Ep. 100: Zooming In on Poetry with Penelope Pelizzon
How to reach Penelope
Twitter/X: @vpenpelizzon
Instagram: @mappamundi1633
Penelope’s Website - Contace page
Links for Penelope’s Work
Penelope’s new book: A Gaze Hound That Hunteth By the Eye.
One of Penelope’s published poems: "Orts & Slarts"
Teaching Poetry (Penelope’s recommendation)
Rose, Where Did You Get That Red
Transcript
Melissa Milner 0:09
Welcome to The Teacher As... podcast, I'm your host Melissa Milner, a teacher who is painfully curious and very easily inspired. This podcast is ever changing and I hope with each season, you find episodes that speak to you in your work as an educator. This is the fifth season of The Teacher As... and it's exciting to see the growth in how many educators are listening. Episodes are released every other week. If you enjoy The Teacher As... please rate it on Apple podcasts and leave a review. It helps the podcast reach more educators. Thanks for listening.
Melissa Milner 0:42
I went to high school with Penelope. She graduated two years before me, but you were very much interested in theater. And I know you were writing poetry in high school, right?
Melissa Milner 0:53
Wow, I love that.
Penelope Pelizzon 1:01
The utility of failure, right?
Melissa Milner 1:04
Yeah. And then you know, life, life happens. And then you have lots of things to write about.
Penelope Pelizzon 1:26
Exactly.
Melissa Milner 1:27
All gives you perspective.
Penelope Pelizzon 1:29
Exactly.
Melissa Milner 1:29
I don't even know where to start. You're a teacher, and then you're a poet, and how are poets and teachers alike? There's so many things we could talk about, what what would you like to talk about first?
Penelope Pelizzon 1:42
Well, you know, one thing actually, since you mentioned the, the high school and the dramatic or any, in some ways, you know, obviously, I'm a teacher at the university, because what I do is I teach the art that I practice, right, which is poetry, as well as narrative prose, and as well as nature writing, but in some ways, I think the thing that actually maybe is most useful to my, well, I don't know, most useful, but useful to my work in the classroom is my training as a failed actress actually is very helpful. And you know, you are familiar with this, right? I mean, one of the things that's really useful is being able to stand up in front of a lot of strangers and, you know, create a kind of intimacy through, you know, eye contact and conversation and, you know, using the space of the front of a classroom, as you know, someplace that you move around in, and that you can actually kind of like, move forward and backwards and kind of just invite people to participate with their, with their face, you know, and their, their, their, their and their engagement. And I think that that's something that particularly early on, in my years teaching at a university, particularly, you know, the first few years teaching at the University of California, you know, I was like 25 years old, so I was just a couple of years older than the college students I was teaching about, I think that just that ability to sort of be like, i'm the professor, here I am to teach you something, you know, it certainly felt like an act at first, but it felt like I knew how to put a good face onto performing something that I didn't yet maybe fully feel like I knew how to inhabit.
Melissa Milner 3:07
Right. It's good. It's good for impostor syndrome, right?
Penelope Pelizzon 3:11
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So there, you know. So I think that that, you know, that was actually really useful. And then I think the thing that, that maybe it was useful about that, that early dramatic experience. And as I said, you know, failure is really important to your life as an artist, right? Like that is how you learn is you fail at things, and you can't really get anywhere unless you risk failure. And so to kind of not be afraid of failing, and just like knowing that, if you fail at something that that may actually mean that you're kind of on your way to the next stage of your artistic life, or maybe, you know, whatever you're trying to do, maybe didn't work out in the form that you conceptualized it as, but if you really are driven to that there may be some other form is trying to present itself. So that's something I think it's really useful for students to know, and maybe really useful for, you know, the particularly this generation of college students post COVID, probably high school students too, everyone is so anxious, right? This is a very anxious time to be a young person or a middle aged person. But you know, it's a very anxious time, and people I think, are very anxious about the environment. They're anxious about the fact like, will there be food globally in 10 years, will there be water? You know, what will be happening there? You know, there's a lot of social unrest that students feel. So I think all of that anxiety amplifies itself, in some ways for a lot of high achieving students and feeling like I have to do everything perfectly, and I can't fail at anything, like the only thing holding my world together. So I'm a straight A student, and I'm an overachiever. So I think to come into a to a writing class where you're told that one of the things that you have to be prepared for is like, be prepared to fail not to fail the class, but like, you know, if, if you're engaging with this class, you're going to feel like things are maybe a little bit beyond you, and that's okay. And that feeling of like, I don't know how to approach this project that I'm supposed to be doing. Part of that like floundering and feeling like you're failing is actually part of the process of figuring out how to get to the next step of it.
Penelope Pelizzon 0:53
Sort of, I mean, I really I was really kind of pursuing. I mean, I guess I did, like I sort of like, I think I published some stuff in the literary magazine, but I wasn't really writing in a serious way until until actually going off to Boston Conservatory for two years and flunking out. And that was actually the crisis in my dramatic life, the failure of my dramatic birth was actually the thing that really brought me into the world of writing.
Melissa Milner 4:59
Yeah. It's so funny. I just talked to my kids today. They're writing narrative stories. And we were talking about rising action. And I'm using David Lynch's idea of like, giving them time to daydream. You know, one boy came up, and he just said, I daydreamed. I have no idea what my rising action is. I said, Okay. Okay. I said, just start writing the story and see where it goes. Because the way stories go, I'm curious to see if that helps them. It's just, like, just write it. Sometimes it just comes out of you, and then you make it better. But that linear was not working for him of this rising action, and then that makes it worse. And then this rising action, you know, it's more risky, and the stakes are higher. It was just, it was too much. I mean, they're fourth graders. Yeah, yeah.
