Michael Lasater, department chair of integrated new media studies and professor of mass communications, has had his poem, Obit, selected as a finalist in the 2020 Joy Bale Boone Prize and will be published in The Heartland Review. Lasater has many interests, but poetry has been something he has been interested in since high school.
By Kate Luce
“I’ve had a strong interest in poetry since high school, where I was a member of a writing club. When I was a music student at the Oberlin Conservatory, I included poetry classes in my electives – modern poetry was my favorite. In my performance career I was constantly involved with opera, oratorios, lieder – I studied German and Italian – poetry was everywhere. I’ve produced broadcast documentaries on poets and poetry. Several of my friends have been poets and writers. So, poetry has been a thread running through my work and career from the beginning,” Lasater says. About six years ago, Lasater wrote Now for a gallery display with a video composition, One, Two. About the same time, he saw a call for poetry in the publication Kansas Time + Place. Since Lasater is originally from Kansas and Now was about his childhood there, he submitted the poem. Eventually it was published both online and in print. This encouraging start has allowed Lasater to continue putting his work out for publication, and for the community to enjoy. As of the past few years, Lasater has had several of his poems published. Last year, he won the Joy Bale Boone Prize for his poem Documentary. His poem, West of Wichita, was the runner-up for the same competition. Both poems were published in The Heartland Review. He has ties with Joy Bale Boone, as she was a coworker and mutual friend of his former colleagues at Western Kentucky University, Jim Wayne Miller and Mary Ellen Miller. “In memory of the three of them I very much wanted to see my work published in a competition named in Joy Boone’s honor,” Lasater says. “Documentary derives from my 1985 video documentary on Jim Wayne Miller and his poetry, and is largely situated in Jim’s homeplace, the mountain South. West of Wichita is entirely different, situated in my homeplace, Kansas. The jury process was blind. The Heartland Review did not know that I had any connection with Joy Bale Boone or the Millers. I was simply hoping to have one of the poems named finalist, which would result in publication. Documentary won first place, and West of Wichita won honorable mention. That was just astonishing.” This year’s published poem, Obit, is an obituary to the late Mary Ellen Miller. In 2011, Miller won a poetry prize for her work, The Poet’s Wife Speaks. Lasater writes about her poems and the years they spent working together in Obit. “I entered the poem in the 2020 Joy Bale Boone Prize again because of the connection between Mary Ellen, Joy, and
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