by Liz Maceda
Poet Laureate of Hickory, NC, Scott Owens is the author of 25 collections
of poetry, most recently The Song Is Why We Sing, poems about the
practice of poetry, and Elemental, poems about nature.
Owens is recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, the Next Generation/Indie Lit Awards, the NC Writers Network, the NC Poetry Society, and the Poetry Society of SC. His poems have been featured on The Writer’s Almanac 8 times, and his articles about writing poetry have been used in Poet’s Market 5 times. He
has twice been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and was 2016 Recipient of the Pinesong Dedication for his contributions to the poetry community. Owens holds degrees from Ohio University, UNC Charlotte, and UNC Greensboro. He is Professor of Poetry at Lenoir Rhyne University, and former editor of Wild Goose Poetry Review and Southern Poetry Review. He has taught creative writing at every level from elementary to college and in the community, and has given more than 300 readings of his poetry. He owns and operates Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse and Gallery and has coordinated Poetry Hickory in Hickory NC, for 19 years. More at scottowenspoetry.com.
Scott Owens, the Poet Laureate of Hickory, North Carolina, answered our interns Liz’s questions over email. Be sure to check out his poetry at scottowenspoetry.com/ to learn about his journey in poetry as an author of twenty-four poetry collections and make sure to stop by Taste Full Beans to have a blast participating in an open mic.
As an author of 24 collections of poetry, recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets, and the Pushcart prize anthology, among others, what advice would you give to someone who has just started their poetry journey?
Do it because you love it. Writing poetry will not have a great deal of extrinsic rewards. Fame and fortune are rare and probably too distracting anyway. The greatest reward of writing poetry is learning to pay attention; learning to notice more, to see value in almost everything, and connections between things. That ability will make the world so much more vibrant and meaningful to you.
When you were young, you began converting your journal entries into poetry. What are the advantages of this writing practice? Looking back now, what would you tell your teenage self about poetry?
I first kept journals as a means of processing a pretty chaotic childhood. To understand and eventually “transcend” the world I had been born into, I first had to objectify it so that I could examine it with some detachment. This was remarkably helpful, but it didn’t have anything to do with writing poetry at the time. As I grew a bit older, I fell in love with how the poetry I was reading could have multiple layers of interpretation. That idea seemed to create an avenue for using the journal entries and the unrecorded memories to make something that might be useful to others as well without necessarily revealing too much to those who weren’t ready to hear it. As far as what I would tell my teenage self, I would say, “Pay attention. Write it all down. Save it all. Be extremely hesitant to judge anything. Be open to experience.”
Your poem titled “Churchyard Playground, Cokesbury SC” won an honorable mention. You wrote “Don’t make them see that days will come when they will be still beneath the trees” What emotion did you want to evoke in the reader with this line?
“still” between “be” and “beneath.”It is, as many words in poetry intended to have double meaning: “still” as in “continuously,” suggesting that as they are “in the world” as children, they will always be “in the world;” and “still” as in “unmoving,” suggesting that they, like the person whose wake they are attending, will one day die. So the emotion I want to evoke is something akin to a bittersweet determination to take advantage of the time we each have in the world.
As a Professor of Poetry at Lenoir-Rhyne University, what is your favorite part of your job? How do specific workshops, open mics or other poetry community events inspire your own lectures?
I’ve written a couple of poems recently about how much I still enjoy teaching, and I imagine, right or wrong, that what I enjoy most in it is the same as what every other lifetime teacher enjoys: that moment of growth in a student; that moment I see that they get it; that moment I see they recognize that they get it, and they suddenly believe in themselves and like themselves so much more than they did before. Teaching, whether at the university or in the community, remains a great inspiration for me. Not only do I draw (capital I) Inspiration from my students’ successes, but I also glean (little i) inspiration in the form of ideas, images, words, lines, etc. from our conversations of their poems, my poems, poems we read to learn from and how they all relate to the world around us. And, as your question suggests, every time I see something that works with one student or one class I reflect on how I can utilize it again as a prompt or a lesson or an essay on writing.
What was the most important moment of being the first Poet Laureate of Hickory?
Although I have only been Hickory’s Poet Laureate for 5 months, I’ve already had a number of very gratifying moments in that role. One of the first was having 31 people attend the first Hickory Poetry Salon we scheduled at the Hickory library. We have continued with the salons once a month, and we are still averaging 26 attendees. These salons give me an opportunity to share the value of poetry outside the college classroom. I have also thoroughly enjoyed writing the every-other-week poetry column/blog in our local weekly newspaper. It has given me the chance to share knowledge and ideas about poetry with a much wider audience, and I’ve received wonderful feedback about some of the columns. I think the title has helped many in the community know who to reach out to when they are practicing poetry or have questions about it, and that has enabled me to help a half dozen poets get a book published. Ultimately, I think the most gratifying moment is still just learning that Hickory had decided to have a poet laureate as it made clear that the city embraces the value of poetry and how it can make a difference in the life of the community.