Penelope Pelizzon 5:47
But I think that that's, that's a really nice point, right? Like this idea of, as you say, kind of like, sometimes just have to write yourself into it. And I think that that is, I mean, there's different kinds of writers, right? Like, they're the people who, like they need to plot everything out ahead of time. They can't make the next step unless they know where the narrative is going. And then there are other people who are like, I can I work by language, like, I can only go to the next image.
Melissa Milner 6:05
I'm like that.
Penelope Pelizzon 6:07
Yeah, I know, I that's sort of how I work too. And I feel like it's like to get, you know, students will be like, Well, I don't, I think the students often want to sort of abstract things like a student will say something like, what if I change the stanzas and then like, change the ending? Will that work? And I would have to say, I have no idea. It depends. You know, it's really it's not about an eye writing is not about ideas. Writing is actually about words. So I don't know until I know what words there's, the ideas are not interesting until they have the language that they that they go into. Ooh, whoo. Oh, that's cool, right? I mean, this is like, no idea has been things. Writing is not about it's, you can have a great idea. It doesn't matter if you have a great idea. If you can't, if you don't actually have interesting language, you don't really have a great idea.
Melissa Milner 6:49
Yeah. Oh, that's so yeah, I like the way you put that. Very cool.
Penelope Pelizzon 6:53
But it's hard for students, right? Like, that's like, they really want to have like, Am I doing this right? Like, I don't know.
Melissa Milner 6:59
Oh, that's so true. That's so true. So when you I'm just trying to get like this timeline. So you, I don't like to say it, but failed at? So were you going to be an actress?
Penelope Pelizzon 7:12
Yeah.
Melissa Milner 7:13
Okay.
Penelope Pelizzon 7:13
So as you I mean, just to like for listeners to go back into the deep, the deep, dark recesses of history. So you remember, of course, the Generic Theater, and one of the things that Melissa and I did back in the deep dark days of history is that we co founded a an independent theatre company, you know, with six actors, and did our one performance of Waiting for Godot that was like, sure to be that was sure to be a hit in the summer. Right? Like, you know, that that was like, so we were too smart and too good for for ourselves. So after that, I mean, I was that that experience of founding the Generic Theater with you and our other friends was also really informative for me, because I felt like oh, you know, I actually kind of want to control things a little bit. Like, I'd like to run things. So I really had this fantasy of acting of course. But I also thought, you know, I am really interested in directing and doing some more kind of like thinking about, like, how the big picture of the theatrical production works together. So I went off to Boston Conservatory for two years. And it was fairly clear fairly early on that this I just, like, I just wasn't a great actress, and nor was I a great dancer, and I especially wasn't a great singer.
Melissa Milner 8:23
So oh, they made you do all that. That's hard.
Penelope Pelizzon 8:27
It was terribly hard. Yeah, some people are great at it. But the thing that was really wonderful is, you know, I read a lot of plays as one does when you're in theater school. And I also I had a great Shakespeare class and I became very interested in Renaissance literature and Renaissance theatre. And so I feel like the thing that was kind of most influential to my poetry coming away from that was having this like, deep immersion in theatrical production, enough Shakespeare in production, particularly, and just also Shakespeare, right? Like this language. And this Yeah, this in this kind of way that you can get both dramatic and lyric modes working together on the stage in the same way you can have something that's performative and has all this action, but it also has this like meditative reflection and a voice that is thinking, right? So that that's actually been really, really influential to my own writing.
Penelope Pelizzon 9:13
But when I made, at the point when I was like flunking out, it was clear that I, you know, was not going to succeed at that. I was just reading a lot of like, bad poetry and writing a lot of like, bad, like, angry feminist poetry. Like the intention was good, but the poetry is terrible.
Melissa Milner 9:28
Yeah.
Penelope Pelizzon 9:29
But it was, you know, it was it was useful. I mean, it was sort of like, okay, I have this like voice but I want to follow, I left Boston for a while I went off to Ireland. So I thought, I'm going to be 19 kicked out of school, I'm going to be a poet. What do I do? I'm gonna go live in Ireland for winter. And I took my savings from my waitressing job in Boston and it went off and then went to Ireland for a few months until my money ran out. And the thing that they had like not realized like stupidly in my cluelessness was I had to have all these Irish friends in Boston who were working in the restaurant. Straight, right, like all these young people our age
Melissa Milner 10:02
That's Boston, yep.
Penelope Pelizzon 10:03
That is it. Yeah. But it was, I got to Ireland as like, Oh, I'm in the west of Ireland. There's no young people here. Where are they under? Like, they've gone to Boston, they got a job. So I was like, oh, all the young people had gone off to take the jobs in Boston that I had sort of like stupidly given up so that I could go live in Ireland and be a writer.
Melissa Milner 10:21
Oh, that's so ironic.
Penelope Pelizzon 10:23
Yeah. So it's kind of another short of failure, but it was a colorful failure. And it was, you know, I learned how to be alone. Right, like, I lived alone in a house in the middle of nowhere without heat, or hot water, or basically food, you know, for several months. And, you know, it was it was a good experience in that sense.
Melissa Milner 10:40
Wow.
