Poetry for Public Health with Tyler Meier
About This Episode
Tyler Meier is the director of the University of Arizona Poetry Center and the co-editor of Dear Vaccine: A Global Vaccine Poem, a project that invited anyone to share experiences of the pandemic and vaccination through poetry.
What business poetry, you might ask? Because poetry, as Tyler says it, is marching away at the atomic level of our communication.
“Our lives are shaped by the language around us and the language that we choose to use. As beings based in language, poetry, I think, is the opportunity to teach us each day new ways of thinking about the language that we use to describe the things that matter greatly to us, the challenges that vex us enormously. We know that the future is one that we're going to share, regardless of what connects us or keeps us separate from each other. And we know that language is something that forms us and that gives us the sort of power to think in new ways about the challenges that we share.”
Dear Vaccine is an outgrowth of the Global Vaccine Project launched in March 2021 by the University of Arizona and Kent State University. In sum, it features selections from over 2,000 poetry submissions from all fifty states and more than 150 countries. And while the project features incredible global voices speaking to the pandemic, it serves the dual purpose of uniting us, filling in the holes that form through the haze of memory, a reminder that pandemic history is our history, and that if we can come through that, then we can come through anything together.
Our great thanks to Tyler Meier for joining us on the show this week. Pick up your own copy of the book and learn more about the project at GlobalVaccinePoem.com.
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Carrie Fox:
Hi there and welcome to the Mission Forward Podcast, where each week we bring you a thought-provoking and perspective shifting conversation on the power of communication. I'm Carrie Fox, your host and CEO of Mission Partners, a social impact communications firm and certified B Corporation. As you know, on this show, we talk about the role of communication and social change, and today's guest has seen that effect up close. Tyler Meier, in addition to being one of my favorite people on the planet, is director of the University of Arizona Poetry Center and the co-editor of Dear Vaccine, which is an outgrowth of the Global Vaccine Project, which University of Arizona and Kent State University launched in March 2021.
The project invited anyone to share experiences of the pandemic and vaccination through poetry. Dear Vaccine features selections from over 2000 poetry submissions from all 50 states and more than 150 countries. I've got my copy dogeared here and I'm going to share a little bit with you. My hope is that Tyler might also read a few of his favorite poems. But Tyler, as we get ready to start in on this conversation, welcome. Thank you so much for being here.
Tyler Meier:
I'm thrilled Carrie and thanks so much for having me join. This is a great gift and I'm looking forward to chatting with you.
Carrie Fox:
So as you know, better than most of us, stories and poetry specifically are one of the best ways for us to understand each other, right, to understand the world around us. And here we ar, season seven of Mission Forward, and we are really digging deep into our personal role and some cases also our responsibility as storytellers, right? Folks who are not just advancing a narrative but expanding and challenging that narrative, helping ourselves and those around us better understand the world that we're in. And we have not yet talked about the role that poetry plays in helping us understand the world around us. And so I'm really looking forward to better understanding the project and the role that this book, Dear Vaccine, helped to play in helping us understand the shared moment in history. So let's talk about you first. Let's talk about how you got into this work, how you got into poetry, how you see the power of poetry in your world and in your life. And then we'll start talking about the book.
Tyler Meier:
That sounds great, and I'm thrilled for that approach too because it might help for people to know a little bit about where I come from. There's an essay from the poet W.H. Auden that I love, where he thinks about critics and what he wishes that critics would say to their audiences before giving a critique of a book. And he says, I want to know what they believe in and what they care about, so I can see where they're coming from and have that sense of that approach to know how they might respond to the work that they're considering. So he sets up his kind of ideal world and says, this is where I'm coming from, so you know how to understand me when I'm going to tell you about the things that I care about with poems.
So here's some information about Tyler. So I am the executive director of the Poetry Center here at the University of Arizona. We're in Tucson, Arizona, so this is one of the largest poetry centers in the United States, and it houses a collection of about 80,000 items at the Poetry Center. So one of the biggest standalone collections of poetry in the country. The Library of Congress exists and it's very big, but what we have here in Tucson is really unique and special and we prize it. And there's a community here that really loves and supports it. I came to this work as a reader, essentially. As someone deeply invested and who cared about reading. I studied English when I was in college and was an English major. And coming out of that experience, deep investment in caring about language and about storytelling, I opted to do a couple of years of volunteering when I exited. I had a lot of student loans that I was carrying with me when I finished, and I was really good at reading books, but I wasn't sure what I was going to do in the world.
