A poet and a professor

By Kate Luce

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.

“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

myself. But I had just won the 2019 prize and thought that getting published twice in two years in the same competition might be quite a stretch. So–different juror, again a blind process. Obit was named a finalist and will be published in April. This is as gratifying as it gets,” Lasater says.

While poetry does come naturally, Lasater has a process when it comes to writing. He reads poetry almost every day, often returning to Frank Bidart, W.S. Merwin, Mary Karr, Frank O’Hara, Brenda Hillman, John Ashbery, and Ocean Vuong. He then writes two to three days out of the week.

In addition to this creative process, Lasater also spends time working with video, creating prints, sketching, and collaging. The creative process allows for unexpected things to happen.

“My first lines in West of Wichita '…as much the certainty of unknowing as/the relentless subtraction of growing old…' were just a riff on the opening strategy of another poet’s work I had recently read and admired. For a long time I went one direction, then another, trying to make the poem work. Then by chance a friend wrote something quite unexpected to me. I quoted her in the second stanza, and things started to develop. As it turned out, the poem went to a place I could not have predicted or planned. This always happens. You start a poem – any work of art – with something that interests you. Then you push it in some direction. If it works (or not) you push it again. And again. At some point, you don’t need to push anymore. The piece takes over, does its own pushing, and you become an enabler, helping it get home,” Lasater says.

For Lasater, poetry has its connections with his New Media work. His video pieces are meant to be hung on the wall and derive from the aesthetics of painting, music, and poetry. When he sees a poem, he sees a visual composition within the layout of lines, indentation, and spacings.

“My video And Then is strophic, each strophe ending ritually with a spoken line that in a poem might end a stanza. The visual composition of Birthday resonates with the poet John Ciardi’s use of the mobile to illustrate poetic structure. In Stilts, I surround a boy, who is me, standing on stilts in a checkerboard desert amidst swirling panels of words from poems by Mark Strand. Recently, I’ve extracted prints from some of my video pieces, inching even closer to painting,” Lasater explains.

The plan for Lasater is simple: working on new media pieces and creating poems for future publication.

“I’m 73, so for me the future is now. I’m currently composing an abstract video piece, a diptych, that I think will probably spin off a series of prints. I’m working on a couple of poems, and have submitted a number of pieces for possible publication. You never know. The poet Jim Wayne Miller once told me that when he finished a poem, he never knew if he would ever write another. I understand that. All of this might stop tomorrow. But probably not. I’m all in,” Lasater says.

West of Wichita

... as much the certainty of unknowing as the relentless subtraction of growing old.

My friend writes: I will pray for you even though I know you do not believe.

Yes.

And yet even those who cannot believe may also pray – pray out of sheer unbelief perhaps –pray to no one, to a fable, an empty room – or pray to the wind, one of the old gods, the messenger of prayer – a god with breath and body, a god you can touch and hear.

Unbelief has its rituals, its priests.

Blinds half shut against the late afternoon sun, we sing to ourselves as we prepare a dinner we’ve enjoyed a thousand evenings before. There will be wine – that much endures, at least –and later music – Schumann – circling –turning – color swirling –

vanishing –

Listen.

This morning I dreamt we had another child – a boy. First desire, then form, face and flesh –then a voice, laughing as children always laugh –running to me – father –

a mirage like him.

– Published in The Heartland Review, Mick Kennedy, ed. April, 2019. Honorable Mention, Joy Bale Boone Poetry Prize, 2019.