Penelope Pelizzon 10:41
Yeah, that got me to the point where it's like, okay, I committed to this course. And, you know, I'm a poet, that's, this is what I'm gonna do. Yeah. And then, you know, it was kind of like, well, I, after a couple of years, I was like, you know, I, I could just be waiting tables forever. This is kind of terrible. So I do want to go back to school. So I ended up going back to UMass Boston, got an English degree there and focused on creative writing. And then as like, oh, you know, there's this thing called the Master of Fine Arts and like, someone will pay me to just like work on my poems for two years. And I applied to a few schools on the east coast, but I also was like, at the point where I was, I was in this long term relationship that needed to end. And it was, it was clear to me that I probably wouldn't break up with this person who was deeply attached to unless I like, moved 3000 miles away. So I was like, oh, University ofCalifornia, I'll go there. And I hear like, our students will, like, say things about their romantic life, they'll be like, Okay, sounds really familiar and crazy. So yeah, so. So then I ended up in California, got an MFA worked on my poems for two years. And like, at the end of like, two years of like writing, writing, writing, writing, writing, I had like one good poem. And that's actually the that's the one poem from my master's program that appeared in my first book, that was the only poem that made it my first book, but I was like, Okay, I've gotten somewhere with this, I'm better. But I still feel like I don't actually know really anything about the hundreds and hundreds of years of this part, I need to more and I want to have time more to write and I still have no job prospects. And so is it well, you know, I could I could actually do a PhD, like, there's like, someone will pay me to work on my poems for five more years. I'm not gonna go back to waiting tables. So it's like PhD, five years. Library, poems or waitressing. So I took the PhD. And that was great.
Penelope Pelizzon 12:21
It was it was it was a fantastic time to just read read, read, read read and write, write, write, write, write.. And by the end of that, I have like, 30, good poems.
Melissa Milner 12:30
Okay.
Penelope Pelizzon 12:32
And so then I was like, Okay, that was my first book. And I was very lucky, though.
Melissa Milner 12:35
That was like finding your voice, right? Is that basically what it was?
Penelope Pelizzon 12:39
Yeah. I mean, finding my finding my voice, you're finding one's voice. That's a great metaphor, in some ways, you know. So in some ways, it was like, I think the thing that was it took me a really long time to figure out how to do was how to find something that wasn't just an anecdote, because that's still something that I struggle with as a writer that feels like it's, it's easy to find sort of like a funny story, or to figure out like, oh, this thing happened to me, like, let me just tell you about it. But the kind of poetry that I'm really interested in, and that I want to write does more than kind of just make, like a single gesture telling a story. So it took me a long time to figure out like, how do I get beyond poems that just do this like one thing, because there are great poets who can do that. But But I, it sort of isn't what I wanted to do. So I feel like the thing that those years taught me was how to how to layer time, and how to move back and forth through time in in a single in a single narrative in a poem like, how can I say that I cover several 100 years, or move from place to place in a poem, and kind of get like layers of history in it as well.
Melissa Milner 13:45
And is that part like, I know, you can talk about all your travels, I'm sure that all your travels have helped, just with perspective and see things differently. Talk about your travel.
Penelope Pelizzon 13:57
Oh, well. So that's a guess. Yeah, we were sort of joking about this ahead of time. But when I was in doing my PhD, I met and fell in love with this handsome, handsome young poet. And, you know, we dated for several years, we moved around together, and we ended up getting married very happily. And so he we ended up in Pennsylvania together, teaching nearby each other for a couple of years. He was he was teaching at colleges as well. We ended up actually in Connecticut, where I am now he was teaching in the same department, we had offices down the hall from one another, and the he decided he'd always been interested in, in travel in the Foreign Service and doing sort of like diplomatic service and that kind of like, you know, serving in a foreign capacity. And so he took the Foreign Service exam, you know, just to see what would happen and was offered a job as a diplomat. He did that.
Penelope Pelizzon 14:49
So he can be you know, it was difficult because, you know, obviously, he lives abroad for much of the time. So we had to figure out okay, you know, how will we make this work? Is this like, we're gonna have this long distance relationship Again, but it's gonna be like thousands and thousands of miles apart. So we thought, well, you know, we'll try it for a few years and see if it works. And just, you know, reassess at that point. And it has been great. He's been posted to these amazing places. So he was posted for two years to Naples, Italy. So I was able to be there for part of the time after that he was posted to Syria. So he was in Syria from 2008 until 2010. So right, wow, six months before the war broke out there, in Damascus, the most amazing city, you know, just an incredible, incredible place that is like very much with us in our hearts all the time. And then after that, you know, to another a number of other places to Namibia and Southern Africa, to South Africa. So, you know, he's been posted to these really, really interesting places. And I have been fortunate in that, you know, through applying from receiving grants, sometimes sabbaticals, I had been able to be with him a fair amount of time, not all the time, but at least part of every year to be with him wherever he is.
Penelope Pelizzon 15:56
So you know, obviously, it's just having a life in these places, you know, is, is part of my daily life. So that's been reflected a lot of my writing and my thinking, one thing that's been really useful is just the experience of trying to, like have a daily life in another language, like, I feel like one of the best things that a writer can do is sort of like, not be an English not be enough in writing language all the time. So for me, it's like, okay, I'm very comfortable in English, but it's, it really makes you think differently and process the way that language works. If you have to think in, you know, Italian, or, like really badly in Arabic, right. Like, like, like another failure?
Melissa Milner 16:35
It's, yeah, it seems very complicated.
