'People are capable of making really beautiful things': Wisconsin's new poet laureate has big plans for the state

FORT ATKINSON - Well before he would be named the new Wisconsin Poet Laureate, Nicholas Gulig routinely spoke to the dead.

Not just any dead. As an undergraduate studying poetry at the University of Montana, Gulig would frequent the gravesite of the poet Richard Hugo, whose memory and influence is said to haunt Missoula. Gulig followed the "wildly beautiful silver maple tree" that guards Hugo's gravestone. He'd eat lunch next to Hugo's grave, burying dimes and pennies in the fissures of the maple bark during these ritual visits.

On his last day in Missoula, Gulig drove to the cemetery, weighed down by all the long-held fears of his future.

"I sloppy-cried all over his grave because I didn’t know what I was going to do, if I would ever publish a poem or write a book or get into (graduate) school. I was so scared at that time. I felt utterly alone in my uncertainty, and I turned to Hugo," Gulig said.

After the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission selected Gulig for state poet laureate on Jan. 9, no uncertainty remained: At 43, Gulig had reached a level of influence with his work that only a handful of poets experience. He's the first Asian American to be selected for the role, which comes with an opportunity to amplify the writing and reading of poetry across Wisconsin and celebrate geographic landmarks and cultural heritage.

For the next two years, that's exactly what Gulig intends to do.

Angie Trudell Vasquez, chair of the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission and the current poet laureate of Madison, has described the role of state poet laureate as an ambassadorship that "takes poetry into the community." That could mean bringing poetry into elementary schools, middle schools, high schools and retirement homes.

"What you do is you take your love for the written word and poetry and your way of knowing the world to the community," Vasquez said.

Vasquez envisions the role to extend from urban to rural settings. The poet laureate's job is to "meet people where they're at" because, whether we engage in poetry only through songs or during special events, be them weddings or funerals, Vasquez argues that we're all connected to the tradition of poetry.

It takes imagination and creative projects to access a whole state's diverse range of people, said Vida Cross, vice chair of the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission and a blues poet in her own right. In her tenure as vice chair, she has worked with three state poet laureates including Gulig, each of whom has brought individual flair to the position.

Margaret Rozga, who served from 2019 until the end of 2020, edited a book of poems featuring Wisconsin-based poets called "Through this Door: Wisconsin in Poems." Dasha Kelly Hamilton, who served from 2021 until the end of 2022, hosted multiple poetry workshops in an online course called "Alignment."

Gulig plans to start conversations between Wisconsin poets and poets who thrive in cosmopolitan oases like New York and San Francisco. Poets from in and out of the state would interview each other, engage in the other's poems and talk about a Wisconsin poet who helped them see the world through a different lens. The goal, ultimately, is to boost Wisconsin's thriving but perhaps lesser-known poetry scene.

His project, he said, is personal.

Poetry hadn't always been an artform Gulig associated with his state. Far from it. Growing up in Eau Claire, Gulig described his interest in verse as "alien" against the backdrop of industry, suburban sprawl and a burgeoning music scene.

As a boy, he listened with rapt attention as his father read him the poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Edgar Allen Poe. Dylan Thomas was his first poetry love, whose verse Gulig recalled being "the first time I felt like poems were songs." But the poets he learned to love were long gone and he didn't see living poets doing things anywhere — at least, not in Wisconsin.

"My experience growing up in Wisconsin in the '90s was a sense of our state being as divorced from anything of cultural merit as a place could possibly be. Granted, my definition of culture and merit was probably pretty limited at that time," Gulig said.

A broken knee the summer before high school prevented Gulig from playing sports his freshman year, and, if painfully, opened a window of time for young Nicholas to immerse himself in poetry as an art form. He'd pull poetry collections down from his parents' bookshelves and attempt to knit together meaning, even beauty, in the lines. He felt a spark to try his hand at the form.

Eau Claire occurs in flashes throughout his latest collection, "Orient," as with this excerpt from his poem, "Some Apostasies": In central west Wisconsin, a pair of rivers rose as separate streams and met. The city / built a park around the confluence, the water intertwined and often shining, the / shoreline wooded and kept up. // Where I was born, raised among the farmers and the forests / and the punks. I left

"When you are young and encounter something that is interesting, you want to do it yourself — at least I do,” Gulig said. “When poems are working, they are a reminder that people are capable of making really beautiful things.”

Finding his way back to his roots

It wasn't long ago that Gulig was dragging four suitcases full of books from Denver — where he was pursuing a doctorate in poetry — to his mother's home country of Khon Kaen in Thailand. Gulig had met his wife, Numfon, there while bartending over the summer in 2011, and, four years later, he wanted to put himself in the country of his ancestors while finishing his dissertation.

