A selling point of poetry is that it expands the ways we can access some of life’s most vital truths. For poet and longtime UNLV professor Claudia Keelan, poetry is an art of continual present-tense attention to the world, in its largest and smallest movements — you never know what detail will yield a new insight. April being National Poetry Month is our pretext for interviewing Keelan, but the calendar is beside the point. As she notes, “any second can produce a poem.”
Let’s take it back to the beginning, to your formative engagements with poetry — both as a reader and as someone who would pursue poetry as a vocation.
My mom taught us how to read when we were, like, two years old, and so my teachers would have me essentially teach everyone how to read. And I found out really early that poetry, and language of any kind that’s interesting, has a beautiful sound. So, I would teach my fellow students how to read by reading poems to them. … That was really where it started.
I went to college (to study) vocal jazz. I was at (Cal Poly) Humboldt, and Jorie Graham, who’s a major American poet, taught a poetry workshop, and she said, You know, you’re a poet. … And I took it from there.
As a writer, how does your process work? Are you at the mercy of inspiration? Or is it a more active process than that?
Well, I have imagination at my mercy, in the sense that any second can produce a poem as long as you’re awake and paying attention. So, my process is very much present-based, you know. One book that I wrote, called Missing Her (2009, New Issues Press), is all based on things that I saw driving on the way to work.
… One day, I saw this sign that said Righteous Brother at the Orleans — like, oh, no, what happened to the other (brother)? And so, I pulled the car over and wrote a poem based on their song (“You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feeling”). That kind of immediacy, just paying attention to what is there to see in Las Vegas — and there’s always something to see.
You’ve been called upon to create public poems for various occasions: the first pandemic-era commencement at UNLV; the memorial to the 2023 campus shooting. Why does it seem natural for us reach to poetry at a moment like that?
We don’t have words for our feelings, right? And, really, poetry is heightened emotion. You know, the feeling of heightened emotion in a present moment, concentrating on something, and we need that. Everyone wants to be able to express their feelings, even if they don’t know they want to, and often are embarrassed by it. And the poet is the one who’s just willing to be the town fool. I’ll speak your emotions for you, because, boy, I have them! I have a lot of those emotions and, also, I can make you feel it.