Penelope Pelizzon 16:38
Yeah. So but it's like, that's been, that's been great. And, um, I would say, the sounds of some of those languages, and the ways in which, just like this, they're really different architecture of languages, different languages, has been incredibly important to my writing really like shapes, it shapes all the poetry that I do, again, which is, you know, I write primarily in English, but I do do some work as a translator. So that's, that's also been like, a real work on translating, you know, translating, like badly translating poems, I'd say, yeah, that's just a great, it's a great, it's a great tool for you, as a writer, if you can kind of put yourself in another writers mind and try to kind of think, kind of see through what they're seeing.
Melissa Milner 17:17
That's amazing. I'm just thinking about how hard that would be. I mean, how well do you know the language to be able to do that?
Penelope Pelizzon 17:25
That's, well, it's interesting. There's a lot of translation now, you know, people are working on these, these kinds of experimental translation modes, I would say. So, you know, we always think that well, great, obviously, you should be really comfortable in the language that you're that you're translating into the language that you're carrying over into. But, like, for me, I feel like it was actually, you know, my Italian is not great. It's like, let's say I have like, bad functional Italian, but my reading Italian is much better. Right? And the thing that, that helps that is that, you know, I, I tried to read and and to think about like, what's, what is what's happening in this poem? And if one were tried going to try to sort of create a parallel or like the flavor of this in English, what would have to happen for this flavor that this Italian writer is doing? What would English have to do?
Melissa Milner 18:13
And sometimes English doesn't have the best, you know, sounding to make it sound? Yeah, yeah.
Penelope Pelizzon 18:22
English is really like English is actually really a really rich language, there's a lot of things that like, there's a sort of myth that it's really hard to rhyme in English, and English as actually full of great rhymes. It's, it's hard, like there are not the same equivalences because we, you know, we don't have the same verb endings we don't our language doesn't do some of the same echo sounds that a lot of romance languages do. On the other hand, there's actually a lot of like, built in phonic texture in English. So it's, it's kind of like, you might not be able to create exactly the same effect, but I feel like you can create the same, like an atmosphere or a flavor.
Melissa Milner 18:54
The gist.
Penelope Pelizzon 18:54
Yeah, something like that. So it's, it's really interesting and really interesting. Also, to think about, like with students, right, because, you know, so many students, you know, at all levels now, so many students are multilingual, right? Like, this is like this incredible richness for students is like, imagine if you can think and multiple languages what a richness that is, like, we should be cherishing that and like trying to nurture that as much as possible, as opposed to like shutting it down, which seems like is what happens sometimes. So I think like, for me, like working as a poet, as a professor working with students who have capabilities in multiple languages. That's super exciting. Super exciting.
Melissa Milner 19:33
Yeah. Yeah.
Penelope Pelizzon 19:34
What's your experience? I mean, do you have a lot of multilingual students among your, your classes? How does that work?
Melissa Milner 19:40
Not a lot. So I'll have a student that you know, their home language might be Portuguese or Spanish or, you know, there's different languages at home, but they're definitely English speaking in the school. You know, we have we do have a obviously, ESL not. They don't call it that anymore to help students that, you know, just haven't really learned much of their own language or, you know, they're coming in kindergarten/first grade. And they don't know either language. And yeah, that's
Penelope Pelizzon 20:15
Right. Yeah, it's interesting. One of the most interesting teaching experiences I've had, actually. So I was for one semester, I was a visiting professor at a university in Namibia, in southern Africa. And it was fantastic because so English was the language of the school and English is like one of the 14 languages of Namibia, right? There's like, it's, you know, everyone is multilingual. So the class was taught it was a, it was a writing creative writing class in English, the focus was on people bringing narratives from whatever their home language was, and translating them into English, but then kind of working back and forth between languages. It was amazing, because nobody's first language in the classroom was English, except mine. And it wasn't even people's second language. It was often like their third or fourth. You know, like, I'm, I, my first language is Oshiwambo Oh, but no, actually, like, really, my language at home was Lozi, right? Or, like, it would be some, you know, other language that they had gone through three languages to get to English. So you're just like, Okay, everyone in this classroom is like, ten times as smart as I am, because they're all half my age, and they all are doing all this incredible, like brain work. And then they're, they're writing poems in English, they're, you know, fourth or fifth or whatever language and then being able to kind of like, pull into English, some of these images and figures of speech and, you know, syntactical moves that they're pulling over from, whatever their their first language is, it's just incredible.
Melissa Milner 21:38
Wow, I just, you know, being able to see that and experience that and then go somewhere else, and see that, and, you know, it's just the traveling, I am hoping to start traveling Canada. Hawaii, but yeah, I need to get over and do some other areas of the world type traveling, because it's just...
Penelope Pelizzon 22:02
It's hard. I mean, it's like, it's one of the things like it's, it can be hard to, you know, I mean, I've been very lucky because I, you know, there's, there's a home waiting for me in a bunch of other places, right? So I kind of can just, like pack a backpack and show up and like, Oh, my clothes are there. And, you know, there's a sort of community that is like, typically, my husband has been there for a while. So it's like, alright, well, there are people that he knows there. So it's kind of like he does all the heavy lifting.
Melissa Milner 22:27
You just show up, you have a house? I mean, it's, it's amazing.
Penelope Pelizzon 22:30
Yeah. So it is it is pretty incredible. And it's, you know, it is one of the pleasures that is like, you know, okay, well when, you know, when you're a little older, and maybe there's you know, some time when you're retired, and there's a bit of you know, like, then you can be a little bit creative about where you where you want to go.
Melissa Milner 22:47
Definitely. So is there anything else you wanted to talk about before we get into the Zooming In segment?
