The Pee Dee’s first poet laureate explains the importance of art in an uncertain era.
“I was always really taken with art, but I was never quite good at it,” Dr. Jo Angela Edwins explains with a laugh. “I tried different instruments, even played the piano for three years. Nothing stuck.”
It wasn’t until a young Edwins saw a poet on the PBS channel giving out writing advice that she considered poetry. The advice was to write one poem a day, everyday in order to develop poetry skill. “For a long time as a kid, I wrote really bad poetry everyday,” she says. “I do think that it made me really attuned to word the sounds of words and how words fit in a phrase.”
Today, Edwins is a professor of poetry for Francis Marion University’s English department. She usually teaches three to four classes a semester. This spring, she taught two classes on advanced poetry writing and American women authors. Her courses are reading and writing intensive, and COVID-19 really affected how she was able to foster a connection with her students.
“One of the things we do in creative writing is workshopping and feedback.” Edwins continues, “Getting feedback face-to-face is a whole lot different than getting [feedback] through notes on Blackboard.”
To remedy this, she started doing video calls through Zoom with some of her students to go over their work in a more in-depth fashion.
“That was really helpful for the students who [attended] those sessions, I think,” she recalls.
In addition to navigating the pandemic as an educator, Edwins also works on her craft. She explains that one of the main challenges of writing during the pandemic is the reliance on publishers. “I had noticed that it seems like it's taking publishers a lot longer to respond because of the pandemic,” she says.
Edwins also expresses her belief that the arts have gained prominence since the start of the pandemic. As the Pee Dee’s first Poet Laureate, she takes this idea with her when she considers methods to get readers to engage with literature and poetry.
Though this has been a difficult task because of the pandemic, she started a Facebook group, Poetry Across the Pee Dee, to connect readers and writers alike through virtual readings.
“[I’m] having to find alternative methods to let mostly depend on the internet to try to inspire people to consider poetry,” she says.
However, Edwins explains that the pandemic has provided a way for people to discover new interests in art, especially poetry. “If you don't think that the art should be funded ... think about what’s sustaining you right now,” she says. “All of these artists who are writers and directors and actors and singers and songwriters, who wouldn't have an opportunity to create that if their talent hadn't somehow been encouraged and nurtured at some level.”
Throughout our conversation, Edwins repeats the sentiment that art is truly all around us everyday, and art keeps track of our history. “We are living through something that hasn’t happened in anyone’s living memory,” Edwins says, siting that both the pandemic and the current “historical moment” that is bringing Black Lives Matter back into focus. “Both of these events really highlight how much humankind depends on art in general, and particularly poetry, to help us through moments of crisis.”
To help provide a sense of comfort and strength during this uncertain time, Edwins is working with a group of writers to compose Poetry in a time of crisis. “Sometimes with poetry, we can find ways to salve the wounds of the spirit at a time when the physical life feels out of balance,” the poet says.
Her poem, Outbreak, was included in the collection, and it provided an inspiring vision of the pandemic’s conclusion.
“In a world full of fear and profiteering hoarders,
look down at your hands, folded now, skin parched,
and know that they are powerful.”
-By Dana Nickel