this time, you were so blind you didn’t realize you were cutting me down, too.
Boulle: That was Skyler Thomas, Zephyr’s editor-in-chief. I sat down to talk to him about the 2023 Poetry Out Loud event and the original poems he read there.
Garcia: So, I’m Skyler Thomas, and I run the Zephyr editorial committee. Zephyr is the UNE journal of artistic expression. We take submissions from students, faculty, staff, and alumni, and their families, and compile and publish them into the journal every year, and we release it every spring.
Boulle: Skyler Thomas also talked to me about the Poetry Out Loud event.
Garcia: It’s a fun time. It’s a huge hit every time that we have it. I would see a bunch of English professors there, friends and family of people who are reading, and just people will walk into it sometimes. It’s like, oh, yeah. It’s cool, and, you know, it’s really nice to have a hot drink in the late fall and just listen to good writing. People will read their poetry that they’ve written or their short stories that they’ve written, and some of us will also read just things that people submitted to Zephyr, and it’s always really fun. This year, one of the poems that got read from the Zephyr was mine, and the person who read it didn’t know I was going to be there, which was pretty funny. I was flattered.
Boulle: Next, he told me about one of the poems he read last year, Wildflowers.
Garcia: I wrote it slightly before the summer. It was like the last day my girlfriend at the time was on campus, and we were going to lunch together with her and her mom, and then we were gonna like help her get her stuff, like, to leave. And I was walking, and I saw a bunch of flowers growing outside of one of the dorms, and I was like, oh, Wow! Awesome! And I was hyped because spring flowers are so awesome. You don’t typically see them on a lot of places around campus because they mow like crazy. So I picked some and brought them to her, and then after lunch when I was walking back to my dorm, they had already mowed, and I was like, ‘man, that’s kind of upsetting. Why’d they do that?’ There was something there. And I was like, I’ll write about that because it made me feel something. Some kind of way.
Boulle: Now, let’s hear the poem.
Garcia: Wildflowers. On my way to lunch today, I picked some wildflowers growing on the lawn. I gave them to the girl I love, and it was lucky I did because, on the way back, they were all mowed and gone.
Boulle: After speaking with Skyler Thomas, I sat down with Cole LaChapelle, who also read at last year’s event.
Cole LaChapelle: I’m Nicholas LaChapelle, but I go by Cole. I’m a marine science major, a 1st year.
Boulle: Next, I asked him how he found out about the event.
LaChapelle: I found out through the Creative Writing Club, and they kind of, like, sent out stuff and was like, I think we want to participate, and we can sign out now. So I was, like, sure. So I went.
Garcia: Next, we have Cole.
LaChapelle: Not an Ode. We slogged through dirt, through silt, through rot, across an endless mire, a mind of mold and muck. Yet from the swamp, a stone, its face of moss, and so we climbed atop and now unstuck. Gaze past your bog, your toxic tedium. Persistent gnats and stagnant water. We could see connection, this mycelium. There’s more to us alone than we could be with you. We grow on rot on silt on mud on muck, our roots now anchor strengthening the dirt, and though you poison clogged and called we persevered. So despite still feeling your bites and welts, all of which we sustain, your requiem’s meaning no longer remains.
Boulle: Finally, I asked him a little bit about his writing process.
LaChapelle: So if I’m trying to write something with structure, like the unknown poem, I knew I wanted a swamp. So I went into a document and, like, wrote up every single swamp-related noun and verb I could think of and then linked them together so that they rhymed. And then I used that. So I had that, and then I had another piece of paper that I used to, get a timeline down. So I knew I wanted gross, some sort of redemption thing, pointed statement, conclusion. And then I kind of used the words that I had previously prepared, crammed them into that format, and edited the hell out of it.
Boulle: I hope you’ve enjoyed this little taste of last year’s Poetry Out Loud event. If you’re interested, you can watch the whole thing on UNE’s YouTube channel. Now, let’s listen to one last poet.
Lizzie Baker: My name is Lizzie Baker, and I’m a junior with an English major, with a writing minor. And I am a writer of many different genres, many different, processes. Most notably, though, I’m looking into novel writing, and I do some poetry, usually just for the reading events. This globe of glass. My dear one, please tell me if these colors will return. If these blurred lines will focus. If I will see the leaves again. This prison is a home. These stars are just lights on the ceiling, fluorescent, reflecting off the glass. Fear makes its home on the back burner, only smoking when I pay attention. If the glass cracks, if these shapes fall away, where will I be left? The tinny radio of your voice, your staticky visage, it’s all in a place I can never reach. When did my world leave? This globe of glass has become my cage.
Boulle: Thank you to Skyler Thomas, Cole, and Lizzie for the wonderful poetry, and thank you for joining me today. This has been Chloe Boulle with Tempest, UNE’s Arts and Humanities podcast. The music in today’s podcast was Chill by Edgy Toast.