Penelope Pelizzon 22:53
Well, so it just, you know, I'm really interested again, thinking about, like, you know, the content of the podcasts, your creativity with this, all of the different people that you've had on here, I mean, it's just striking to me the different ways of teaching that exist, right, and the sort of different roles, the different types of teaching that exist. So I think that that's, that's just very inspiring. So there's just like kudos and compliments to you know, you for bringing this whole thing of different you know, a lot of different people who are really interesting during different things around around education around thinking about learning about the ways that that's, you know, that's a constant process.
Melissa Milner 23:27
It is it is and then, you know, I'm doing this series about film directors and I, you know, I I'm watching Master classes of film directors and going, that's teaching that's teaching that's teaching. So I started this series, and then I'm, you know, I'm just gonna keep going, because, and the, The Teacher As... is real, it started because of parallels to teaching, I would hear someone who has a completely different job from teaching, but then they'd be talking, I'm like, but that's what I do as a teacher, like it was. I also did, just because you brought it up, I did The Teacher As actor, and I came, I did, we did a lot of that, like, teaching in front of a class and all that. And then I did my read alouds I did a series of ones about really zooming in on read alouds when you read aloud to kids, and I gave acting tips, and you know, the volume, the pacing, stop, just look at the kids, and then say, you know, all that stuff being dramatic. So that, you know, I'm even using it in my, in my podcast, I'm able to share some of that stuff.
Penelope Pelizzon 24:32
Yeah, that's great. It's amazing to me now. Right? I mean, that those tips were for reading aloud. It's we do a lot of reading aloud to obviously in creative writing classes and poetry classes, either, you know, having students read from a text that we're studying together or having them read their own work, and it's just so hard for people. Right, it's so infrequent, it's so infrequent that people are actually taught this and get to study it.
Melissa Milner 24:54
Yeah.
Penelope Pelizzon 24:55
So you know one thing that in some classes I will ask students to memorize over the course To the semester, three poems, you know, so like three short sonnet length poems, and recite them for the class. And it's just terrifying and, you know, just like horrible for them. Like, it's so, so hard. And it's like, okay, we're all going to do this together, everyone is doing it, you can try it as many times as you need, like, it's okay. But this is actually really good practice to be able to hold a short poem in your head, stand up and be able to say it in a way that is slow, and you're paying attention to the punctuation or to the meaningful whitespace. And you're actually trying to convey something about what those words are actually doing on the page. And like the, the poem is, you know, it's coming alive because you're putting your breath into it, right. Like by the third poem, I feel like students are often like, Okay, this is not so bad. I can do this.
Melissa Milner 25:43
That's good.
Penelope Pelizzon 25:45
But I think like after this after the plague after COVID, you know, it's even more difficult to get students just to feel comfortable, like picking their face up and looking out at, you know, the, the rest of the class, right?
Melissa Milner 25:56
Yeah. Yeah. It's been tough. Are they? You're they're literally used to being on Zoom. Like, we're now you know, yeah. Yeah. I mean, for people who are naturally like, Yeah, I'll get up and do that. But I can't imagine, you know, I, you know, I'm an actress, I've done stuff, whatever. But I don't I mean, a sonnet, and to know how to deliver that, like, I can deliver like a regular script, but I don't know. Am I supposed to stop or pause at the commas? Or am I supposed to pause when I feel it? Like, I don't know.
Penelope Pelizzon 26:30
Those are? Those are great questions. Yeah, I would say read the punctuation, read it and try to listen to what it's saying. And read the punctuation is very much like acting those sort of like, who is saying this, and why are they saying, like, what's happening here? What's this? What's the action that's going on here? It's not just like random words, right? Like somebody is speaking. Because they feel something, they want something they are trying to convey something to someone who's listening, maybe. So I think, you know, those are things that, again, if you have studied acting, there should have natural to you but I think for students, it's like, oh, yeah.
Melissa Milner 27:03
So as a poet, I know, we're supposed to get to the zooming in. But this is leading me to more questions. As a poet. I mean, I know I, I, we talked to the kids. Fourth grade, it's a you know, at a low level, but we talk about where do you want your reader to breathe? And if you're at a dramatic moment, you know, they're learning like the power of an ellipsis? Or the power, you know. Like, what are you trying to get your reader to feel? Yes. And then use the punctuation that matches that. But yes, I mean, is that like a big thing and poetry along with the words and the mood and the...
Penelope Pelizzon 27:38
I would say punctuation is part of language as it is whitespace. Right. So like, a line break is an important, really important moment and a poem. You know, different quotes, do different things, right? Like it might be it might be a metrical pause, it might be a syntactical moment, there might be a rhetorical pause there, maybe there's no pause. And so it's like a really a jammed line. So you kind of like tumble over into the next thing, just getting students to like, these are easier questions to ask, right? Like, what's what, why is the poetry and so if the poet has chosen to use no punctuation, so they're giving no cues with punctuation? What are they doing instead? Right, like, yeah, they they've chosen to give up that tool. What other tools are they using, instead of that to help you? Maybe they want you to feel breathless? Like that might be a thing, right? Are you supposed to actually feel a little bit uncomfortable and breathless as you're reading this because the experience of the poem is breathless? Is it is it trying to convey something about kind of like sense of rush, rushing or something like that?
Melissa Milner 28:31
So I think your next book should be for elementary teachers, middle school teachers, all the stuff you're saying right now, how would you teach some of these things? Like, I mean, I'm like, yeah, it's a stanza. And then you go to the next stanza. I didn't know that in between, there's something important in that, like space that that that is a reason that they stopped at that point to then move on to the...yeah.
