Participation Type
Performance
Session Title
Session 5.18 Literature
Presentation #1 Title
Pauletta Hansel Poetry Reading
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
Poet Pauletta Hansel reads from her newest collection of poems, Tangle, just out from Wind Publications. Tangle is a rich and resonant exploration of interwoven connections: family, marriage, community, writing and place, and of the tangled relationships among the living and their dead. Many of the poems are set in eastern Kentucky where Hansel and her family were born and raised. The voices of ancestors inhabit her poems, mingling with her own poetic observations and memories. Whether writing of her father who taught her to hear the stretched out Appalachian “i” so she’d “always know the way //to find [her] tribe” or of her own relationship with her poems (“like/our houses. They want more of/us than we had planned to give/them…”), Hansel’s poems, in the words of past Weatherford Recipient Richard Hague “remain steadfast in their connection to the fundamental, represented…by those with whom, and inevitably without whom, we practice our most meaningful lives.”
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Pauletta Hansel has five books of poetry, including the Weatherford nominated collection The Lives We Live in Houses and Tangle from Wind Publications. Her writing has been featured in Appalachian Journal, Atlanta Review, Now & Then, Appalachian Heritage, Still: The Journal and Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia. Work is forthcoming Appalachian Literature: An Anthology from University of Kentucky Press. She edits Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, the literary publication of Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative.
Pauletta Hansel Poetry Reading
Poet Pauletta Hansel reads from her newest collection of poems, Tangle, just out from Wind Publications. Tangle is a rich and resonant exploration of interwoven connections: family, marriage, community, writing and place, and of the tangled relationships among the living and their dead. Many of the poems are set in eastern Kentucky where Hansel and her family were born and raised. The voices of ancestors inhabit her poems, mingling with her own poetic observations and memories. Whether writing of her father who taught her to hear the stretched out Appalachian “i” so she’d “always know the way //to find [her] tribe” or of her own relationship with her poems (“like/our houses. They want more of/us than we had planned to give/them…”), Hansel’s poems, in the words of past Weatherford Recipient Richard Hague “remain steadfast in their connection to the fundamental, represented…by those with whom, and inevitably without whom, we practice our most meaningful lives.”