And so I spent two years building houses with AmeriCorps, and one year was in Portland, Oregon and one year was in Philadelphia. And those were really formative experiences for me, like a second education. And reading was an affordable hobby and I didn't have a lot of money. And out of that interest in reading, I started to try to do some of my own writing and ended up back in graduate school for writing and then staying connected in different ways to writing communities that propelled me forward into this opportunity here in Tucson to work as the director of the poetry center.
And we think of the work here as an ongoing experiment and project and what does it mean to be a poetry center and to serve a community broadly that's rooted in Tucson and in this sort of Southwest Arizona and the United States geography. But then also broadly thinking about our role as an actor in the national conversation about, and international conversation about how poetry, as an art form, does its work and what its possibilities are, how to activate its capacious. And so all of that factors into what we think about each day and how we bring the work forward. Dear Vaccine is an outgrowth of some of that thinking.
Carrie Fox:
So what I know about you personally and that story reinforces, but also what I have seen very true about the University of Arizona is that you are grounded in the humanities, that you see the humanities as a way to bridge divides in this wild world that we live in. Talk to me a little bit more about how you all as a university and even as a poetry center are thinking about the importance of grounding all work in the humanities.
Tyler Meier:
And this is one thing I love about poetry broadly. When we think about what we're collecting here, it's one thing is to say it's a lot of books that are on shelves. That's true, just books, but that is a large part of the collection. But I like to say that we're collecting a record of our very best uses of language. And that archive that exists here is perhaps the best that we know that exists, that matters greatly. We are human beings based in language, and we believe that, and fundamentally here at the poetry center, I think broadly at the university, and I think I would argue that this is a truism that we all experience. Our lives are shaped by the language around us and the language that we use and we choose to use. As being based on language, poetry, I think has the opportunity to teach us each day and in new ways of thinking about the language that we use to describe the things that matter greatly to us and the challenges that vex us enormously.
And if we can find new language for the things that we care about or the problems that are difficult to solve, I think we have new opportunities for how we orient to those things that we love and those challenges that we harbor. We know that the future is one that we're going to share regardless of what connects us or keeps us separate from each other. And we know that language is something that forms us. And I think this is the kind of future that we're excited about at the poetry center, one that gives us the sort of power to think in new ways about the challenges that we share.
Carrie Fox:
It's a powerful living art form, right? I mean, it is so present that to your words, helping us understand the world we're in, in this moment and coming up with the words to help us understand that.
Tyler Meier:
That's right. Yeah. There's a Polish poet that I love named Czeslaw Milosz, and he has a line that's, "language is the only homeland." That's what he says. And so for him, this means something very specific. 19th century Poland, Europe moved back and forth across Poland's borders many times in many directions. His sense of where he was from immigrating to the United States that his country existed and didn't exist and existed again in new ways. So as a working poet, language was the thing that he thought of is where he was from or who he was. But I would argue that language is also the thing that where we are all from, the language that we use to think about our challenges and then our opportunities largely defines our relationship to those challenges and opportunities. And this of course spills out into storytelling, how we imagine and how we do the work of conveying meaning.
So it is a very present art form, one that we love. We do have to often sometimes undo people's bad experiences of poetry in high school and take a moment we realize that people bring different things to the idea to say what is poetry or how does poetry work? It's one of the ways we had to think about how the Dear Vaccine Project worked. But we find that when people really sit down and explore what poetry is, that they are already experts and have the tools that they need to explore the art form. And it's partly because we use language every day and we know how language operates. And so we have the tools and that makes poetry pretty accessible and we're try to activate that.
Carrie Fox:
I want to make a connection for you, but also to those who are listening that the first episode of this season, we talked with Brandon Nightingale, who's an historian who's at Howard University, and his charge is to document the history of the Black press. And he is going through an enormous amount of archived information that has not actually been digitized yet. So think first editions of Black newspapers and digitizing them so that history exists again. That it is there and it can be found and it can be learned from.
