Music Credit: “Annibelle June” written and performed by Abigail Washburn from album, The Appalachian Picking Society. Melissa Range: In general, I think that at least where I’m from and in my family there is a real delight in rhyming and alliteration and word play. Just people always kind of making up funny little sayings that would usually rhyme or alliterate, and I didn’t really think about that much until I was an adult and writing poetry. And thinking "Oh, well, it’s really fun the way that my grandmothers and my parents and my sister, how they just use language as this real kind of playful thing." Jo Reed: That is poet and 2015 NEA Literature fellow, Melissa Range and this is Art Works the weekly podcast produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed. We kick-off National Poetry Month with the focus on Melissa Range, an award-winning poet whose most recent collection, Scriptorium was selected by Tracy K. Smith for the National Poetry Series. Scriptorium marries the past and the present with its focus on language—who speaks with authority? Whose language is dismissed? What do we preserve and how? The collection’s title refers to a room in medieval monasteries where the monks copied and illustrated manuscripts, and many of the poems describe in sonnet form the processes involved in creating illuminations: mixing the ink, preparing the parchment and so on. But in Scriptorium, Melissa Range also examines her Appalachian roots— the word play, the language and slang she grew up hearing—often disparaged by outsiders and slowly falling out of use. As disparate as these two series of poems may sound, it’s the image of the Scriptorium that brings them together. Melissa Range: I started thinking more metaphorically about a scriptorium as a place where language is taken down as if with some kind of permanence. So if I think about, you know, illuminated manuscripts and how very often they were written in Latin, but that’s not the language of the people. It’s the language of the church, but there’s always some enterprising monk who will translate it into a language for the people. And that to me shows the power of the vernacular and that the vernacular is as good as the standardized language. That was really interesting to me because also while I was writing about medieval art, I was writing a lot of poems about southern slang. My grandmothers had recently passed away and I was really interested in kind of their languages and preserving it. So once I thought about this scriptorium as kind of this metaphorical place where the vernacular language could also kind of come up and assert itself against standardized language, then I thought that was kind of a metaphor that pulled all of my poems together. Jo Reed: So tell me what interested you in illumination? Melissa Range: Well, it actually starts I think in a library where I was working. This was about 12 years ago when I was working in a theology library at Emory University and I was cataloging library books. And I kept getting all of these really interesting books on my cart about illuminated manuscripts, and I just thought they were really beautiful. And I would sit there—you know, never hire a poet to work for you because they might just not do their job and just start reading a book instead. But I would sit there and I would catalog the books, but I would read a lot of them while I was doing it, and I just got really captivated by what I was seeing. The colors were so rich and bright and the manuscripts were so old, and I just kind of started wondering how they were made. And then once I started doing research on how they were made I got totally hooked because these monks—they were just kind of inventing it as they went along. They would just use anything to make the paint that they used in these manuscripts. And so I was just—I’m really always fascinated by the process of making anything, and so that kind of hooked me, and so then I just had to know more, and that’s where it started. So there's a lot of sonnets in this book about the pigments that monks use to create these manuscripts. Jo Reed: Can you read a poem for us? Melissa Range: Sure. Jo Reed: Great! I would love to hear Ultramarine. Melissa Range: Oh, okay! Ultramarine—this pigment is the most expensive one. This is the one that’s made from lapis lazuli, so if you are really fancy you could afford ultramarine in your illuminated manuscript, and otherwise you’re gonna use some other kind of blue, so I thought that was interesting, too. “Ultramarine. Beyond the blue scum sea, miners assault lazurite and pyrite, a blue gold beam, pry from limestone caverns the lapis seam for the shade that painters' patrons so exalt to hem the Virgin’s mantle, from the Vault where she’s fixed like a lodestar or a gem. Mixed with wax and turpentine, by the dram this powdered stone costs more than gold or salt. Stella Maris, Blue-Eyed Lady of the Whale-Road, God tore your veil into the seas that hide Leviathan’s blue fluke and flail, the skies that hold the sailor’s compass made of ice-trussed stars. You're vessel of the swell, and all of the deep will be your swaddling clothes.” Jo Reed: And that’s Ultramarine. Tell me about the sonnet form and what it is that appeals to you about it. We don’t see sonnets very often. Melissa Range: Well, I think they’re having a little bit