{"id":43638,"date":"2019-04-08T22:21:30","date_gmt":"2019-04-09T04:21:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=43638"},"modified":"2019-05-01T11:14:47","modified_gmt":"2019-05-01T17:14:47","slug":"trish-hopkinson-attending-to-poetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/trish-hopkinson-attending-to-poetry\/","title":{"rendered":"Trish Hopkinson: Attending to Poetry"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nAccording to rules Trish Hopkinson was responsible for creating, her own children aren\u2019t able to join her poetry group. Both her son, 25, and daughter, 17, live in Salt Lake City, and Rock Canyon Poets is a Utah County-only group. \u201cWhen I had ever done anything in the poetry or arts communities, it was always in Salt Lake,\u201d she explains. \u201cSo it was really important to create a group in Utah County.\u201d Now in its fifth year, Rock Canyon Poets is one of several projects Hopkinson is passionately engaged in, all bringing poetry to a larger community \u2014 not all of it restricted to Utah County.<\/h4>\n

Though her family roots are in Missouri, Hopkinson was raised in Provo. \u201cMy parents were converted to the Mormon church [in Missouri] when I was 6 years old and my eccentric grandmother decided that since they were LDS they should live in Provo, so she bought them a house out here.\u201d The family moved when she was 10. Her parents still live in the house.<\/h4>\n

Hopkinson\u2019s initial foray into college, at Utah Valley University, was interrupted by work and family \u2014 her two kids were followed by a 20-year career in the tech industry. \u201cI\u2019ve always been kind of techy and both of my parents come from the tech industry,\u201d she says. For two decades she\u2019s worked for the same company, which develops insurance software. She began at the call center and has moved through most divisions. Currently, she\u2019s a product manager and much of her job involves translating the tech aspect of the company for a non-technical market.<\/h4>\n

\u201cThere needs to be more poetry about people in the tech industry,\u201d she says, only half jokingly. \u201cI could write about some of the bullshit I put up with at work. But I don\u2019t know where to start. I think it\u2019s because I don\u2019t want to think about it.\u201d She\u2019s passionate about what she does, whether at a computer or a writing desk, but likes keeping the two separate.<\/h4>\n

Hopkinson has always been a writer \u2014 her mom says she was born with a pen in her hand \u2014 but her creative life exploded after she returned to UVU to get her creative writing degree. Since then, her work has been published in dozens of journals and anthologies and has received a number of awards. It\u2019s personal poetry, first-person dominant, finding inspiration in subjects as varied as her son being struck by a car, nuclear devastation and the Carambola (aka, the star fruit), and finds further material in the felicitous surprises that emerge in found poetry. Everything she writes is feminist, written from a feminist perspective, she says. \u201cIt so happens, I am tired of being a woman,\u201d begins one poem. \u201cAnd it happens while I wait for my children to grow\/into the burning licks of adulthood.\u201d<\/h4>\n

\u201cPoetry is about trying to re-create an experience that, technically, can never happen again,\u201d Hopkinson says. \u201cIt\u2019s specific to the poet or the character they\u2019re writing through.\u201d From Karin Anderson, who was at UVU both when Hopkinson began her studies and when she returned as a nontraditional student, she has learned to \u201cattend\u201d to life. \u201cJacuzzis are holy\/ Garage door openers are holy\/ Back-up cameras and recycle bins\u2014all holy,\u201d she writes in \u201cFootnote to a Footnote.\u201d \u201cAny life, however mundane, has poetry in it if you teach yourself to pay attention,\u201d says Hopkinson.<\/h4>\n

And if you pay attention to the poems you write, you may discover a book, as Hopkinson did when she was teaching a workshop on response poetry. \u201cI began looking at what I had, as examples, and found there were a lot.\u201d She collected them into a chapbook (her third) called Footnote<\/em>, published by Lithic Press in 2017.<\/h4>\n

\u201c[In Footnote<\/em>] Hopkinson embraces the anxiety of influence and openly engages with her predecessors who include the canonical (Emily Dickinson), the avant-garde (David Lynch), and the radical (Janis Joplin),\u201d Deborah Hauser writes in a review of the book. \u201cIt\u2019s as if, in these poems, Hopkinson is answering the question \u2018Which artists would you invite to a dinner party?\u2019 and the reader has been invited to eavesdrop on the ensuing conversation.\u201d<\/h4>\n

She discovered she had the poem collection while teaching a workshop for Inspire, the organization she began in 2015. With support from Utah Humanities, she produces a community workshop every fall as part of Bookfest, choosing a different theme each year and using prompts to encourage developing poets.<\/h4>\n

For the more serious poets, there\u2019s Rock Canyon Poets. Named for the popular cleft near Provo\u2019s Y Mountain, the group was started in January of 2015, with friend and fellow poet Bonnie Shiffler-Olsen. Hopkinson had recently graduated and the pair had been attending open mic readings but felt they needed something more structured, more academic \u2014 an opportunity to workshop and develop their poems. They wanted a group for \u201cliving poets working as poets.\u201d Rock Canyon Poets provides open mics, a monthly reading series, workshop opportunities, and a yearly retreat; and they publish Oregeny, an anthology of local poets \u2014 all of it designed to push the poets to get their work out. \u201cWe\u2019re interested in people who really want to work on their craft and start publishing their work,\u201d Hopkinson says.<\/h4>\n

With Marianne Hales Harding, Hopkinson began Provo Poetry in 2016. They achieve their mission \u201cto bring poems to a wider audience, support local poets, and promote poetry in general,\u201d with gumball machines. Poems by local poets are wrapped up into the gumball capsules, providing poetic inspiration for the low investment of 25 cents. They\u2019ve been so successful, they\u2019re finding a hard time keeping the machines filled.<\/h4>\n

As one might guess, the poemball machines were initially installed in Provo (at Pioneer Bookstore and Enliten Bakery and Cafe) but they have since expanded north of Point of the Mountain, to KRCL\u2019s headquarters on North Temple. The radio station is the only one Hopkinson will listen to, and she also produces for it \u2014 Poetry Happens, a monthly feature in which poems are read on air by local poets.<\/h4>\n

\u201cEmpty nesting is the best thing ever,\u201d she says about those children now burning in the licks of adulthood. \u201cI\u2019m ready to have some me time.\u201d<\/h4>\n

That may prove difficult with all the projects she\u2019s engaged in this year (she also appears in Artists of Utah\u2019s READ LOCAL series in April, and is developing the literary programming for the Utah Arts Festival), but she continues to find personal time for her own poems, even if they are written through the voice of another. \u201cI recently wrote the longest poem I\u2019ve ever written from the perspective of Quentin Tarantino,\u201d she remarks. It\u2019s still feminist \u2014 \u201cthere\u2019s something about the badass women in his films,\u201d but she\u2019s not sure what to do with it. \u201cIt\u2019s really super long. Eleven minutes. I\u2019m not sure I dare read it out loud anywhere. How long can you really listen to someone go on and on about a made-up version of Quentin Tarantino?\u201d<\/h4>\n

Trish Hopkinson appears with fellow poet Jennifer Tonge at Artists of Utah’s READ LOCAL Onsite, Thursday, April 11, 7 pm, Finch Lane Gallery<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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