And as I think about you sitting in the poetry center, there's so much about the history of our writing and of language that one, we need access to it to be able to learn from it. If we don't have access to it, we can't learn. There's gaps. What Dear Vaccine seems to do is start to fill in some of the holes that help us understand the present day, that this time that we are in, the history we are living right now. And I'm curious if you can bring us back to the inception of this idea and tell us that story.
Tyler Meier:
Yeah, yeah. I appreciate so much that archival project you just mentioned, and we think about this a lot, that poetry as an art form has the ability to have a timelessness and also very much timeliness. That it can be outside of time, but also very much within time. And so that maybe is a good segue into Dear Vaccine, which we might imagine as a kind of documentary project. And it came about in January of 2021, there was a phone call in Arizona among arts leaders that was convened by our state arts agency. And at that point we had been six or seven months into the pandemic, its bleakest beginnings, if we can think back to that. It was a challenging time. The beginnings of the vaccines' presence were starting to... News reports were coming out, and there was this sense that there would be a kind of national public rollout for vaccination for everyone.
And the call was really about can arts leaders and the arts community play a role and can we leverage arts as a site of cultural trust? And so thinking about experiences with art, when we go to libraries and we go to museums that often those are experiences we trust. We have a contract even of what an audience expects from those experiences and a kind of historical narrative or a cultural narrative. And so could we leverage these things and how could we do that with some authenticity in ways that were meaningful? How do we use our lobbies? That was one of the big questions. How do lobbies become a site that could be a site for something positive to come out of this? We exited that phone call and I started thinking about our collaborators at Kent State and their work with expressive writing and digital tools and knowing that they had created websites in the past that had been a sort of invitation for a lot of public engagement around different themes and different topics.
And so I called my friend David, who's the director there, and said, "David, what would it look like to create something that would support or connect with this opportunity to be vaccinated with poetry?" And so he immediately thought this is a good idea. And had been in conversation with the poet Naomi Shihab Nye, who's our third leader of this project, and Naomi, a wonderful poet, a sort of international presence for poetry, wonderful writer. And Naomi was immediately on board and loves poetry's ability to connect people and to do good in the world. And so she wrote a model poem for the project, and we launched a website that was based on her model poem that included four different writing prompts to encourage people to participate. And originally we thought that the project would be something that could be shared in the 15-minute window after someone had chosen to be vaccinated when we would be observed to make sure no one had a reaction.
So if we can remember those times, I know my experience at that time, I was in a room with a bunch of people and we were sitting in chairs 10 feet apart from each other, waiting and hoping nothing bad was going to happen. But also feeling a lot of other emotions, the not knowing of what the future was going to look like. Some sense that maybe there was a kind of future we could start to understand a little bit because this vaccine might make that more possible. So that's how we thought it would start. That's not exactly how the project wen. If we fast-forward to right before it became a book, what we learned was that people participated in that moment after vaccination, and we launched that as a concerted effort at a mass vaccination site at the University of Arizona campus, one at Kent State also, and then one with a rural and mobile provider in Texas that was working, especially with underserved communities.
So they had a mobile vaccination clinic that they would take into communities to support people making the choice to get shots. But the project spread on its own. So David calls this the positive contagion of the project, and people started to participate outside of that 15 minute window. It was a web-based project so they could participate whenever they wanted to. People started participating in places far away from Tucson or Northeast Ohio or Texas. And it started to spread in different ways around the country and around the world. And we had some great news that helped, I think, the project move in different ways. And it really became a way to document not so much the vaccine at all, but really about the human experiences around living through what we all had lived through, and then all of the emotional landscape that went with those experiences.
Carrie Fox:
I love that so much. And you know what? That's a great reminder. Best laid plans. You might have a great plan in front of you that sometimes, however, the best impact comes from the unexpected places.
Tyler Meier:
That's right.
Carrie Fox:
Will you read us one of your favorites?
Tyler Meier:
Yeah. So when the project started to grow and we had so many responses on the website, we realized, oh, there would be a really wonderful anthology that could come out of this project. And so Naomi and David and I huddled up, we had launched in January, by April and then into the summer we were thinking, what could an anthology look like? And so we partnered up with Kent State University Press, which was able to accommodate a very fast publishing timeline and produced a book of about 130 of some of our favorite responses. And the book is organized around six thematic threads that started to emerge in the project when we looked at all of the responses and read all of them. And one of these was lessons that we had learned, lessons that we had thought of. There was so much that expressed gratitude. So people who were overwhelmingly grateful to healthcare providers, to clinics, to human perseverance in general, to things that had gotten them through.
