‘Tis the season for poetry.
For Inside The Arts this week, WKAR’s Scott Pohl marks the holiday season with Lansing’s poet laureate, Ruelaine Stokes.
Interview Transcript
Scott Pohl: Ruelaine Stokes, welcome back.
Ruelaine Stokes: Hi, Scott. Thanks for asking me to come.
Pohl: We have invited you, as Lansing's poet laureate, to write a holiday-themed poem. What have you written for us?
Stokes: Well, I've written one about Christmas gifts that don't come wrapped in boxes and fancy paper, but that may be come in unexpected ways.
Pohl: What's it called?
Stokes: It's called Lost and Found.
Lost and Found
Max pulls a poem from his bag
and offers it to me: hand-written on lined paper
only one coffee stain.
His sandy hair is a bird’s nest
his goatee white, his eyes quick
his smile easy—this boy
I didn’t remember, now middle-aged
and sitting across from me over quiche
and coffee at the Pie Company.
Max is my first Christmas present
the poem, my second.
“It was raining,” he said, “and the line of people waiting
to enter the Cluny Museum so long
I walked across the street
to the café.”
“I thought I might write a poem.”
Every year since 1981, Max has flown to Paris.
Each time, he goes to the Cluny Museum
to see The Lady and the Unicorn:
6 tapestries glowing in a red haze
each with a lady, a unicorn
and a lion.
He stands in the darkened room thinking of a thousand
things, including the small poem
he read 45 years ago
in East Lansing.
The poem is lost.
He can’t remember the words
only it convinced him
he had to see the tapestries.
I who wrote the poem cannot find it anywhere.
But it stitched the image of the lady
and the unicorn so clearly in his mind
he began to dream of going to Paris.
He followed a thread shining in the dark—
all the way to La Dame à la Licorne.
He has followed that thread
back to me, bringing a poem in which he “weaves
his way up the stairs, to the room where time
is frozen and the lady is waiting.”
Now, he places the thread in my hands.
You cannot see it but it holds us
together.
—ruelaine stokes, 12/16/2024
Pohl: Ruelaine, is there a backstory to this poem?
Stokes: Yes, I think the back story is I wrote a poem back in the late '70s about the tapestries at the Cluny Museum, The Lady and the Unicorn. They’re magnificent tapestries, and my friend Max read that, decided to go to Paris, and every year since then has gone to Paris and visited the tapestries. That, to me, is amazing. But I think also, art, the tapestries, visual art, literature, all forms of art are themselves part of a tapestry that connects human beings through time and space, and that is sort of the idea that's animating the poem.
Pohl: It's part of what we're doing here on Inside the Arts. Thank you.
Stokes: Exactly.
Pohl: Tell me about your time so far as Lansing's poet laureate and what's ahead in 2025.
Stokes: Well, it's a lot of fun being the poet laureate, I must tell you. You have a poetic license. So, if you dream up things, you can talk to people, you can find resources, you can help make them reality. One thing that right now is still in the level of imagination and planning, but we're hoping to create poetry pathways, find walking paths in Lansing, East Lansing, along which we can install lectern signs, each with some artwork and a poem on them. So, that's the vision. Making it reality is another, hopefully, the next part of the project.
Pohl: Well, if that comes to happen, we're going to want to tell people about it, so let me know.
Stokes: Okay. Love to, love to.
Pohl: Lansing poet laureate Ruelaine Stokes. Thank you, and happy holidays to you and yours.
Stokes: Thank you so much, Scott. Same to you.
Pohl: With Inside the Arts, I'm Scott Pohl.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and conciseness.