of a comeback. I don't think they’re all strict sonnets, but I feel like I’m always seeing unrhymed or kind of experimental sonnets in contemporary poet stuff. I think it’s having a little moment. Jo Reed: Yay! Melissa Range: Yay! Jo Reed: <laughs> Melissa Range: I love sonnets. Well—so I just love to rhyme and I’ve always have—I love the way words sound together, so I’m really drawn to rhyming forms, but I love the sonnet because it’s so hard for me. A poet told me long ago, a poet I consider a teacher, Mark Jarman, actually, and also Kimberly Johnson, another awesome religious poet, they both said, “You know, you’re better when you write shorter poems.” And I said, “Oh, come on, I love to write my long poems.” And they said, “No, you know, you have this ability if you will let yourself do it to compress and to really pack a punch.” And I thought, "Oh, well, I should try that more," and it’s really hard but I like the feeling of—you know, you have to say it in 14 lines and you have to have certain movements in those 14 lines. So you have to set up a problem or some kind of a situation in the first 8 lines, and then you have to turn it to some kind of an interesting resolution in the last 6. And to do that while also rhyming—and, you know, I’m not a very strict metricist but, you know, still trying to write in some kind of a loose meter. That challenge is really appealing to me. And I like how neat the sonnet is. Jo Reed: I always loved resolution at the end of something— Melissa Range: Yes. Jo Reed: because life is so not like that. <laughter> Melissa Range: Yeah, you’re right. You’re right. Life is not like a sonnet at all. Jo Reed: Exactly. Now, you also write in Scriptorium about the place where you were raised, which is east Tennessee. Melissa Range: Right. Jo Reed: I would like you to talk a little bit more about how these two strands of the poems in your book connect. Melissa Reed: Well, I do think it is kind of about the level of language, the power in language that other people might make fun of or discard. And so when I think about where I’m from I think about the way that I talk, the way my people talk, and how I have been made fun of that for a long time, whether it’s my accent or the kind of southern slang that I use, Appalachian slang, and I really wanted to explore the kind of fascination for me in some of these great slang phrases. And also to kind of assert their power and that they’re not something to be mocked, but there’s a real longevity and there’s something really juicy in the language. Jo Reed: There's something so authentic about it. Melissa Range: Yeah. JO Reed: I'm from New York, another place that you really do get made fun of a lot for different reasons. Melissa Range: <laughs> Jo Reed: I mean it’s very, very different, but I think it’s similar in the sense that there are so many stereotypes. Melissa Range: Right, right. Jo Reed: And you know, the whole New York accent, which of course means you’re completely uneducated, which I have a feeling you probably share that part of the stereotype, too. Melissa Rnage: Oh, yes definitely, definitely. Jo Reed: And speaking about that, I would like you, if you don’t mind, to read one of your poems that deals with the southern vernacular and that’s Hit. Melissa Range: Oh, yeah, I would love to. So Hit, this poem came about actually while I was in graduate school. I was studying Old English, and that’s another thing that’s happening in this book is there’s a lot of kind of working with Old English literature, Old English texts and poems. But I had heard both of my grandmothers say “hit” for “it” my whole life. So instead of saying, “It’s raining,” they would say, “Hit’s a-raining.” And I always thought that was perfectly normal except people would make fun of it. But then when I took Old English I realized it was Old English and the “H” was just still kind of there in my grandmother’s generation. I don't think it’s really there anymore. I think that is kind of dying out. My mother’s generation doesn’t use it, and my generation, we don’t really use it, either, but we know it when we hear it. So that’s kind of how this poem came about. "Hit. Hit was give to me, the old people’s way of talking, and hit’s a hit sometimes. Sometimes hit is plum forgot and I drop the ‘H’ that starts hillbilly, hellfire, hateful, hope. Sometimes hit hits the back of my teeth and fight’s hit’s way out, for hit’s been around and hit’s tough. Hit’s Old English. Hit’s middle. Hit’s country. Hit will hit on you all day long if you let hit. When I hit the books they tried to hit hit out of me, but hit’s been hit below the belt and above, and hit still ain’t hit the sack. Sometimes you can hit hit like a nail on the head and sometimes hit hits back.” Jo Reed: I love this poem. Melissa Range: <laughs> Thank you. Jo Reed: I love the rhythm of it, and I love the sensibility of it. I think it’s wonderful. Melissa Range: Well, thank you so much. I had a lot of fun writing it, and the first time I ever read it I thought, "Can I actually read this?" It’s such a tongue twister. Jo Reed: It is a tongue twister. Melissa Range: And then you get used to it. Jo Reed: It’s interesting because I’ve always been told that if you want to know how people spoke in Shakespeare’s time, what the accents were, you need to take yourself to Appalachia because