There were a lot of sections about grief, poems about deep loss, profound losses, and managing those experiences. There were poems about where people had been vaccinated. And so one section is about just clinics or places, and then two other sections in the book. One about nostalgia, what people had missed and what they longed for. And then a section about people envisioning a future that might come from this.
So here's one poem, and this is from the lessons section that I love. And so this is also, you can imagine all the other social turmoil in this moment, experiences of police brutality, there's so much happening. And so this poem comes from Minnesota and from a writer named Denise Alden, and it is, Dear Vaccine, you're great and all, but will you also cure us of our debilitating ability to fracture all into people like us? So this way in which the pandemic became a shared moment that we all went through, and using what we learned through that as a way to imagine not to divide ourselves into small groups, but to think about the things that connected us as being more powerful. So it's one of my favorites. Yeah. Can I share one more?
Carrie Fox:
Yes.
Tyler Meier:
Yes. Let's see if I can find this? I have a very dog-eared copy of this book. This one's very short, and it comes from the section about nostalgia, and I love it for its brevity, but also for what it also expresses in its care for other people and comes from Michigan and from the prompt about, I liked. So it goes, and again, from the nostalgia section, I liked being able to see the food stuck in between people's teeth. I was reassured they had at least something to eat. So many of the poems were about only seeing parts of people's faces. And this one I love because the playfulness of it, someone's got some food in their teeth, but also how do we care for each other? What does it look like to care for each other? If I see food in your teeth, I know you've eaten well, and that makes me happy. And so that's another example of a poem that I love.
Carrie Fox:
The power of just what a few words can say, how much is said and how visual that experience is, now that it just brings you back to being able to relate to that universal language, I guess.
Tyler Meier:
Yeah.
Carrie Fox:
Are you familiar with, I think it's Ernest Hemingway that started this, the six word memoir?
Tyler Meier:
Yes. Yes.
Carrie Fox:
Which I just love this concept that you need to determine six words that tell your life story, which is quite a challenge if one tries to do it, and there's a million different ways that you can take it. But I kept thinking, as I was reading this book, of that project because so much can be said in so few words, and I'll share one of my favorites. Now, I am no spoken word poet the way you are, but I will share it because it's more than six words, but to me, I think this is also nostalgia. Though I'm not sure what section this is from. It made me feel nostalgic. This one is from Singapore. It's the times we spent together, the times we hugged each other, the times we could breathe freely, the times we could stand closely. Those were what we took for granted. Now, those were the things we wanted. This is a reminder for everyone. Let your happiness yet come.
Tyler Meier:
It's an incredible poem. That poem is by Tien Xi Ning, is that right?
Carrie Fox:
Oh gosh, yeah.
Tyler Meier:
Who's a high school student in Singapore, and who had a Zoom visit-
Carrie Fox:
Oh, my gosh.
Tyler Meier:
... With Naomi and the whole class wrote responses, and that was one that we were so thrilled to include in the anthology. To think of young people's experiences of being alone or being separate, learning online, all of those challenges. And to think of that response, let your happiness yet come. What a beautiful sentiment. That's one of the things I think that the book powerfully does too. It shows us ways in which our experiences overlapped despite great distances, great ages, different cultural upbringings. All of those separations that there were these overlapping experiences where we might see what we lived through and someone else's experience and know that we were connected. And I'm grateful for the way that the project calls that forward in ways that are powerful for me, and I hope for readers too.
Carrie Fox:
I'm going to tell you a quick story about this book. So as mentioned, you could see it, I've got these little pages that are dog eared, and those are my favorites. Here in our house. My husband and I have two young girls, and they were in first grade and fourth grade during the pandemic when it was at the height of the pandemic. And we agreed that when the pandemic, when we were beyond it, we would have a time capsule and we would throw those masks in the time capsule and anything else that we wanted to forget about, but yet still keep. And we would just put it away. And someday maybe we would look at it.
And I thought, maybe this will go in the time capsule, but I couldn't bring myself to do it, Tyler, because I found that I needed to keep it around. There are certain things that I didn't want to have too far away, and this is one of them. I think this is just a really powerful reminder of that moment in time. But to your point, the power of connection and people and shared experience that I just think is captured so beautifully in this project.
