Poetry Reading: Talvikki Ansel

Award winning poet, Talvikki Ansel, held a poetry reading at the University of Rhode Island on Tuesday night, where she discussed her poems and answered questions.  

URI’s English Department hosted the hearing, which consisted of a reading of her most recent collection of poems, “Somewhere in Space.” It is the winner of the Ohio State University Press/The Journal award in poetry. Attendees at the reading included creative writing and English professor, Peter Covino, along with his poetry class. Afterward, in a Q&A, Ansel answered a few questions from the audience.    

Ansel is currently a professor at URI, but is also the author of poetry books, “My Shining Archipelago” (1997) and “Jetty and Other Poems” (2003).

Talvikki read poems such as “Leap years,” “Mycorrhizae,” “How It Sounds,” “Forest,” “If the Vulture Chooses You,” “Somewhere in Space” and “Apples.” For the poem, “Somewhere in Space”, in which she named her book after, Ansel wrote it in ten different sections. Ansel said that there is something about the section poems that she is very drawn to.

“I think it’s something about not relying on one continuous narrative with the connective tissue,” Ansel said. “I am able to approach something from different angles and make leaps across the ‘white space.’”    

There were also some references to Edith Södergran, a Swedish speaking Finnish poet, and references to WWII; for the children who were in Finland and sent to Sweden during the war.    

During the Q&A session, Ansel discussed that she organizes her poems by cutting and rearranging the stanzas on the page. At first she hand writes her poems, and later on, types it on a manual typewriter.

“I can feel the lines if I’m typing it out,” Ansel said. “I can feel the words.”

When she’s writing a book or assembling a manuscript, Ansel stated that she prints them out. “I see how my eyes travels from one poem to the next,” Ansel added.  

As for language within her poems, Ansel has lines such as “…wrap the taproot, the calm anchor, reach horizontal through duff and toad dung…” (Ansel, Mycorrhizae), and acknowledges nature in her work.

She uses nature in her poems in a very obscure way. During the Q&A, Covino recognized and honored Ansel for her dubious language throughout her collection of poems.

“I do not know what is happening most of the time with so much movement, and yet there is this desire to find out,” Covino said.

Ansel mentioned that she really enjoys poetry by Mary Ruefle, and ironically, she does not know or understand how Ruefle goes from one line to the other. Ansel alludes to reading, and says that reading helps create and understand obscure writing as it advances.

The English department holds many poetry readings, and they only fill up more and more each time. They hope to reach out to young minds in order to expand and improve their judgements on poetry. Covino mentions that there is a poetry contest this month.

It includes The Nancy Potter Short Story Contest, The Nancy Potter Poetry Contest, The Creative Nonfiction Contest, and The Critical Essay Contest. Prizes vary up to $100 for each of these four contests. Submissions are due by March 19th at 3 p.m. to the English department as PDF files to [email protected].