that’s where you’re going to hear it. Melissa Range: <laughs> I’ve heard it, too, and it was always kind of news to me. I’m like, "well, I mean we have a really musical way of talking, but we’re definitely not talking Shakespeare’s Queen’s English or anything." But I mean, you know, that’s a high compliment. I love Shakespeare, but I don't think we really talk like that. Jo Reed: Oh, I would just take it, Melissa. <laughs> Melissa Range: Yeah, right? <laughs> Jo Reed: There’s a lot of dialog between the past and the present that happens throughout this book. Melissa Range: Uh-huh, yeah. Jo Reed: Talk to me about that and what you were doing with that. Melissa Range: Okay, you know, I don't know if I even had that much of a plan, really. I just love history and I love to write about history. There’s historical stuff in my first book, and I’m writing kind of a historical manuscript now for my third collection that I’m working on, and so I think I’m always interested in how can I see parallels between my life and lives that have gone before me, or how can I see parallel situations in the country or in the world with what has gone before? And I feel like it’s important to look at that and to kind of see what can we learn from the people who have gone before us. And then as far as the southern poems, I do think it really is at the level of language. Like I was thinking so much about old languages, and, you know, like I said, there’s some poems about Old English poetry in here, so thinking about that language. Old English becomes this dead language that no one speaks but we can read. So we can read “Beowulf” in Old English but nobody goes around speaking in Old English anymore. And I was thinking about my language, my southern language, and the fact that a lot of these phrases that my grandmother said are kind of dying out. And I wanted to think about them as living language and in some ways I wanted to preserve, you know, kind of doing that poet’s work of preserving language. Jo Reed: More than preserving because you don’t want to put it—you don’t want it to be like set in amber— Melissa Range: Right. Jo Reed: but to keep it vital? Melissa Rnage: Yeah, I agree, to keep it vital, for sure. And for me to remember that—you know, my grandmother would say something is as "flat as flitter." Well, if I write a poem about that then I’m always going to always remember that, and I’m going to remember that I can still use that phrase. I can still keep that phrase alive no matter where I end up living. Like I live in Wisconsin now. I don’t live in east Tennessee anymore, but whether I ever go back home to live or not, I can always kind of take that language with me. So, yeah, it is preserving but it’s also more than that, like you say. It’s keeping it vibrant. Jo Reed: There’s a poem that you-- and please forgive me. I’m going to mangle the name of the poem. Is it Ofermod? Melissa Range It’s “Ofermod.” That’s close. Jo Reed: “Ofermod,” like the “F” is almost a “V?” Melissa Range: It is a “V,” yeah. It’s Old English. It’s an Old English word, and I mean it looks like “Ofermod” but it’s “Ofermod.” That’s how—well, we think that’s how they said it. We don’t really know. Jo Reed: Okay. Do you mind first reading and then talking about that poem? Melissa Reed: Sure, yeah. So Ofermod, I think the poem will kind of explain what this word is, but I’ll give a little bit of background. There are a couple of characters in the poem. One is my sister—you’ll learn about her—and, then, there’s a warrior named Byrhtnoth—this is an Old English name and he was a guy, he was a character in this poem called “The Battle of Maldon,” and this was a real historical battle. And he had this real thought that they could beat the Vikings, he and his Old English troops, and they really couldn’t but he was very prideful and thought that they could. So you’ll hear him in this and I think that might be all I need to say. There’s a little bit—at the end there’s a quotation, a proverb that is actually a direct translation from Old English, and you’ll probably know it when you hear it because it sounds very proverbial. "“Now, tell me one difference,” my sister says, "between Old English and New English.” Well, Old English has a word for our kind of people: ofermod, literally “overmind,” or “overheart,” or “overspirit,” often translated “overproud.” When the warrior Byrhtnoth, overfool, invited the Vikings across the ford at Maldon to fight his smaller troop at closer range, his overpride proved deadlier than the gold-hilted and file-hard swords the poet gleefully describes — and aren’t we like that, high-strung and ofermod as our daddy and granddaddies and everybody else in our stiff-necked mountain town, always with something stupid to prove, doing 80 all the way to the head of the holler, weaving through the double lines; splinting a door-slammed finger with popsicle sticks and electrical tape; not filling out the forms for food stamps though we know we qualify. Sister, I’ve seen you cuss rivals, teachers, doctors, bill collectors, lawyers, cousins, strangers at the red light or the Walmart; you start it, you finish it, you everything-in-between-it, whether it’s with your fists, or a two-by-four, or a car door, and it doesn’t matter that your foe’s stronger, taller, better armed. I don’t tell a soul when I’m down to flour