Tyler Meier:
Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. The one thing, if I could change anything now, Dear Vaccine is important as a title, and it was a kind of originating force of the book, but the book isn't so much about saying vaccination is great, or it's not really about trying to invite anyone to choose something that they don't want to choose. It's about what connects us through the experience that we've shared. And so that's one thing that I would say is wanting people who might be thinking, "Oh, I'm interested. I want to learn more about what that book's about." But that's really at the heart of where the project has ended up. And so new iterations that have come, there've been a theatrical adaptation of this book where some of the poems have been presented in a theater like setting where it's half hybrid of theater and reading. That's traveled to some schools in Ohio already. We had a presentation and a premiere at the National Academy of Sciences in DC.
And so what we're learning now is that there's a lot to process still, that our world has rapidly moved, in some ways, back to some versions of what it was before. And there's a kind of cultural trauma, I would name it, that we maybe haven't fully acknowledged. And this book now feels like a tool for acknowledging some of that and making sure that we don't just forget that we've all had a very difficult two years, three years together.
Carrie Fox:
So this feels like a really important takeaway for anyone listening that for those who are listening, who are thinking about how to communicate and engage and connect with their audiences, whoever those audiences are, right? I think many times the conversation goes to what platform should we be on? Should we be on Instagram to connect with the people? Should we be on TikTok? There's a lot of conversation around what platforms do we need to be, to be connected to the people that matter in our work. But there's another side of that conversation, which is what tools are you using? What language tools, what communications tools, what forms of communication? And the power of poetry in being able to engage a community, this does not need to happen on the social media platform, but how powerful that is. And it reminds me of, there's a program, I don't know if it is still in existence, but it was at Drexel University called Witnesses to Hunger.
And it was a photography project where individuals who were experiencing homelessness had access to a camera and they would document 24 hours of their day and however they chose to document it. And then those photos were developed and put into a gallery. And many times that gallery would find itself in the halls of Capitol Hill of Congress for those policy makers and decision makers and elected leaders to understand, from a first person perspective, what poverty feels like, what homelessness feels like. And so I would say, let's not forget how important it is to not just think about what platforms we're on, but the tools we use to share stories.
Tyler Meier:
That's great. I love this. And I would just add, when we say the word poetry, sometimes this also evokes for a lot of people the situations when we hear it. So for in common experience, we hear poems at moments of great importance. We hear poems at weddings, we hear them at funerals, we hear them at inaugurations, we hear them at graduations. And so there is a way of ennobling, of saying something matters when you use poetry to express it. That's part of how the culture has come to understand where poetry shows up. And it doesn't exclusively need to be in those spaces. I like poetry in other places too, but I think when you think about tools or what does it mean to use poetry as a tool for communication, you can bring all of that into the room when you imagine poetry as one of your mediums.
Carrie Fox:
Suddenly we're at time. I don't know where it went, but it went fast. Tyler, how can people who are listening learn more? How can they get the book, how they can get engaged, or is there anything else? I know there are so many projects at the poetry center right now that you want to leave people with.
Tyler Meier:
Yeah. So book is available at all your favorite places to buy books. So wherever you like to find books, you can find it. It's called Dear Vaccine, Global Voices, speak to the Pandemic. And then I would love if people were interested in learning more about the Poetry Center. And you can find a lot on our website, poetry.arizona.edu. There's a lot to get online. A lot of our in-person experiences are also virtual. Come visit us there and learn about the work that we do. And thanks so much for listening today.
Carrie Fox:
Tyler, you are a gift and your work is a gift. Thank you so much for being with us.
Tyler Meier:
Back at you, Carrie. Thank you.
Carrie Fox:
And that brings us to the end of this episode of Mission Forward. Thanks for tuning in today. If you are stewing on what we discussed here today, or if you heard something that's going to stick with you, drop me a line at carrie@mission.partners and let me know what's got you thinking. And if you have thoughts for where we should go in future shows, I would love to hear that too. Mission Forward is produced with the support of Sadie Lockhart in association with the True Story Team, Engineering by Pete Wright. If your podcast app allows for ratings and reviews, I hope you'll consider doing just that for this show. But the best thing you can do to support Mission Forward is simply to share the show with a friend or colleague. Thanks for your support, and we'll see you next time.
