Wisconsin poet laureate Karla Huston brings playful spirit to Memory Café events
As a former Neenah High School English teacher, Karla Huston knows something about how to work a room: Get people playing. She brings that approach to a project she has chosen during her tenure as Wisconsin poet laureate: using poetry with elderly people and people with memory impairment as part of the Memory Café movement.
Memory Cafés are social gatherings for people with memory loss and their loved ones. In a recent phone interview, Huston described her approach to Memory Café visits.
She shares a poem that’s strongly rhymed and metered, often a familiar one from childhood, such as Longfellow’s “The Arrow and the Song” (”I shot an arrow into the air”).
She invites responses, verbal and otherwise (including, sometimes, people physically acting out movements from a poem). In some situations she’s facilitated a group creating a poem together in the room, each person contributing a line.
Huston brings a similar spirit of play to her own writing. “Theory of Lipstick,” which won a Pushcast Prize in 2012 as one of the year’s best small-press poems, dazzles the reader with its color vocabulary and wordplay: “a vermillion bullet,” “carmine death rub,” “alizarin crimson.”
Her poems often address, question and critique the roles women play, or have been assigned to play. In “The Plastic Surgeon’s Wife,” she imagines how the title character thinks her husband sees her: “When they make love, she fears / how he’d like to improve her – / a little lift here, a little tighter there .... ”
Her recent chapbook “Grief Bone” (Five Oaks Press) includes two poems about domestic disturbances that would make many newspaper editors salivate. In “Woman Beats Husband,” the longsuffering spouse “grabbed the mug / instead of the rolling pin / or the cast iron skillet, / the one in which she cooked / the awful animals he brought home .... ” Turnabout being fair play, “Man Kills Wife With Two Banjos” switches roles and adds a “Far Side” touch.
Reverently, her poem “Great” invokes love and appreciation for a person who has died as that person’s body is being cremated, the hair, the eyebrows, the legs and finally the heart remembered and celebrated as emblems of the person’s living distinctiveness. “You burned. / How I miss the way you burned,” she concludes.
Huston will serve as the state’s poet laureate through 2018. The Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters took over stewardship of the poet laureate position in 2011 after the state cut its support for the program, citing budget reasons. The laureate receives a $2,000 annual stipend and arranges or attends at literary events around the state.
Her predecessor as laureate was Kimberly Blaeser, a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. During her laureateship, Blaesers-pear-headed a poetry recitation project around the state, which has resulted in an online map and video archive of Wisconsinites reciting poems. Browse the collection at