Weekend_1029_ellen_kort_website_clip Weekend Poet Laureate Ellen Kort

- Dave Iverson: With much fanfare, we brought you the winner of our "Weekend" Poet Laureate Contest a few months ago. Our winning poet, Angie Hall of Evansville, is still on the ready to write wonderful poetry for our "Weekend" viewers as the need arises. But if you remember back to when we originally announced our own poet laureate contest, there was another search going on for a poet. A search for the official state poet laureate. Well, just before Christmas, Governor Thompson
named Ellen Kort of Appleton to that prestigious position. We're not saying Ms. Kort's got anything on our own "Weekend" poet laureate, but we thought we'd invite her to join us from our Green Bay Studios tonight and show us what she's got. Ms. Kort, welcome to "Weekend"!
- Thank you!
- A question about poetry: Is it getting the proper respect that it needs to get
in our schools these days?
- I believe that it is. I do a lot of school residencies and I think it really does. It's growing. It's growing through many venues through schools and poetry readings, coffee shops, poetry slams. I think poetry is alive and well.
- Dave Iverson: You do a lot of workshops. I was reading in your biography for at-risk teens, AIDS patients, people who have been abused in the past. That seems like a really diverse group to bring to a common thing like poetry.
- Well, it is except that I think poetry is one of the strongest places we can go when we need, when we need to express ourselves when we're going through something traumatic, when something has changed in our lives and we can find a way to put words on the paper to express what it is that we're going through this.
I know you brought some of your poetry with us. Please, the stage of the state is yours.

- Thank you. I chose a Wisconsin poem actually to read
and it's about the sandhill cranes that were migrated by an ultra light to Florida.

Crossing the borders, 
November 2000
The longest human lead bird migration ever attempted
Sandhill Cranes reigned the air
born away by instinct to follow the sun and moon
and Joe Duff, in his yellow-bellied ultra-light
A month-long journey,
1,250 miles from Wisconsin to central Florida
A pilot dressed in a crane suit
Sand-colored birds on close terms with humans
Breast-heavy birds relearning the sacrament of migration,
the insistent need to ride wind
the ravenous distance between dark and light
Maybe we're meant to join the long tongue of cranes
against the cold simplicity of sky,
the map of lakes and hills and Prairies
hidden inside our own ancient breast bone
The slow procession we've always known
of leaving and coming home

- Ms. Kort, how would you how would you judge the success of your tenure?
- In the next four years? Is that what you're asking?
- Mm-hmm. When you finish, what will it take for you to go, "This was a success?"
- Well, it will be a success when poetry reaches a far, far further boundary of Wisconsin and beyond the state. It will be a success if I'm able to bring a lot of other poets into this into these four years and if it goes out to places and to people who don't ordinarily write poetry and if poetry is even alive and well throughout the state, I'll be very happy.
- Ellen, thanks for joining us on "Weekend" tonight.