Penelope Pelizzon 28:55
Yeah. So I mean, think about like, the poet's. It's like, the poet superpower is the line break, right? Like, we're the only genre that gets the line break. Nobody else gets it.
Melissa Milner 29:04
That's right.
Penelope Pelizzon 29:04
And if you're working in their prose poets, I mean, they're like I some of my favorite posts are prose poet. So there might be prose posts who are like, I'm not going to use the line break, I give up that superpower, I'll do something else. But again, it's kind of like Don't Don't waste your line breaks. Because every line break is a moment of ratcheting up the tension or releasing the tension. That's what it's doing. It's doing that either sonically or again, rhetorically, or, or syntactically. But interestingly, I am going to teach a poetry class to not fourth graders, but to I think they're gonna be 11th graders. And in some ways, I think 11th graders can be harder, right, like younger. My sense is like middle school and like just under middle school kids are, they're like vociferous, they're overflowing with ideas. They want to share their ideas, they raise their hand, they shout out, they have a lot to say. Whereas I think by 11th grade people are a little bit like, don't look at me and don't call on me.
Melissa Milner 29:57
Even middle school. I mean, some seventh and eighth graders are like Yeah, yeah. No, I'm serious, though. I would love if you did something like that I would use it in my classroom. Yeah, I would.
Penelope Pelizzon 30:10
I bet that there are some resources. And I actually like I should have, I should put this up ahead of time. But um, I bet that there probably are some things out there. Like, I knew that there are some great poets who have written who have written books on teaching poetry to children. So Kenneth Koch wrote a book for kids, and I cannot remember the name of it, teaching poetry to kids. Anyway, I can email you this like there...
Melissa Milner 30:33
I can put it on the episode page. Yeah. Yeah. Anything you anything you recommend? Because, I mean, really, at fourth grade, we talk about stances we talk about write a little bit of rhyme scheme, you know.
Penelope Pelizzon 30:46
They're really good with rhyme at that age. Yeah.
Melissa Milner 30:50
But it's, it's very much like, this is how to do a haiku. This is how to do you know, an acrostic. And it's like, what you're talking about what you just talked about? I'm like, I want to teach that to my fourth graders. How cool is that? That there's this language with the punctuation and then you're like, you said, syntactical, rhetorical and...
Penelope Pelizzon 31:15
and usually like sonic, right? Like, there's something going on, like, you know, might be a measured line, like a metered line that how, okay, um, but you know, there's like, a sonic texture that is like that unit, that texture, that sound texture, that, again, maybe is created by meter. But it may also, even if it's a free verse poem, there might be something going on with the way that the sounds are contained in that line. That is, you know, that makes it distinct from the line before it and the line after it.
Melissa Milner 31:41
So cool. You could even you could do a book of poems, where you're either you wrote them, or you find ones that have examples of the things you're saying, for upper mid upper elementary.
Penelope Pelizzon 31:57
Yeah, yep.
Melissa Milner 31:58
Would you want examples of, you know, examples of Sonic examples of rhetorical examples of yeah, that's...
Penelope Pelizzon 32:04
That's actually a great idea.
Melissa Milner 32:05
This is what I mean, when I say, you know.
Penelope Pelizzon 32:07
Yeah, so that's actually, that's a great suggestion. And again, I feel like that is out there. And I am going to you inspiring me to do a little research when I get off the Zoom with you and just pull up some titles because I, you know, I feel like there is this movement in the 70s of a sort of, like, we're going to, we're going to, you know, again, we benefited from this, like, we're gonna have more arts in schools, right. Like, we had music and we had visual art, we have, you know, drama, and there's all of this stuff. And I feel like there is this movement in the 70s to do a lot of these sort of, like handbooks or textbooks for sort of getting kids excited about about poetry. So let me see what I can find.
Melissa Milner 32:42
Yeah, I would love that. I, you know, sometimes it's like, oh, fourth graders aren't gonna get that. It's that's that's from I don't believe in that. You know, I think as long as you have an example to show them, yeah, some kids are gonna go, oh, I want to eat that up. I want to do that. And they get motivated. Let's say same with the narrative. Like the some of these kids are just, you know, one girl went home and wrote 10 pages. Yeah, she typed, she typed 10 pages in one night. It's like, yeah, you know, their revved, some of them are ready for it.
Penelope Pelizzon 33:12
Yeah. They're totally ready for it. And I think that that's like, you know, they will remember you, right? Like, they will be looking back and being like, there was a lady who taught us how to do this thing with this, like, creating dramatic narrative, creating a tension.
Melissa Milner 33:25
But I would, I would, I am never thrilled with the poetry stuff that I do every year. I'm always like, I mean, I cook haikus are cool. But like, if I'm going to do haikus, like I would love to know why a haiku is so cool. Like, I love haikus. Yeah, okay. syllabication like syllable, like, I get it. But like, why is that cool? Like, like, what's the what's the what
Penelope Pelizzon 33:50
works? Well, syllabics, like, in and of themselves, they're a great form, because what they were shooting is you really have to pay attention to the syntax, right? So like, I mean, haikus are often written in response to one another, right? So you'd be like, one person writes a haiku or maybe a Tonka, which is a sort of a cycle. So it's the two 77 syllable line. So it's 57577. You know, so you write one and then I write one back to you, and then you write one and response. And so we create this dialogue that goes back and forth. And the thing that is really exciting, I think about working with syllabic forms, for me anyway, is, you know, so it gives you the structure to kind of drape the sentence over. And it's kind of like this interesting architecture. In English, it's a slightly, like, that's a short line and then a longer line. So there's, there's a way in which you have to really think about like, what's going to work around that. So it's a really, it pushes you to think syntactically and to shape your sentences a little bit more intentionally. Yeah,
Melissa Milner 34:44
So the whole do you mean like the whole haiku is one sentence like doo doo doo doo doo?
