Bucks County Community College names new poet laureate, continuing long literary tradition

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The oldest poet laureate program in Pennsylvania has crowned a new winner.

Lake Angela, of Warrington Township, is this year’s top bard of Bucks County. In addition to being a poet, she’s a dancer, choreographer, translator and medieval mystic who has worked on numerous international projects through multimedia performance group, Companyia Lake Angela.

Angela said she was “honored” to be chosen from a pool of more than 50 candidates to receive the poet laureate title. She said she was particularly grateful because her winning poems are from a larger work, “Scivias Choreomaniae,” that is informed by psychiatric patients she worked with as a dance therapist, some of whom, like her, are members of the schizophrenia spectrum.

“The themes of this book are medieval mysticism, the dance cure, the abuse of the professional system, forced incarceration, patient advocacy,” Angela told WHYY News. “And most importantly, really, most importantly to me, this is about making the beautifully associative, schizophrenic language known in verbal poetic form, because poetry is the perfect medium for this.”

As the poet laureate, Angela plans to facilitate workshops for poets and dancers to translate poems into dance, a form of intersemiotic translation, which Angela has studied and received a doctorate PhD in from the University of Texas at Dallas.

Both dance and poetry, Angela said, are “ways of knowing.”

“We think maybe we have this block of words on a page and it’s permanent and unchanging because it can last as long as the paper or whatever materials it’s inscribed on will last,” she said.

But the act of reading a poem, she said, is the “animation that makes the meaning happen.”

“What I think makes poems endure across centuries and across cultures and as long as it keeps moving, is the [multiple] meaning spaces,” she said. “I call it purposeful ambiguity. The ambiguity that keeps us wondering, ‘I feel something. I feel something so strongly from this passage, and I’m not sure logically what it means.’ That’s the way dance works, too. That’s the job of the choreographer and dancers to transmit bodily, felt experience, knowledge through emotion, so we feel first and then we think.”

Ethel Rackin, director of the Bucks County Poet Laureate program and professor at Bucks County Community College, said the quality of Angela’s poetry is “impeccable.”

“The precision of language on the one hand and the emotional impact on the other, all of that comes together in this beautiful lyric poetry,” she said.

As is the case every year, Rackin said the work of the runners-up — Robbin Farr, Madeline Marriott, and Judith Adams Lagana — is also “deserving” of recognition, and indicative of the breadth and depth of the poetry submitted to the contest. Rackin is hoping to start publishing poetry by the winning poets online  at some point in the future.

A literary ‘renaissance’ in Bucks

Originally named after Buckinghamshire in England, the home of Roald Dahl and Thomas Gray, Bucks County also has a vibrant lineage of authors and literary figures. The county’s poet laureate program was founded in 1977 and has been housed at Bucks County Community College since 1986.

Unlike other similar programs, poets do not submit statements of purpose and are not required to complete a community project as part of the contest.

But many of the program’s alums have launched initiatives to connect the wider Bucks community with literature and learning, Rackin said.

The most recent initiative is Volta, a writing center established by the Poet Laureate Community Projects this year. Housed in the community college’s Newtown campus library, the center offers workshops, events, book launches and more.

Tom Mallouk, poet laureate emeritus, started the segment Poet’s Corner in the Bucks County Herald, which publishes a poem from a local poet once a week. Other poets laureate have completed anthologies of their work, and some worked together to create a pamphlet with prompts and sample poems that was distributed for free to the county’s high school English teachers during the pandemic to help fuel students’ creative inspiration.

The program’s legacy is interwoven with the rich literary history at the community college. BCCC’s Wordsmiths Reading Series, also directed by Rackin, has brought important authors — including Allen Ginsberg, Nikki Giovanni and Gwendolyn Brooks — to the campus since the 1960s.

“Any major poet that you can think of from the ‘60s onward has at one point or another visited Bucks County Community College to give a free and open reading, not only for the college community, but for the community at large,” Rackin said. “So this is one way that Bucks County Community College contributes to literary life in the region.”

Rackin said from her perspective as someone who has been involved in the county’s literary life for 15 years, Bucks is seeing a “renaissance.”

“I would say the last five years or so have been particularly vibrant,” Rackin said, crediting both  BCCC and the Arts and Cultural Council of Bucks County with fueling the “resurgence.”

Poetry for all

For both Rackin and Angela, poetry resonates far beyond the academic realm.

Rackin said she has found that there’s not “as big of a hurdle with poetry as we think.”

“Once you give students the permission to relax, that they don’t have to analyze poems to death,” she said. “That … you don’t actually need any special tools to take in poetry, that you can just listen and enjoy the same way that you would with music, that some poems you’re going to like, some poems you’re not going to like, the same way that you do with songs.”

She said she often encourages her students to come to readings hosted at the college for extra credit, or as part of an assignment. They often keep coming back, she said, because they find they enjoy listening to and reading poetry.

“Poetry and literature are about life,” Rackin said. “They’re about love, money, death, fear, happiness, all the things that make us tick. And once students start to see that there’s something in it for them, that the poetry will speak to their own personal experience, they easily start to love poetry.”

Rackin said at a community-wide level, poetry also has the power to foster connection and programs like the poet laureate contest or the Wordsmith series are “vital, more now than ever.”

“It gives people a place to really connect, to empathize with each other, to really listen to each other, to communicate on a deeper, more personal level,” she said. “A lot of the things that are maybe a little bit lacking in our public discourse now and in our digital world. A lot of the feels, as the kids would say, that we are lacking we can find in poetry.”

Angela has a similar view of poetry’s power in our times.

“Good poetry is always prophetic,” she said, because words can create new realities. In that way, poetry is “subversive,” and a “catalyst for social change.”

“We can protest,” she said. “It’s all necessary, right? But poetry is a way to speak through and beyond, and a way that also connects us with other similar periods in history and across continents.”

Angela has invited local poets and dancers who are interested in collaborating with her to reach out via email at angela20051984@gmail.com.