and tuna and a half-bag of beans, so you’ve not seen me do without just to do without, just for spite at them who told us, “It’s a sin to be beholden.” If you’re Byrhtnoth lying gutted on the ground, speechifying at the troops he’s doomed, then I’m the idiot campaigner fighting beside his hacked-up lord instead of turning tail, insisting, “Mind must be the harder, heart the keener, spirit the greater, as our strength lessens.” Now, don’t that sound familiar? We’ve bought it all our lives as it’s been sold by drunkards, bruisers, goaders, soldiers, braggers with a single code: you might be undermined, girl, but don’t you never be undermod. Jo Reed: Wonderful. Ofermod. Tell us your thoughts as you created this poem. Melissa Range: Yeah. Well, this poem took a long time to write, and I was just learning Old English. I hadn’t read “The Battle of Maldon” yet, and I was in the—I was visiting home and I was talking to my sister, and I said, “I’m taking Old English,” and she said, “Well, what’s the difference between Old English and New English?” And I thought, this is a good question, you know. And at the time I was like, “Well, you know, it’s Germanic and so is regular English, but it’s, you know, different,” but that wasn’t really the heart of the question, you know? And it wasn’t until a few years later that I was translating “The Battle of Maldon” with a friend of mine--we had a little Old English translation group—and I hit upon this word and I said, “ofermod?” And she said, “Yeah, it’s really rare. It’s only used a couple of times in the entire Old English poetic corpus.” And this idea that mode as a word means mind, heart, and spirit all wrapped up in one. So if you can imagine your mind and heart and spirit are all the same and then that somehow translates to over proud. Once I learned that word I thought a lot about me and my sister and where we grew up and kind of the ethos of us. When I showed her this poem she said, “Oh, that’s the poem about my anger management problem,” <laughs> and I said, "Yeah, it kind of is, but it’s also my poem about me being so prideful that it doesn’t matter if I have half a bag of beans I’m not gonna ask anybody for help." You know, I’m not gonna say everybody in Appalachia is taught the same thing because that’s not true. But at least in my family we were taught, you know, don’t ask for help. Don’t be beholden to anybody. You figure it out and you make your own way. You know, I have a lovely job now being a professor at a small college and I’m really grateful for this job. For many years I struggled financially and with jobs, and so I would be really kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel, but I just wouldn’t ask anybody for help. And that overpride, when I learned that word it was a real revelation to me, that I applied it to my sister but I also applied it to myself. That word taught me a lot about me and my family and it taught me a lot about where I’m from, and I mean it was amazing to me that that just happened just because I had to translate this Old English poem, that I found this word that felt so Appalachian to me, just so hearty and grim. Jo Reed: That’s a great story. The wonder of language—that’s what I was thinking about as you were talking. It’s extraordinary-- Melissa Range: It really is. Jo Reed: How it can take you through generations and centuries and be all but obsolete and still so pertinent. Melissa Range: Yeah, yeah, I agree. Jo reed: Well, tell me about your upbringing. Tell me about your people. Melissa Range: You know, I'm from upper-east Tennessee, the very corner, the eastern corner of the state, so basically it’s the opposite end from Memphis. And it’s very much an Appalachian small town where I’m from. It’s definitely not the smallest town around. It’s a town called Elizabethton. When I was growing up there I think there were about maybe, I don't know, maybe about 18,000 people, so it’s not tiny but it’s definitely not big, either. You know, and I do think that there is kind of an Appalachian ethos that my family participates in, but there are always exceptions, of course. I think there really is this real sense of pride, pride kind of above all else. “You can do it and you will do it and you won't ask for help," that's a big part of it. And I think, you know, that may be one reason that a lot of Appalachian people are very suspicious of do-gooders, like, “Let me come in and help these poor Appalachian people,” and I think very often we’re like, “Well, what’s your motivation? Why are you doing this? You know, we’re okay. We’re taking care of ourselves.” Jo Reed: I always think that people in that region are great appreciators of language. Melissa Range: Yeah! One wonderful thing that I got from my upbringing is just this real kind of delight in language. I don't know how true that is for Appalachian people or southern people in general. I think that at least where I’m from and in my family there is a real delight in rhyming and alliteration and word play, just people always kind of making up funny little sayings that would usually rhyme or alliterate, and I didn’t really think about that much until I was an adult and writing poetry and thinking, “Oh, well, it’s really kind of fun the way that my grandmothers and my parents and my sister, how they just use language as this real kind of playful