The story below is a preview from our May/June 2017 issue. For the full story Subscribe today, view our FREE interactive digital edition or download our FREE iOS app!
National award-winning poet Cathryn Hankla finds inspiration on the greenway, translating her thoughts into two new poetry collections.
As a teacher of college and graduate students in creative writing and literature, Cathryn Hankla is a busy woman. That hasn’t stopped her, however, from recently publishing two new collections of poetry, “Great Bear” and “Galaxies.”
Hankla has over three decades of teaching experience, mainly at Hollins University, and also with a couple of years as a visiting professor at Washington & Lee University. She is currently in her second stint as department chair at Hollins and has previously served in administration as director of the MFA program and director of the Jackson Center for Creative Writing.
“The pace is pretty wild during the nine-month calendar, with events in the evenings as well as days in the classroom,” Hankla says. “I spend most of my downtime reading for classes and on writing projects. I’m happy with this rather breakneck pace, which seems so leisurely to those not in the same profession.”
It’s easy to see she’s passionate about poetry, describing it as a whole world of language reclamation, discovery and creation. Hankla believes many people have been encouraged to think of poetry as a puzzle to be solved. This is one belief she’d like laid to rest.
“A poem is not a puzzle, even if it’s puzzling at first. Instead, it’s a highly selected parcel or capsule of language meant to burst into your psyche and change you in some way. Poetry is the life blood of our language, and it’s meant for everyone, not just academics or young people in school. Poetry is in a word: consciousness.”
She describes herself as a hibernating bear, burrowing in for a few years on various projects and then several releasing at once. The collection “Great Bear,” published by Groundhog Poetry Press, tackles the cycle of grief and love and how they are necessary to each other.
“To love completely means to recognize love’s impermanence on the human scale, while partaking in the expansiveness of love on the other hand. To put it bluntly, if you do not mourn, you never really loved,” she says.
… for the rest of this story and more from our May/June 2017 issue, Subscribe today, view our FREE interactive digital edition or download our FREE iOS app!