Irreverence was on Gulig's mind, specifically the merging of sacred and profane texts. In the days and weeks following the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, Gulig was thinking about cultural values, how we imbue certain symbols over religion. During a lecture on the attacks from the vantage point of Middle Eastern culture, Gulig imagined two dictionaries floating in the desert that suddenly crashed into each other. He saw displays of violence whose origins began with a lack of understanding.

When he wasn't teaching English to nursing students at Khon Kaen University, Gulig worked on his third collection of poems, "Orient." He imagined pitting together the language of holy texts with cruder words, a means of clashing and subverting the way we arrive at belief.

Poetry, he realized, could help people better understand the struggles of different languages, different value systems, different cultures. It also produced some killer lines of poetry.

"I just started stitching, piecing things together. I was like, 'Oh, here are three words from the Bible that sound really cool with these two words that derived from black metal songs.' When I put them together, I get this really great line," Gulig said.

As an example, here's an excerpt of Gulig's poem "Some Cacophonies" from his collection, "Orient": Occurring in both the spirit and the flesh, the change that noise creates is radical. / The human subject sinks into its injury. The distance between "here" and "there," the / "self" and "other," the "sacred and "profane," collapses fundamentally, even if only / for a moment. New noises break into the world. / One is wrought by the totality. A / person puts an ear against the ground and listens. One is overcome

Gulig would eventually return to his Wisconsin roots as an associate professor of poetry at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He lives in nearby Fort Atkinson with Numfon and their two daughters Tonkhoa, 11, and Pieta, 5. When asked what he was doing when he got the phone call from the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission, he joked, "I was probably yelling at my kids."

But the reality was gentler than that. All the years of uncertainty and fear about his future came to him during the call. Afterwards, he looked to Numfon and let himself cry.

Creating a modern landscape for poetry in Wisconsin

Gulig thinks often about his former teenage self, his early interest in poetry and the sense that nobody else shared his growing love of verse. One of his plans is to curate a new series called "Letters to a Young Poet" after Rainer Maria Rilke's titular book, which would allow him to communicate to young Wisconsinites about the power of poetry.

In keeping with his interest in merging texts, he also wants to tap into his roots by invoking another ghost — this one far more local than Missoula's Richard Hugo. Lorine Niedecker was a poet who lived in Fort Atkinson. At the end of her life, Niedecker traveled along Lake Superior, writing and collecting documents and letters of the region surrounding the Great Lake. The end result was a long poem called "Lake Superior."

Gulig wants to document the same route again, traveling with a team of writers and filmmakers around the lake to explore what Niedecker saw in her journey. And he wants to ensure that this pilgrimage includes the rich cultural lives of Indigenous peoples, a gap in Niedecker's work that Gulig intends to correct through collaborations with the Indigenous poet Kimberly Blaeser, a former Wisconsin poet laureate and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe.

There would be an interactive map for students to engage with, whether providing references to the historians Niedecker cites in her poem or geologists explaining the truth behind the first line of the poem, "In every part of every living thing / is stuff that once was rock."

"It'd be a way for high school teachers and college teachers to guide students through their own kind of documentary-inspired poems about bodies of water in their areas of Wisconsin," Gulig said. "Then they could upload the projects onto the website. It would be this living resource of poets documenting the history, geology, bodies of water in their parts of the state."

Cross, the vice chair of the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission, admitted that poetry can feel like an intimidating genre to enjoy, but it's a form that is perfect for people who want to elevate their literary interests but don't have the time to read a whole book. Cross cited Mohammed Ali's two-word poem, "Me We" as one example.

"Poetry is the oldest form of literature and has been around since the beginning. And yet people are so intimidated by it," Cross said. "You can find all types of poetry — poetry set to music, poetry that's just three lines long, or even just one or two words. What I would advise people to do is just sit with it."

Despite his love of language, Gulig said it's sometimes inadequate to explain life's monumental events. That's part of what makes poetry so powerful, he said. Where uttering the sentence "I was sad when my dad died" fails to capture the deep sorrow of loss, a poem may contain shades of complication and grief that come closer to getting the feeling right.

When Gulig is confronted by people who say they don't like poems, he offers a different perspective.

"The first thing I want them to think about is how inadequate speech is when we need it most. For the things that are the hardest to understand, like love and death and God or the lack of God, ordinary speech just seems like such a blunt, inadequate instrument," Gulig said.

"We tend to turn to extraordinary speech that is moving in a different way, that is operating under different principles and guidelines and goals. One word for that is poetry."

Natalie Eilbert covers mental health issues for USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin. She welcomes story tips and feedback. You can reach her at neilbert@gannett.com or view her Twitter profile at @natalie_eilbert. If you or someone you know is dealing with suicidal thoughts, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or text "Hopeline" to the National Crisis Text Line at 741-741.

This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Wisconsin poet laureate Nicholas Gulig wants to show power of words