Kentucky has a new poet laureate. Kathleen Driskell of Louisville will serve a two-year term traveling the Commonwealth to promote the literary arts, encouraging writers young and old through workshops and readings, and setting a good example for those who wish to express themselves creatively. On April 24—Kentucky Writers’ Day (the birthday of the nation’s first poet laureate, Todd County native Robert Penn Warren)—Driskell was inducted as the Commonwealth’s poet laureate in a ceremony presided over by Gov. Andy Beshear in the marble rotunda of the Kentucky State Capitol in Frankfort.
Before an assembly of former poets laureate, state officials, lovers of Kentucky literature and the honoree’s family, the governor welcomed the new poet laureate and thanked her predecessor, novelist and poet Silas House, for his energetic performance during the past two years. In addition to Kentucky’s youth poet laureate, Maria Faisal, Driskell and House each read selections of their work under the towering statue of Kentucky’s Abraham Lincoln.
Like Lincoln, Driskell grew up in a rural setting in a working-class family, her home being the Oldham County of nearly a half-century ago. She attended Murray State University and received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Louisville before earning a master of fine arts degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She returned to Kentucky and began teaching at Spalding University’s low-residency creative writing program in Louisville, rising to the position of chair of the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at the university. Driskell’s work has appeared in publications as diverse at The New Yorker, Appalachian Review, Southern Review, Shenandoah, and many small-press magazines, and she has received many writing awards.
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Writer, teacher and arts activist Kathleen Driskell is the author of six collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Goat-Footed Gods. Her honor as poet laureate is a natural extension of what she has been doing for years, for Driskell sees her role as making connections among writers and audiences, promoting all the arts—especially writing—in a state nationally known for its community of writers, living and dead. The quality of writing in Kentucky, she affirmed, rivals that of any state in America: “Writers and readers are working every day across the state to support and simplify what it means to be a Kentuckian in all our shapes and colors.” Their backgrounds and approaches are as diverse as the people and places they inhabit: “hills, hollers, glades, plateaus and prairies.”
Now, much of her work relating to place centers on a once-abandoned church that she and her husband, Terry, re-habbed in a square mile outside Louisville. Central to her attention to place is her collection Next Door to the Dead, a reference to the old cemetery in which many members of the church’s congregation are buried. Following the example of Edgar Lee Masters in his Spoon River Anthology written more than l00 years ago, through imagination and fact, Driskell ingeniously recreated the lives of those interred there, including a former slave, a Civil War infantryman and a snake handler.
When asked about her vision for her two years as poet laureate, she affirmed her rootedness in Kentucky. “I want to applaud our many and diverse Kentucky writers, especially contemporary Kentucky writers, as much as I can within and outside the state,” she said. “I’m proud to say that great writing in Kentucky is thriving across all genres, from poets to screenwriters.”
Driskell shared a kind of artistic statement of faith that might be a credo for every serious artist. “I believe when we engage our creativity, we’re being given access to the sacred, the divine,” she said. “When we activate our imaginations, we are activating our capacity to love ourselves, to love one another. We create a world that demonstrates our shared humanity is strengthened through, paradoxically, writing about the differences among us.”
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Driskell’s former service as chair of the board of a national network of writers, the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, has given her a perspective on Kentucky’s place in the forum of national literature in which Kentucky writers are prominently represented. Connecting, she said, is the key, recognizing the importance of connectedness among writers, especially between experienced and emerging writers. To promote this goal, she and friends founded the Kentucky Writers Coalition when she returned to the state from graduate school 30 years ago. The organization, which eventually had 2,500 members, provided a clearinghouse to share information about writing conferences, readings and publications across Kentucky. The internet eventually became a more favorable conduit for exchanging such information and bringing writers, teachers, librarians and bookstores together.
As poet laureate, Driskell said that she wants to connect with some of the existing writing groups within the state, such as the Kentucky Poetry Society, with master classes. Energetic and plain-spoken, she also wants to work with other writers who are also teachers, concentrating on Kentucky high schools, where the next generation of Kentucky writers is formed. This may involve readings and workshops, perhaps at state parks, as previous poets laureate House Frank X Walker and Crystal Wilkinson have done successfully, places in which writers have the opportunity to explore and write about the natural world.
Richard Taylor is a former Kentucky poet laureate (1999-2001) and the author of several books, including Elkhorn: Evolution of a Kentucky Landscape.