In this week's segment of KNAU's series PoetrySnaps!, we meet Utah-based poet and professor Danielle Dubrasky. She wrote her first collection of poetry when she was in third grade. At the time, she couldn’t have known that someday her passion for the artform would help her grieve the loss of her father. Dubrasky says poetry can be a powerful way to mourn, preserve memories and process emotions. Today, she shares her poem Your Treasures Are Marbles.
Danielle Dubrasky:
I have loved poetry since I was a child. When I was about six I was writing poems, and when I was five I dictated stories and poems to my mother and she would write them down and put them in a book. I've always read poetry, and when I was in first grade I put together a book called Ghost Poems. I was afraid they would scare my aunts, so I was hesitant to show people.
There was something about poetry itself that I really connected to since I was younger. Writing was always something that I loved to do, so writing stories was always part of it, making up stories. But poetry in particular I loved reading and writing as well.
I just continued to hone my craft and my connection to the art because that's what my passion was. In terms of moving toward a professional aspect of it, when I applied for graduate school, and I got into Stanford University as a master’s student in their Creative Writing program with an emphasis on poetry, that would have been the first time that I was seeing it more as a profession. Whatever it means to be a professional poet! That was the first time I thought maybe to continue the trajectory.
So I think what's interesting is I loved poetry growing up, I loved it has a passion. When I was 18 my father died of a heart attack. I was a freshman in college. That same love for poetry turned into a way to mourn, a way to grieve, to preserve, and process. So I processed grief during my college years with poetry.
Your treasures are marbles
Your treasures are marbles, matchbox cars, old maps, fly fishing lures you find in the reeds.
Hers are shells, antler shards, acorns, the tip of a raccoon’s tail found in mulched leaves.
You give her what you value most— a mayfly nymph broken off someone else’s line.
She puts it with an antler bit, and they are two fragments rattling together, one snapped off, one shed.
Somewhere the fisherman has unsnagged his pole and the buck has grown back its rack.
When he startles the stag in a clearing he is stunned by its frame.
When it lurches into the woods he looks for a hint of pelt, weaves it into lures.
About the poet:
Danielle Dubrasky is the author of several collections of poetry, art books and chapbooks. She is a professor of English and Creative Writing at Southern Utah University in Cedar City where she is also the director of the Grace A. Tanner Center for Human Values.
About the host:
Steven Law is a poet, journalist and educator based in Page, Arizona. He is the author of a collection of poems called Polished.
About the music:
Original music by Flagstaff-based band Pilcrowe.