Melissa Milner 34:50
Could be or you could have like, you know, you could have like a single poem that is like five haiku and the the sentence goes for fifteen lines. Like have like some like wildly and jam stuff, like that's the kind of stuff that I love is the way that you can syntax can kind of like be a waterfall that's moving over the shape of the syllabic stanza is giving you this architecture. Yeah. With the water of poem is moving,
Melissa Milner 35:15
if that makes sense. Very cool. Thanks, metaphor, but totally got into the weeds. Sorry, listeners. Okay, so. So back on track. What are you zooming in on right now in your work?
Penelope Pelizzon 35:31
Yeah, well, so um, as I was saying, I have a new book that will be out in February, it's coming out in the Pitt poetry series, it is called A Gaze Hound that Hunteth by the Eye. And that is a title is it's kind of a nod to the Hollinshead Chronicles, which are the, as you will remember, which are the historical chronicles from which actually, Shakespeare pulled a lot of the narratives from his, for his plays, is sort of a corrective to one of the authors of the Chronicles and it's a sort of, I think, I hope playful nod to the way that the book is in dialogue with some older poems, as well as some very contemporary situations. So let's see, it will be out in February, I think I said that it's, um, you can order it online. If you cute Google my name, it's the catalog just came up, I sent you the link to it, it was I was like, okay, the catalog is out. So it can be ordered there. And hopefully, it's, you know, I hope that it will bring joy to people, it's a book that is, you know, it's the poems were interesting for me to write because they were my ways of thinking through and kind of feeling my way through a lot of complex situations from things like, you know, the death of my mother, to, you know, being in, you know, some interesting intercultural experiences, living abroad, linguistic experiences, experiences as a woman, right, as a middle aged woman, what are some of the things that when deals with? So, you know, it's, it's, I would say, it's pretty rangy, and it's subject matter. But I hope that it will be an appealing book to anyone who is interested in the way that poetry might help one think and feel.
Melissa Milner 37:08
Yeah. And along with that, well, I'd like to know how long it took you to write it, but also longer that you have other poetry books, and you've won awards and stuff, right?
Penelope Pelizzon 37:17
Yes, I have
Melissa Milner 37:19
Come on, toot your own horn.
Penelope Pelizzon 37:20
Yes. So there are some there's some awards out there. You can Google them there too.
Melissa Milner 37:24
But the oh, by the way, when you say Google, are they doing Penelope Pelizzon?
Penelope Pelizzon 37:29
V. Penelope. Yeah, so I do use a do your first initial initial when I when I publish. So if you Google Penelope Pelizzon, I think everything will come up. Okay. But in published with my first initial just so that my poor parents rolling over in their grave, they gave me this nice thing that they don't actually use. So that's just my nod to them. But um, yeah, so it's, I mean, like, I wish that I produced books faster. But each book has taken me about 10 years. So you know, like other things have come out in the meantime. So this is my fourth book, I have a book that I co authored, actually with a with a beloved friend and former professor, that's a scholarly study of crime films and crime narratives and newspapers. And that was sort of a side project I worked on for a number of years. But this book, so the first poem in this book started in 2013. And I worked on that poem for about eight years before it's published. And that, you know, it's like a long poem. So it's, you know, something that I worked on, I kind of kept hitting the wall and was like, not sure where it was going. It's narrative poem, it's got a lot of covers, you know, multiple continents and multiple timeframes. I wasn't sure, I kept sort of like hitting a point where I wasn't smart enough to figure out what happens next, right? Kind of like your student talking about, like, what happens, how do I go? Where do I daydream this thing next.
Penelope Pelizzon 38:47
So you know, my work process is pretty much like, if I hit a wall, I put it away. And I usually have several other things going on, I can go to work on some shorter things. And then it might be, you know, like, four months will pass or six months or whatever. And I will be like, Okay, I've got this thing, it is still of interest to me, I feel like it is important, I need to really go back and, and try to excavate it again. And then I should have worked back into it. And at that point, often what will happen as I can see what the problems were that were folding it up, you know, and usually I can get it to the next stage. But it also means that I have like I throw a lot away like have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages, I'll never see the light of day because they were just like the the kind of the, you know, the wings of the maze that were not the right. They were not the right thing. And I'm really a writer that I just I have to write a lot before I can figure out what something is actually about and that's a lot of my process really is like it's actually throwing throwing away at cutting away and like this is really what the heart of this is, but I had to write all this other show. Yeah. Is that familiar to you? Yeah,
Melissa Milner 39:47
yeah, I I tried screenwriting I've done stories. And yeah, I just that makes so much sense to me. Just like I just like, it's like, I just vomit the story. Yeah. And then I go back, I'm like, this stinks. This stinks. I need to add to this, I need to add to this. Oh, I should have put this up here. You know all that. Yeah. Yeah.
