An interview with 2023-2024 Wisconsin Poet Laureate Nicholas Gulig

Folks around Jefferson County recently learned the exciting news that Wisconsin’s new Poet Laureate is Nicholas Gulig, a Fort Atkinson resident and UW-Whitewater associate professor.

Fort Atkinson is already a town with a reputation for loving, producing, and supporting poetry. Famed objectivist poet Lorine Niedecker hails from Black Hawk Island, the town honors her legacy by sharing lines of her poetry on several downtown murals and incorporating her poems into all students’ curriculums in the community, and Fort has been the host of the Wisconsin Poetry Festival for years (lapsing lately primarily because of a change in momentum due to COVID). So this news is a great source of pride for the community and there are already suggestions that we may need some new murals honoring Gulig’s writing as well.

**For those of you unfamiliar with what it means it to be Poet Laureate, some background on this program and role are at the end of this article, along with Gulig’s bio.**

As Fort Atkinson’s Tourism Manager and a writer, I was delighted to hear this news and jumped at the chance to reach out to Gulig to ask him some questions about his new role.

My Q&A with Nick Gulig

Fort Tourism: What are you most looking forward to in your role as Poet Laureate?

Nick Gulig: There is so much to look forward to, more than I’m even probably aware of at this early moment in my tenure, but one thing I’m curious about has to do with experiencing and making sense of the effect of the position on my relationship to the craft. I’ve been writing poems since I was 12 or 13—that’s 30 years, most of my life—and, for the most part, during that time my relationship to writing has been highly solitary, almost secretive. I read and write in relative isolation, either in my office at work with the door closed, or in a small one-room cabin that I built in my backyard. As such, for me, being a poet has always involved a kind of turning inward and away, akin to what we see in the romantic tradition. This doesn’t mean that I don’t think and care about what happens beyond me, far from it. I mean only that materially being a poet has always involved a physical distancing that my new role as state laureate very much complicates. For the next two years, being a poet now means navigating the public sphere, the social commons. How will that change my relationship to poetry? What will it add? What will it take away? I have no idea. This is new to me. I’m excited for such newness, deeply curious. And curiosity, I think, is what poems are all about.

Fort Tourism: What path (as a writer or otherwise) led you to this role?

Nick Gulig: There are a lot of ways I answer this question, all of which are a matter of where in the narrative I start. Sometimes when I think about this, I begin with my parents who filled our house with books. We didn’t have a TV growing up, and there wasn’t such a thing as the internet back then, so I spent all my time either listening to my father’s records, listening to the radio, reading books from the library, or making up games with the other kids in the neighborhood. Said differently, I lived and breathed in creatively constructed contexts for as far back as I can remember, not merely as a consumer of a product, but as a co-creator of and participant in a variety of imaginary worlds. Reading is participatory, for example, meaning that the audience involves themselves and contributes meaning to the text. Music, too, orchestrates one’s attention to the song in a way that changes both the song and the listener of it. When you’re a listener, a reader, you’re activated, you’re turned on and made alive by the communal nature of the relationship between art and audience. So, whatever path brought me to poems, and, by extension, to my role as laureate, starts there in a childhood defined by repeated acts of attention and participation.

I also owe a debt of gratitude to my late father, who read me poems when I was a kid, and to both my parents who supported me and never tried to talk me out of being a poet, even when, I imagine, they likely wondered how poetry would ever put food on my table or a roof above my head. So their faith in me, their encouragement, is also a part of my narrative.

Another way I think about becoming a poet has to do with the group of friends I fell into league with during high school, and to the punk sub-culture to which we were so passionately drawn. Eau Claire, where I was born and raised, was a lot different in the ‘90s than it is today. There wasn’t the creative infrastructure in place back then that there is now, and so we had to make it up ourselves. We started bands and spent our weekends playing instruments we didn’t know how to play and screaming into microphones in our parent’s basements and garages. So here, too, my formative years were almost totally steeped in creative acts, in making and making up. By the time I graduated high school, what choice did I have? The only thing I had ever known, the only thing I cared about, involved creation, and so I ran with it, first to college at the University of Montana, then to the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, then to a fellowship in Bangkok, and then to Denver where I completed a PhD. I had a lot of help along the way, both from peers and teachers. The first thing I did when they announced me as poet laureate was sit down and write to the people who made the life of a poet possible for me. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the work of others.

Fort Tourism: Our community has a history of being known as a city of poetry, in large part because Lorine Niedecker came from here and wrote about this area. Might your role as Poet Laureate further reinforce this, and if so, in what ways?

Nick Gulig: I moved to Fort Atkinson in the summer of 2016, in the surreal whirlwind leading up to Trump’s election, so the city and surrounding countryside was littered with a cacophony of political signs and banners. I was moving here alone from Thailand because my wife and daughter still needed to complete the immigration process and had to stay behind. I don’t know if folks remember, but the political rhetoric of that particular moment wasn’t especially convivial to folks like us and I remember pulling into town, seeing all the signs and bumper stickers, and wondering if my family would be welcome here. Of course, for the most part, we have been, but at the time, I wasn’t sure, you know. I was nervous. I was worried about my family. However, I remember driving down Main Street for the first time, my car still packed top to bottom with all my earthly belongings and seeing a sign above Scottie’s Eat Mor Diner that read, simply, “Welcome Poets.”  I can still feel the wave of relief that swept over me when I saw that, silly as it might seem.