thing." And I think that might have something to do with the fact that I love to rhyme and use wordplay, just kind of listening to that growing up. Jo Reed: Now, when did you become interested in poetry and actually writing the words down and doing written poetry as opposed to staying in an oral tradition? Melissa Range: I love the sounds of things, but I really kind of have to write it down to understand what I’m thinking. I’m kind of a process-y person like that. You know, I always wanted to be a writer but I didn’t know I wanted to be a poet until I was in college. I think it’s because my schools where I went, we didn’t really do a lot of poetry. We mostly read novels, and so I read novels and I thought, "Well, maybe I’ll be a fiction writer." And so it wasn’t until college and I took this fiction workshop and I kept getting comments back on my stories that were, “Well, your language is really beautiful but your characters are flat and your plot makes no sense.” And I thought, "Well, I don’t really care about the characters or the plot. I just care about the language." But I hadn’t really thought that that equaled poetry. And then my junior year of college I took a workshop with a lovely poet named Marilyn Kallet, and after about a week I was like, Oh, I don’t have to have characters and plot." I mean you can have characters and plot in a poem but I don’t have to. It really can be all about what I want to do with language. And so then from that moment I was like, "Okay, I’m going to do poetry." And so I just started reading and writing and haven’t really stopped since then. Jo Reed: Okay, you said that you don’t necessarily need character or plot for poetry, and on the positive side, though, what can you do in poetry that you can't do with prose? MR: Hmm. For me I think poetry, it doesn’t just give you permission to play with language. It expects that you will. And so if you love to use sound and you love to kind of investigate rhymes—there’s a wonderful poet, A.E. Stallings, who talks about the relationship between rhyming words and the idea that rhyming words could have a meaning relationship through sound. I think that’s a wonderful, crazy idea and I love it. And, you know, I’m trying to imagine talking about that in a fiction class, whereas a poetry class I’m like, 'yeah, okay, let’s put these rhyming words together and see what happens. Let’s see what the magic is.” So it really is kind of this expectation that you’re going to play with language and that you’re really going to get in there. The meaning of a word is going to be so important, and I do see that in poets across the board. I think we’re just so interested in language. Jo Reed: Because you’re writing about Appalachia you’re also writing about poor people— Melissa Range: Yes. Jo Reed: and poor people are so rarely represented in prose or in poetry. Melissa Range: Yeah. You know, it’s obviously true that not everyone in Appalachia is destitute, but I mean I definitely grew up around plenty of poverty. And social class has always been really apparent to me, and as I moved from a working class background into kind of like a middle-class profession and existence as a professor, it’s never lost on me, the kind of assumptions that people make about everything that I just don’t make. You know, so how much money you would spend on something, like of course you would buy a house or of course you would buy a car, and I’m like, "would you? Of course, would you?" Like those are such things that I would never think that that was just a done deal, you know, or just the kind of middle-class trappings that I don't know anything about. Or also just the way that middle- or upper-class people will talk about poor people with this real sometimes judgement in their voices, you know, this idea that we don’t know any of those kind of poor people. I feel strongly that I need to right about that. You know, I think I’m always writing about class in some way, even if it’s not apparent. I think in this book it’s a little more obvious that I am. Jo Reed: Do you mind reading another—I mean I really just like your poems so much. I’m just having you read, read, read, if that’s fine. Melissa Range: Yeah, I'd be happy to. Jo Reed: Great. Can we do Regionalism? Melissa Range: Oh, sure. Jo Reed: Ties poverty to a certain extent together with region in that one fell swoop. <laughs> Melissa Range: Yeah. This poem has a lot of little referential things going on, when you hear the line, “I don’t hate it but they all do,” is a repeating line in the poem. And I’m just kind of riffing off William Faulkner at the end of the novel “Absalom, Absalom!” And I'd also seen—you, know I love Natasha Trethewey, and I had seen her kind of riff off of this, too, in a poem in “Native Guard,” and so I was thinking about it. You know, I joke when I read this at readings. I’m like, “Okay, so people made fun of my accent my entire life and finally I got angry and wrote a villanelle about it to get my revenge.” <laughs> So that’s kind of what this poem comes out of, too. "Regionalism. People mock the south wherever I pass through. It’s so racist, so backward, so NASCAR. I don’t hate it but they all do. As if they themselves marched out in blue they’re still us, them-ing it about the Civil War, mocking the south wherever it is. They’ve never passed through. It’s