Calling all poets! The college is now in the process of selecting the next student poet laureate.
Amid that process, The Commuter had the opportunity to interview the current Poet Laureate Morgan Ward and the Poetry Club advisor Chris Riseley.
Morgan Ward, what has been the most rewarding part of being a poet laureate?
“The greatest reward has to be the community I have become a part of here at LBCC. Over the last year, I have felt very blessed to spend time crafting this chapter of my life with such a brilliant community of thinkers and dreamers. Living out loud with my love for language, art, music, and community as the student poet laureate has been an honor.”
Chris Riseley, as the Poetry Club faculty advisor, what is your role in supporting the poet laureate?
“In addition to being extraordinarily inspiring, a lot of my support is tactical — I make sure that we have the rooms we need when we need them. I coordinate with professionals from other organizations that we schedule activities with, like the educational outreach team at Peavy Arboretum. I make certain that our promotional materials get the distribution they deserve.
“It is my hope to support the student poet laureate’s leadership without taking over the role. I navigate our college systems to get the information we need to pull off big projects like our Poetry Waking Trail in our celebration of Poetry Month this year.”
How has the search for the next leader of the Poetry Club progressed?
Riseley: “Each of our-full time and part-time instructors have received the QR code for our application and the campus has been covered with flyers promoting this opportunity.”
Speaking of the Poetry Club, how is the club doing?
Ward: “It has been wonderful! We recently hosted a former student and faculty member who read to us from his soon-to-be-released book of poetry. We have worked with the Writing Center to begin hosting LBCC Poetry Slams in the library, which has been good fun, and we plan to continue that collaboration next year!
“We worked on poems celebrating the Peavy Arboretum and together with OSU we created a poetry walk through the woods there. We did the same here on campus in April. We are currently collaborating with ceramists from the Benton Center Ceramic Studio.
“We will be working on collecting work for an ekphrasis and readying it for publication over the summer. We have many members who cannot often make it into the club itself, but who participate whenever and wherever possible, making our community a vast net of poets and people who love poetry, spread across generations of faculty, students, and community members. All are welcome here, and thus the Poetry Club continues to foster those finding and rejoicing in using their voices.”
Riseley: “As Morgan points out, we have had a busy year. The only important item I might add is that the very respected Corvallis poetry group called Poetics Corvallis, which boasts a three or four decades long history, selected the LBCC Poetry Club as their featured poet for the month of May. A first for us!”
What has Ward’s leadership skills brought to the club and the role of poet laureate?
Riseley: “Morgan is as organized as she is energetic and she has honestly been one of the most profoundly energetic poets laureates that we have ever had. Her writing is soulful, wise, compelling, and moving. It is under her leadership that LBCC Poetry Club strengthened our relationship with Poetics Corvallis. She has been an inspiration for our club membership, drawing new members and gathering returning members back into the fold.”
How far into the search for Ward’s successor are you?
Riseley: “Applications are still coming in!”
Morgan, did you get a chance to write some poetry and, if so, what was your inspiration?
Ward: “Goodness, yes. I wrote an outrageous amount of it. An offensive amount. I could publish a book with all the poems I’ve written during this experience, but that’s not all I’ve managed. I have also written my first play, a 20-page short story of which I’m rather proud, and countless discussion posts, essays, and entire papers about the magic of storytelling in our everyday lives.
“Do you know, I think this position has colored my entire educational experience with an eternal lens of interconnected possibility? Suddenly, every subject felt connected to every other subject. History became narrative. Film became poetry. Science became an act of observation and metaphor. And what do you know about anthropology? Did you know they made an entire science out of being a poet? Even ordinary conversations began to feel layered with meaning. Storytelling is not separate from life but directly woven into every single part of it. We are prone to forgetting that, when we are cursing deadlines and traffic.
“I think serving as poet laureate gave me permission to take creativity seriously. Not as a hobby, but as a way of moving through the world. It reminded me that art cannot be confined. Poetry, like all art, lives in community, in memory, in the way people speak to one another, in the stories we inherit, and the ones we leave behind. More than anything, this experience reminded me that writing is not about producing work. It is about learning how to live fully and how to pay attention.”
Chris, The Commuter would love to keep publishing poetry. Would the new poet laureate like to continue this partnership?
“Our most successful collaborations with The Commuter have always happened when one of your kind representatives joins our meetings and collects the poems directly from our attending poets and also shares a few themselves. Our meetings are Tuesdays at 1:30 in Forum 220.”
Morgan, do you have any advice for other Linn-Benton poets on what inspired or helped you become the poetic leader you are today?
Ward: “Oh yes. A few words. They might matter most of all. The things I’ve shared here … do it all. And when you fall down, write about it, then do it again. Keep dreaming. Take those steps. Do it again, and again, and again. Make a celebration of your bruised ego, take pride in your resilience. There is nothing to be afraid of, in falling down.
“As students, we understand that education introduces us to the vastness of what remains undiscovered. There is no final summit where knowledge ends and certainty begins. We are always becoming. Always revising. Always learning how to see more clearly. Why should dreams be limited when learning is limitless?
“What made me a poet? Librarians. Suffering. Smoke on the water under a full flower moon. Bleeding steak smothered in a port wine demi-glaze. The way the sunlight impresses artists and shadows compel them. How a ballerina folds herself. The arch of a sharp eyebrow. The comfort of a hot ceramic mug while watching snow fall. The bright red brick of a school building. The sparkle in a child’s giggle. A kindness freely given. The curve of a promise. The whispers of hope. Life.
“Life made me a poet, and you might not know this yet, but I bet, life has made you a poet too. Don’t let the old rules fool you. Real poets learn one thing eventually; there are no limits for dreamers who love language, but the limits we give ourselves.”