What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that Niedecker cared about this place and care took on the form of language. This language, then, in turn became something that the people from Fort Atkinson have come to care for and that care, expressed on the sign above the diner, became a form of care for me and for my family at a time when I needed desperately to feel that. Niedecker’s legacy is everywhere here. It’s visible, of course, like in the murals on the sides of downtown buildings, but her legacy is also invisible in the way I just described. No one other than myself experienced that moment driving past Scottie’s, but it mattered to me; it was important and it helped. At their best, poems are special in that way; they last and linger long after they’ve been written. Like Niedecker, I plan to live and write here, hopefully for a long time. I don’t know what I’ll write or for how long I’ll live in Fort, but if there’s anything I want for my poems it is for them to help invisibly, provide some secret sustenance for someone I’ll never meet long after I’m gone. Niedecker’s legacy is a lot of things, but it’s also that. I hope that mine is too and that my language, like hers, might help the people coming here feel welcome.

Fort Tourism: Poetry is not always seen as an attainable art form. How can you help show that poetry is for everyone?

Nick Gulig: This is probably the wrong answer for a poet laureate, but I’m not sure poetry is for everyone. I think it can be, but not everyone at every time is in the right place or frame of mind that poetry requires. Both the reading and the writing of poems takes effort, work, attention. Poems are strange, or unattainable, as you say. They don’t make sense, or rather, they make a different kind of sense. As such, at their best, poems aren’t easily or immediately consumable. For me, given my political and social biases, this is part of what makes them so important and necessary. The world and a person’s role in it feel largely dominated by work, on the one hand, and entertainment, on the other. Said differently, most folks work all day at jobs they don’t enjoy and then watch football or Netflix to recover. The last thing they have the capacity for at the end of the day is T.S. Elliot’s “The Wasteland,” you know.

And yet, Elliot’s critique of contemporary culture expressed in a poem like “The Wasteland” probably informs my thinking here regarding why poetry remains important. Elliot was worried that the ruined landscape of post-war Europe had found its way into the interior of the individual, that the social and cultural structures that had led to the near self-annihilation of the West had also contributed to the wasteland of the soul, so to speak. For Elliot, the war was not only a matter of political failure and external social collapse, but of internal, existential ruin. He worried that we had unknowingly constructed an inherently unfulfilling society organized around the perpetual pursuit of convenience and material commodity that left us dead inside.

A century or so later, I’m not convinced that he was wrong. To the extent that people today experience the death-in-life that Elliot decried in “The Wasteland,” poems both are and aren’t for them. By and large, our lives are radically unpoetic, but then something unexpected happens—we fall in love, a parent dies, the light strikes a tree in a particular way the very moment you are walking past it—and you get snapped out of the doldrum of your routine. These are the moments out of which the poem arises, those flitting instances when we’re brought into a state of pure attention and see, sometimes for the first time, the confluence of forces coexisting to make a moment what it truly is. Like a veil is lifted. Like we’re finally and fully awake. For most people, the only time they read/listen to a poem is to commemorate a marriage or a death, but think of how important these moments are for us, how radically definitive they are, how telling, how substantively they shape us and remind us that we’re alive. Our lives aren’t always like this—how could they be—but when something does pull us out of ourselves, there the poem is, waiting. I, for one, feel lucky that it’s there.

Thank you, Nick, for sharing your beautifully expressed thoughts. I feel I speak for our entire community and county when I say how proud we are to have you in this role.

Guilig’s Poem, Grove of Meaning:

In the middle of September, after everything
we loved had ended, the day remained

a sound pronounced among
emergencies. It was almost

beautiful. A scrawl of voices shook an opposition
through the trees and I believed them.

Among the black metallic structure
of a language, imperfect

in the present tense,
I called to you

across the open grove
and listened. Terror-struck and tethered

to each other, we lived and breathed and were surrounded
by our speaking. The leaves descended

like the inconsistent weather of the law. Our voices
carried them. Ungovernable, the sun, the sun, the sun

“The Poet Laureate plays a crucial role in keeping the arts accessible and vital to all age groups, and acts as a statewide emissary for poetry and creativity. The Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission embraces the diversity of human experience, identity, and literary aesthetics. All applications are welcome, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, cultural heritage, socio-economic background, physical ability or poetic sub-genre. And in fact, those very aspects of identity are factors the committee will take into account when making its selection, in the pursuit of the Poet Laureate Program being representative of the rich and diverse cultures of poetry in the State of Wisconsin.” — Source: https://wisconsinpoetlaureate.org/application-information

“This program was created by Governor Tommy Thompson in 2000. After the $2,000 annual budget was eliminated from the state budget, the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters took over stewardship of the program to ensure its survival. Today, the position is kept alive by individual donations, and by financial support from member organizations.” — Source: https://wisconsinhumanities.org/programs/wisconsin-poet-laureate/

Gulig is a Thai-American poet, husband, and father to two girls, and is the author of North of Order, Book of Lake, and Orient. He received his BA in in Montana (BA), his MFA in Iowa, and his PhD in Denver, Colorado. In 2011-2012 he was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Bangkok, Thailand. Gulig has received additional accolades for his work including the Rushkin Art Club Poetry Award, the Black Warrior Review Poetry Prize, the Grist ProForma Award, and the CSU Open Book Poetry Prize.