a formless, humid place with bad food except for barbecue. The grits, slick boiled peanuts, sweet tea thick as tar. I don’t hate it but they all do, though they love Otis Redding, Johnny Cash, The B-52’s. The rest of it can go ahead and char. People mock my southern mouth wherever I pass through, my every might, could have, and fixing to, my flattened vowels that make fire into far. I don’t hate how I talk, where I’m from, but they all do their best to make me. It’s their last yahoo in a yahooing world of smears, slur, and mar. People mock the south, its past. They’re never through. I’m damned if I don’t hate it and damned if I do.” Jo Reed: That is such a strong poem. Melissa Range: <laughs> Thanks. Jo Reed: Were you discouraged from writing about home when you were in school, or by publishers, or by other poets? Melissa Range: I wasn’t discouraged in my MFA program. I have been discouraged other times in other places by various people who say, “You know, if you write about this stuff it’s gonna kind of pigeonhole you as a regional poet or as a southern poet,” and "I’m like, okay, so I’m not supposed to write about where I’m from because that will pigeonhole me?" Or somehow the idea that if you call yourself a southern poet or an Appalachian poet you can't also write about illuminated manuscripts or other things? And I didn’t really believe that, but I guess I did kind of skirt writing about home for a little while. You know, some people looked at a draft, this manuscript, and a couple people said, “These are cornpone poems, and you shouldn’t try to publish these because these are insulting,” and I’m like, I don't think they’re insulting. I think they’re—I mean at least the way I intend them to be is I intend them to be both critical and thoughtful about where I’m from." And so, I think that's complicated. Jo Reed: That reminds me of the criticism Zora Neale Hurston got for Their Eyes Were Watching God. Melissa Range: Oh, yeah, so true, yeah. Yeah and I mean I do think that when you incorporate any amount of dialect, even a small amount into poems, you know, you are going to raise some eyebrows and, you know, you have to think about how are you using the dialect because you want to be faithful to the language and the people but you also want people to understand it. And it’s an experimental tool, you know, and not everyone takes kindly to experiments. Jo Reed: Well, enough people took kindly to your work. In 2015, Scriptorium was chosen by Tracy K. Smith for the National Poetry Series and in 2015, you also got a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Melissa Range: Yeah. Yeah, 2015 was my year of miracles, my boyfriend says, yeah, because I did. And I used that money to fund some research trips and some time off from my job and to work on my third collection, and I’m still working on it. I’m a very slow writer so I’ll be working on it for a while. Jo Reed: And that was going be my final question, what you’re working on now. Melissa Range: Yeah, I would love to talk about what I’m working on now because I’m so into it. I’ve been working on this project for about four years now, I think. So when I was in graduate school, I was reading all this Civil War poetry by Herman Melville and Walt Whitman, and I was really into it. And I just kind of innocently thought, “Well, I wonder if there’s any abolitionist poetry?" And then was there ever. There was so much abolitionist poetry, and I discovered all these wonderful poets like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, who’s a great poet. I rediscovered poets like Longfellow and Whittier and was just kind of really intrigued by how they were using poetry in their activism, and that really spoke to me. And then as I kind of started reading more about them, I just started reading more about abolitionists in general and I was kind of stunned to see just how many people were involved in this movement, most of whose names we’ve forgotten, and I just decided I wanted to write poetry about these people. They did a lot of really good stuff in this country and they worked together even when they didn’t always get along, and they created this positive change and we should remember them. So I’ve been doing tons of archival research and trying to kind of make poems based on their text and their words. So I’m not trying to invent voices for them because they have voices, but I’m trying to kind of bring them back to our consciousness, I guess. Jo Reed: Oh, I can't wait to see it, Melissa. Melissa Range: Well, I’m really slow so you’ll wait a while. <laughs> Jo Reed: I’m sure it will be worth it. Really, thank you for giving me your time. Melissa Range: Of course. Jo Reed: I really appreciated Scriptorium. It’s such a rich book, so rich. Melissa Range: Well thank you so much. That means the world to me to hear, thank you. Jo Reed: Thank you for doing it. Melissa Range: Oh yeah, my pleasure. #### End of Melissa_Range_blended.mp3 #### Jo Reed: That is poet and 2015 NEA Literature fellow. Her recent collection of poetry is called Scriptorium. You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. Please subscribe to Art Works wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a rating on Apple—it will help people to find us. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening. Transcript available shortly.