If you could automatically comprehend one language fluently in order to read a book in that language, which language would you choose?
A completely unfair question. Who could choose just one? I audited 3 semesters of French so that I could read Baudelaire in the original. I’ve asked others to give me their translations of Hikmet’s Turkish, Cavafy’s Greek, Neruda’s Spanish. And I would love to be able to read Issa’s haiku, haibun, and tanka in his Japanese. If I had to choose one, though, I would go with ancient Hebrew so that I could read the oldest texts used to construct Judeo-Christian literature.
Your poem “Poems Can Be About Anything” won first place for Alice Osborn award for children. Why do you think it’s important to write for children?
Writing for children can be so much more fun than writing for adult readers. The poet can much more freely utilize rhythm and rhyme, imagination, and just plain silliness. At the same time, though, wonderful lessons can be subtly integrated into poems for children, reinforcing concepts such as play, appreciation, perception, acceptance, attention, all those things that help children enjoy the world, be open to experience and possibilities, interested in understanding and meaning, and thoughtful about their relationships with others and with the larger world around them. The first poems we remember are the ones we encountered as children. We carry them with us throughout our lives.
Your book Holding Holden was inspired by your experience becoming a grandfather. How does your family impact your poetry? What emotions were you trying to evoke in the reader?
We all have at least two families: the one we didn’t choose, i.e. the one we were raised in; and the one we do, the one we make as adults. They have both been vitally important to me as a poet. My childhood family was marked by abuse, abandonment, poverty, divorce, a lack of education, etc. Through all of that, there was only one man whose patience, tolerance, strength, consideration, and work ethic led me to admire him, and that was my mother’s father, my Papa. A lot of my early poetry deals with that challenging childhood, and as I became a father myself it began to be about the redemption of the role of father and the expansion of the world that made possible. Then, recently, I became a grandfather, a Papa, bringing me full circle back to the role that in all likelihood saved me from desperation, from giving up. “Holding Holden ” was an attempt to put into words and pictures my Papa’s way of seeing the world so that my grandson would know it as a possibility from the very beginning.
In your poetry book The Song is Why We Sing contains themes of nature, daily life and the act of writing itself. How did you arrive at these themes and what significance do they hold for you?
To a large extent, I think writing is mostly about seeing. Writing encourages us to pay attention to details, to notice what’s happening, to find images and words that will convey what we’ve seen and how it relates to other things, and why it’s all important, or at least interesting. I started this habit of paying attention and writing about it a long time ago, so now it is essentially what I do, so of course, that is to some degree what I have to write about. The significance is that this practice enriches my life on a moment-by-moment level. My eyes are open; my brain is working. I see things and appreciate them for what they are and what they add to my/our lives. It’s a “woke” existence that I wouldn’t trade for anything.
In your poem “Cicada” for Poetry in Plain Sight, you write about nature. How does living in the rural South impact your poetry?
The South is full of interesting things. Cicadas, obviously, but also crows and corn fields, rivers and mountains, chickens and pecan trees, old houses and old ways, butter beans and collard greens, cardinals and great blue herons, change and resistance to change. It’s a beautiful world, and also at times a horrible world. I suspect all regions have the same sort of dichotomy, but sometimes the division seems more extreme in the South. Had I been raised anywhere else, I’m sure I would use the imagery of that place as the imagery of my poems. But I was raised here, and these are things by which I know the world and by which I hope to help others see it clearly.
What are a few things you wish to accomplish this year on your own poetry journey? Are there other poets you wish to collaborate with someday?
Currently, I have a new collection of love poems accepted for publication in February 2027. I have another collection on aging that I hope to send to a contest or two at some point this year. I am working on a third collection that will consist of some new “troubled childhood” poems in the context of personal and political consequences. And I am working on a collection of essays on writing poetry that I hope to finish in the next 2-3 years. I have also just started a 4th collection of poems on a theme I’m not ready to reveal. For the last 5-6 years I’ve gotten quite comfortable working on 2-3 collections at once, and I hope to continue that practice. It keeps me busy, keeps me involved, keeps me paying attention. Beyond that, I’ll continue with Poetry Hickory, with my columns, with the Poetry Salon, with teaching at Lenoir Rhyne; I hope to get the chance to work with some younger students as well, and I remain open to any other poetry experiences that come my way.