Published poet and professor Jennifer Militello will be serving a five-year term as New Hampshire’s Poet Laureate starting this month.
Militello was nominated by N.H. Governor Chris Sununu and approved by the state’s executive council, according to the N.H. State Council on the Arts website. The position is described on the site as “an ambassador for all poets in N.H. and works to heighten the visibility and value of poetry in our state.” Militello succeeds the previous poet laureate, Alexandria Peary from Londonderry.
Living in Goffstown, Militello has a history of working in several higher education institutions. Specifically, she has worked at Brown University, University of Massachusetts Lowell, Rhode Island School of Design and currently at New England College. However, recently she has taken on the position of New Hampshire’s Poet Laureate. When asked to speak on what she is expecting from the position, Militello said she hopes it will be “really human.”
“I hope it’s going to be a celebratory reminder to people that poetry is really great and really alive and really present,” Militello said.
Additionally, she hopes that online elements are added to the position’s abilities.
“I feel like the more exposure poetry gets, the better it does,” Militello said. “And we’re kind of moving to that place where there’s so much more access to things online.”
Above all, Militello said she wants poetry to be more accessible to the common person.“I hope it’s just about people because I think people forget that poetry is about them,” Militello said. “And it’s for them. There’s no ivory tower, there’s just people hanging out and feeling a lot of feelings.”
This sentiment does not come from nowhere; Militello said she feels similarly when it comes to her impact on students. When teaching, she said she emphasizes a few specific points.“I think the first [point] is that writing is about you,” Militello said. “And so every time, though you are reaching out to an audience, the primary desire to write and the primary drive to write has to do with you as an individual.”
Secondly, she emphasizes that reading is a deeply important part of the writing process.“The second thing, I think, especially for students who are more advanced, is the fact that the more you read, and the more you embrace what other people are trying to do, the more you can push your own writing,” Militello said.
Through this perspective and through the gathering of writing from other people, she said she encourages her students to experiment and try new things in their writing.
Militello also said she hopes her students leave with a newfound or strengthened passion for writing and reading poetry.
When it came to her own experience with reading in her youth, Militello said that her family were not readers.“I was at a family gathering for some holiday or something in my grandparents’ apartment in Brooklyn, N.Y… and so I was really bored,” Militello said. “I went into the back room and they had two books there.”
Specifically, Militello found paperback copies of “Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson” and “Selected Poems of Edgar Allan Poe.” Militello describes her younger self as “a very emotional, intense kid who felt a little different.”
She added, “I felt like I was the only person who was having this experience. And then all of a sudden I opened up these books, specifically Emily Dickinson, and I was like, ‘This is the very interior that I experience every day.’ And so I was immediately hooked.”
Following that experience, Militello said she began writing her own poetry. “It felt like a really natural thing to do,” she said. “I was like, ‘I just want to do this for the rest of my life. I want to live alone in the woods and write some poems.’”
Regarding imagery and symbolism in her poetry, Militello said that each reader is going to bring something different to the table.“Not every poem or every poet is going to hit every person in the same way,” she said.
Even with each reader having a different interpretation of the same poem, Militello believes her readers should be OK with not being able to dissect its true meaning.“In school, we’re taught that we have to be able to analyze things,” Militello said. “But if it hits you, and you don’t know why, all the better,” she said. “You had that experience, you had that spark. That’s the whole point.”
Militello said she enjoys the complexity that comes from the creation of symbolism.
“I like difficulty. I like to be challenged,” Militello said. “If I wanted straightforward, nice things, I would watch a Disney movie, right? The goal is not to understand it in your traditional sense of understanding, your goal is to experience it and to take something away from that experience.”
Militello now lives in the woods with a few acres of land. Despite the detours made along her life, she has fulfilled her childhood dream.
“I could not be happier with the life I have ended up with,” Militello said.
Tabitha Sanders can be contacted at tsanders@kscequinox.com
Charlotte King can be contacted at cking@kscequinox.com