Penelope Pelizzon 40:10
And so much of it, I think is like figuring out right, like, what's the architecture for this and figuring out what's really central to this? And what is what is sort of peripheral, this may actually be another poem, this may be something else Exactly. Like it actually doesn't really belong here. So that's, you know, it, but it takes a long time to like, learn how to cut things. Yeah. Feels like. And I also feel like she one of the things that is, you know, it's hard is like, I mean, the process of poetry is a little bit different maybe than other genres. I mean, typically, what happens is, you write a poem, and you typically publish the poems individually in journals, right? There's a lot of literary journals where work comes out. So kind of what you really want to do before you publish a book, is you'd like to have all the individual columns out in good journals, so that people have been reading your work. So it's like they're out there in the world. And then what you're doing is you're, you know, you're putting them all together. Okay. And depending on the genre, you know, like, it might be that you're working on long poems that are hard to get published individually, for example, right? But a lot of what's going on as you're like, Okay, this is ready for primetime. So I'm sending it out to a journal, and it's going to appear and it will have a sort of life and that journal, and then when the time comes, it's all gonna go together into this book. And so then you're kind of figuring out how did these things really fit together?
Melissa Milner 41:18
Wow.
Penelope Pelizzon 41:18
So you know, it's a bit of a different process, I think, than many people anticipate, like, like novels, to me seem like they're faster, because it's like, you write a novel, you send it to your agent, maybe they send it back, you go back and forth a little bit, and then then that's, you know, then write up your agent for the publisher. For poets, I think it's pretty different.
Melissa Milner 41:37
Yeah. And then, do you feel like all those poems have to be connected by some kind of theme of those poems, like the poems that are gonna go together? Like how, yeah.
Penelope Pelizzon 41:47
So they, so be will be whether or not you know it, but part of it is like figuring out what the theme is, but you know, that there will be poems. Sometimes you'll feel like this poem, I like this poem, I published it, it was published in this period of time, it really just doesn't fit in this book. So there might be things, like, it's just not going to go in this collection, maybe it will go in the next book. So it just it has a kind of a life in a journal. So this like when when you see sometimes like a poet's uncollected work. So a lot of times, that's what those are things that were like, we had a published life, but they haven't been collected into a single volume.
Penelope Pelizzon 42:16
I think different people work really differently, right? Like, there's some people who have what you might call a project books, and they're like, I'm gonna write an entire book of poems about Amelia Earhart, or whatever, or I'm gonna read an entire book of poems about this disaster. And so then I think, like, there is a sense of like, I have this kind of pre considered conceptualized narrative frame that I'm going to be writing poems about. That is not how I work, I really am kind of responding to, like daily life, over a span of time and like the crazy absolutely nuts world that we live in. And so it's, it's not clear to me often as I'm working, how these things will fit together, but I trust that because they are all coming from my brain. They will there will be some strands that are linking them. I may have to
Melissa Milner 43:01
That makes sense. Yeah. So yeah. Now I think, you know, picking a topic, like a topic and then having to stay with that topic is pretty limiting.
Penelope Pelizzon 43:10
Yeah. I mean, there are people who could you there are people who do great work with it. They're like, they're just, you know, they're amazing poets where you feel like every one of their books is really unified by a theme like you know, the, the Nobel Prize winning poet Louise Glick, who just died this week, very sadly, at age 80. You know, each of her books feels like it really has this kind of heartbeat right here. Like this is the mood of this book. And everything here feels like it's very much generated around the same kind of like hot center, cool center. But it's just it's a different Yes, it's a different way of working.
Melissa Milner 43:40
So how how can people reach you if they want to talk to you or know more about your work?
Penelope Pelizzon 43:47
So I have if you I have a web page and if you go to my web page, it actually has my personal email on it. So I'm happy to happy to hear from people again, books can be ordered on all the all the usual spots, although we'd like to say like, if you can avoid ordering from Amazon, you can like go to the press directly. And an order from them or, or even better buy it from your favorite local bookstore. But it's pretty easy to find online. So
Melissa Milner 44:11
Yeah, and your website is?
Penelope Pelizzon 44:13
What is my website? I think it's just my name. It's www without the V actually www.penelope.pelizzon But if you if you just Google me, it will, you know, you'll get the links will come up. So it'll be excellent, you know, so it's easy to find. I see that there's also there's like a Wikipedia page that has some errors on it. So somebody made a Wikipedia page, but it's not entirely correct.
Melissa Milner 44:34
Well, that means you've arrived, Penelope.
Penelope Pelizzon 44:36
Yes. So I feel like actually that made me that like chat GPT wrote this lecture. I don't I don't know that that's arriving anywhere. I don't know that I want to arrive where...
Melissa Milner 44:47
That's awesome. I did see one review of your book that okay, raving about you.
Penelope Pelizzon 44:52
So okay, good. Okay, that's what we want.
Melissa Milner 44:54
Amazing. All right. So thank you so much. I don't know. I mean, this was linked to teaching But it was really more like, I love to talk about any kind of writing.
Penelope Pelizzon 45:04
It's so great. It's just lovely to see you. I'm wish I wish that we were like sitting in the same room but like one of these days.
Melissa Milner 45:10
So you're in Connecticut. I'm in math. So...
Penelope Pelizzon 45:12
yeah, it shouldn't be too hard.
Melissa Milner 45:14
It shouldn't be too hard. We'll meet in Rhode Island.
Penelope Pelizzon 45:18
All right.
Melissa Milner 45:18
Thank you, so much.
Penelope Pelizzon 45:19
Thank you, Melissa. Take care.
Melissa Milner 45:21
You too. For my blog, transcripts of this episode, and links to any resources mentioned, visit my website at www.the teacheras.com. You can reach me on Twitter and Instagram @melissabmilner and I hope you check out The Teacher As... Facebook page for episode updates. Thanks for listening. And that's a wrap.