New CPC Board Interviews
Introductions to the New Board of CPC
With the farewell of Beth Franklin, change is everywhere at the CPC. We asked our new president, members of the board, and staff to each answer two questions about their involvement with CPC and then answer, at their pleasure, two other questions from a “hodgepodge.”
Welcome to our new president, board members, and staff!
- President: Nancy Viera
- Vice-President: Kathryn Winograd
- Secretary: Uche Ogbuji
- Treasurer: Lawrence King
- At-Large: Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Newsletter Poet Interviews and Assistant Events Coordinator: Meca’ayo
Webmaster: Jesse Clark
Questions!!
1. With our wonderful Beth Franklin leaving her role as Executive Director of CPC for any number of new adventures, CPC is on the verge of a whole new future. What’s your wish list for CPC?
Nancy Viera: I am excited to continue all the beautiful work Beth has worked so hard to foster for Colorado poets and, I am excited to open up other spaces. We might even bring back the beloved City Silhouettes series. I am excited to see what the future brings. I am honored to follow in the steps of Beth.
Kathryn Winograd: Recently, a poet friend mentioned how difficult it was to navigate the poetry scene in Denver, let alone Colorado, because of how rich and varied the poetry environment has become in Colorado. New readings series, new publishers, new festivals, a constant stream of new books: it’s head-spinning. I’d like to see CPC continue as a communication venue for Colorado’s poetry news, as well as a support system for poets established and new.
Uchi Ogbuji: My biggest wish for CPC is to just continue from Beth’s lasting motivation. The only small additions I can think of are 1) Make more efforts to sponsor and coordinate with literary events and festivals in the state 2) devote some resources to cross-arts collaborations, such as between poets and musicians, dramatists and visual artists 3) Support collaboration between poets and journalists.
Meca’Ayo : Colorado Poets Center is already a respected labor of love. There is so much work that Beth Franklin and Robert W. King have created brick by brick, building rapport with poets and venues statewide. I think it is important to continue this work from the foundation it is built upon and continue building in all the directions we can in regard to poetry. My hope is that CPC will become even more well-regarded for its programs and community archives.
Lawrence King (Son of Robert King): I have been impressed with Beth’s carrying on of Robert’s legacy. She has been committed and instrumental in that process. Now, I am excited to see the new future and growth. My wish list is continued engagement of young people’s involvement in poetry including the high school students participating in the poetry contests. I also want to see a growth in grants and economic support for the CPC to expand its impact on poets and poetry in Colorado and beyond.
Rosemerry Trommer: There are so many incredible poets and poetry communities around Colorado, and my hope is that the CPC continues to find ways to connect them. I think our website is our greatest service to Colorado poets, and I would love to see us find ways to keep the profiles more up to date.
2. Poetry is usually considered a solitary endeavor, yet you have volunteered to serve on the board of the Colorado Poets Center, an organization that is so much about creating community. Why?
Nancy Viera: My entire career is community. I live and breathe the concept of community every day, even when writing. I like to share spaces with other writers; I love listening to their journeys and more than anything I love the glimmer in their faces when reading them out loud. Being in community with poets is the food to my soul.
Kathryn Winograd: Of course, there is the necessary moment of solitude when finally, the poem becomes more than thought, more than desire. Yet thought and desire so often comes out of community, of reading, of hearing another poet’s words, voice, music. Poetry is of the spirit, of the generous human spirit. Joining together in the community of poetry becomes a political force for the good. Back in the 1800’s, Walt Whitman said that “poetry, beauty, romance, love… these are what we stay alive for” and that is as true and important today, as it was then.
Uche Ogbuji: I think the romantic image of a poet sitting by the fireplace, scratching on parchment with the sharpened quill dipped in blood decanted directly from their heart is just that—a romantic image. Poetry has always thrived in groups, way back to the highly competitive Greek festivals (Panathenaea, Dionysia, etc.), or to similar festivals of griots and djeli in West Africa from which we can trace modern blues, jazz and rock. In modern times conferences, write-ins and even hashtags such as #NANOWRIMO demonstrate how poetry remains a social endeavor. For me it’s especially so. I fell in love with poetry in the arts/nightclub scene of Nsukka, Nigeria, and lost a lot of momentum after emigrating to the US, until I found a community of poets in Colorado some 15 years later. Serving with the CPC feels a natural way to contribute to this community.
Meca’Ayo : While I have plenty of writing that unravels the deeply personal, I also focus heavily on community projects that center around collaboration, and improvisation. As a person who has grown with my art and literary communities, I feel there are strengths I can contribute to our work together as we amplify and celebrate Colorado’s poets and poetry-related events.
Lawrence King: Actually, I do not consider myself a poet. I am a lawyer by trade. My commitment to the CPC organization is a result of honoring my father, Robert King’s creation of the CPC and wanting to support the carrying on of his legacy. When he passed away, I knew I needed to be involved in supporting the continuation and growth of this organization. My tribute to a great man, father and poet
Rosemerry Trommer: I am so grateful for the community of poets and the people who help create that community. Bob King, founder of the Colorado Poets Center, was one of the most generous community creators of all. I was so grateful to him for the newsletters he wrote and for the website he created so that poets from across Colorado could find each other and be found. When I was invited to join the board, I was grateful for the chance to honor and continue Bob’s legacy of lifting up our state’s poets.
