A conversation with Christine Stewart-Nuñez
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Beginning July 1, 2019, South Dakota will have a new Poet Laureate. South Dakota State University professor and lifelong poet Christine Stewart-Nuñez was chosen by Governor Kristi Noem at the recommendation of the State Poetry Society. She is the author of several poetry collections, including Postcard on Parchment (2008), Keeping Them Alive (2010), Untrussed (2016) and Bluewords Greening, which received the 2018 Whirling Prize from Etchings Press. She was named as 2018 Author of the Year by the South Dakota Council of Teachers of English and her work has appeared in Arts & Letters, North American Review, Prairie Schooner and Shenandoah. As Stewart-Nuñez begins her four-year term, she is already planning to compile an anthology of poems focused on South Dakota. She hopes to widen the conversation about poetry throughout the state during her tenure.
Arts Alive: Has poetry always been a part of your life?
Christine Stewart-Nuñez: My oldest poetry artifact is from
new sights. It takes me a while to become grounded in a place— but I think I’m settled in South Dakota. My last two books are set here, imagining the prairie as a historical place. The poems I’m working on right now are more South Dakota. My husband studies architecture around South Dakota and so towns around the state are popping up in my poetry—in both natural and urban landscapes.
What is on your agenda for your term as Poet Laureate?
It’s my goal to edit an anthology of poetry about South Dakota the third grade, filled with artwork and poems about bugs and written by South Dakotans. I hope to begin conversations in butterflies. Once I began writing, I never really stopped. Every classrooms about poetry, since it’s my job to focus on the time I tried to stop writing because poetry happening here. I think that I thought nobody would read it, begins with having students write I Wonder I started again—it’s an integral part of and read their own poems. who I am. For a time I was the editor of about perspective; we finish I never imagined that I’d be a Pasque Petals, the South Dakota less what’s farther away. Here’s poet laureate for a state or write State Poetry Society’s journal. One a petal, flower, bush, garden; books or get a PhD or teach people of the delights was publishing new there a horizon of trees, landscape about writing. I just put my hat in the poets. It’s great to shake the trees framed east and west. I wonder ring and do it. I got my first full-time and see what poets fall out. I’ll be teaching job by returning a phone call talking to people in communities and about distance—here Izhvesk, from a director of a school in Tarsus, they’ll admit to writing their own work. islands, Italy, India; there Jupiter and Mercury diminished Turkey. Three days later I interviewed, That’s the way we can bring poetry in the heavens. I wonder about and three weeks after that I was living out. As Poet Laureate, I’d like to in a foreign country. That experience generate more conversations about shifts. Here’s a cubed melon, bowl energized my poetry and led to my poetry all over the state and spotlight of cream, mint leaf, spoon, cloth first book, Postcard on Parchment. the original poetry of South Dakotans. napkin; there the slant of light that alters the color of the fruit’s
Does geography shape your poetry? My poems utilize place as a lens to focus my experiences. As poets we try not to use abstractions, but to build on images. I try to look at where I’m at, and travel makes me aware of my surroundings, ready to explore
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flesh. I wonder how we can trust what we see. Here’s the spark and there the wind that fuels it up— a ribbon of flame. I wonder why everything dissolves when we look away.
From “Untrussed” by Christine Stewart-Nuñez.
www.ArtsCouncil.sd.gov