3. Besides being a poet, what else do you do?
Nancy Viera: I am a community relations consultant for a Medicaid health plan management organization. My focus is to partner with community organizations to bring in programming that impacts our communities. I have been there for 13 years, and it never feels like a job. I get to serve the community and make an impact.
Kathryn Winograd: After teaching for around 40 or so years, well, I’m “retired,” which translated means you get to do whatever you want and you do a lot. I’m a poet, an essayist, and a photographer, which has come as a surprise. I discovered photography during Covid and started a journey that has gone from seeing photography as an inspiration for writing poetry to seeing photography as poetry itself.
Uchi Ogbuji: I’m a computer engineer, and in fact, I work a great deal with AI models. I’m also a youth soccer coach—I work with middle school girls for Boulder’s main competitive academy. Playing and coaching soccer have often grounded my creative side with a healthy physicality, and in my life the two are quite connected. I also DJ and produce music when all the foregoing (and the small matter of my wife and four children) leave me spare time.
4. Sometimes it feels like the literary world is engulfed in a four-alarm fire: an AI of unfathomable reach and power, the reported demise of the book and the reader, a concerted move by higher education away from the liberal arts and toward science and tech. As a living and working poet, how are you navigating through the fires?
Meca’Ayo: Honestly? I put the blinders on. Now, more than ever, it feels so important to keep going, to keep creating. While there’s a push for more healing works, I believe it is also important to write from the deeply personal if one is ready and willing, and from wherever one is, whether that is healed or not, and whether there is only the capacity to say the whatever thing. Poetry isn’t dead, so why not be one of Poetry’s ambassadors? We have senior level tech execsleaving their AI companies to start studying and practicing poetry, a friend related to me recently. And because people are being shifted away from books and the liberal arts, and because languages are more prone than ever to become homogenized and/or extinct, it is paramount that as many of us possible play in and with language, observe, take note, and collect the linguistic patternings around us, even as we play, even as the world quickly changes.
5. What poets do you find yourself going back to again and again?
Nancy Viera: The locals are my favorite poets. Suzi Q Smith, Bobby LeFebre, Crisosto Apache, The Poet Q, often take my breath away. And then, I seek out the poems by Julia Alvarez just as often as I do Yesika Salgado and Erika L Sanchez. Let me not forget Marissa Tirado and my late friend, Ralonda Simmons, I miss her dearly.
Uchi Ogbuji: I like to memorize poems, and I carry a grey matter catalogue from a diverse array of authors, but perhaps one way of answering this is to consider the poets from whom I’ve memorized the most material. I think Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, WB Yeats and Ezra Pound are foremost. Hopkins has that strange intensity of style, and extremity in expression. Yeats and Thomas have that Celtic wit and wildness. Pound is mad, and I do think some poetry should be mad. I love the idiosyncrasy of discovery to which he is a portal. I’ve also memorized a fair bit of Eliot, Plath and Okigbo. Okigbo is probably the poet I would most consider a model. He, like Plath, died at a young age, so his body of work is relatively slight, and in some ways all the richer for that.
Rosemerry Trommer: I am ever surprised how the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke open for me again and again. As time goes on, the more layers I find. I am thinking of his poem, “[I live my life in growing orbits].” The circling he describes in that poem—that is how it feels as I meet and re-meet his poems.
6. What’s the hardest and the best part of writing a poem for you?
Rosemerry Trommer: The getting stuck—that moment when the writing goes from flood to drought. I used to think it meant something was wrong. Now I know that stuckness represents the moment I’ve gone past the known and entered the unknown. That leap into pure potential is the most exciting part of writing—when I give myself over to the poem, trusting it to know more than I do, letting myself be very still, very patient, believing that eventually something I can’t possibly predict will come through. And then, miraculously, it does.
7. Describe the moment that made you realize that you were a poet.
Meca’Ayo: I knew I was a writer and a poet in the third grade when I was in Ms. Groten’s class, learning how to finish mystery stories with R.B. Bugg (The Write Channel), and I received a bona fide card back from the station. I started copy changing short poems during this time from the books my grandparents had sent us all the way from Boise, Idaho. At some point, I wrote a poem called “I Wish,” that I still remember. Ms. Groten made two posters out of my poem, and she had me carry one of them to the principal’s office. The other one, Ms. Groten kept after I had read it aloud to class.
Lawrence King: As noted, I actually am not a poet, but lawyer by trade. When my father, Robert King, passed away we held a celebration of life for him. As part of that process, I wrote a poem as a tribute to him and his life. Although it took me a great deal of time, as the entire process was new to me, it turned out well. Importantly, that process allowed me to have a more in-depth appreciation for his trade, his creativity, and his brilliance. That was an unexpected gift I received during the grieving process.
Kathryn Winograd: I remember two moments: one in the pink bedroom of my girlhood and one in a bar of sticky floors and peanut shells. First moment: I liked a boy; I thought he liked me; he stood me up; I felt sad; I looked out my window and wrote a poem about brown leaves and green ponds. Never thought about the boy again. Second moment: our college poetry class met in a small-town bar. It smelled of sour beer. I read a poem about brothers and snakes and streetlights curling through my bedroom window.
“F…!” our poet teacher snorted, red-faced and boozy, leaping up from his chair into our salty pile of peanut shells. “I’ve gotta go take a piss.”
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