N.C.’s Poet Laureate Joseph Bathanti visited A&T on April 3 in New Academic Classroom Building for a full day of writing poetry to commemorate National Poetry Month.

N.C.’s Poet Laureate Joseph Bathanti visited A&T on April 3 in New Academic Classroom Building for a full day of writing poetry to commemorate National Poetry Month.

The award-winning poet and novelist was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA where he obtained his bachelors and master’s degree in english literature at University of Pittsburgh. Joseph Bathanti first came here to North Carolina in 1976 as Volunteer s in Service to America (VISTA) volunteer teaching writing programs in prisons. The experience was life changing for him, and long after his time with VISTA was over he still continued to work with prisoners.

All afternoon, Bathanti held discussions and workshops for students with the help of the English department in order to help guide them through developing better writing skills. Later that evening the author held a reading where he recited some of his work.

Bathanti has a style of writing creates motion and evokes the realities of different emotions. He is a poet that can appeal to the ears of many. Many of his poems deal with the many memories he has from his work with prison inmates. His poem “Crying” talks about a young boy in jail with a tear drop on his face and his struggles to fit in to adult population in jail. Towards the end of the poem, the boy is asked the reason behind the tear and he says he doesn’t know why he got it or why he has done anything.

When asked about his work in the prison system he expressed that one thing that surprised him was that the “guys on the yard didn’t seem so bad” and that “he had more things in common with the inmates than the guards.” He stated that their fate of their misfortune could happen to anyone depending on their course of action. One thing that sticks out to him every time he goes to these prisons is that when he enters he immediately wants to be on the free side, saying it’s just something about being fenced in.

His poems also deal with his relatable memories of his youth and of the lives of other people. The poem “The Footlocker” tells about a footlocker his father insisted on buying have even though he didn’t want it. Another poem named “Son of a B****” told the story of a former baseball teammate and how his aggressive father pushed him to play a sport he was uninterested in.

“I come from a similar background and I particularly appreciate how he is able to portray the essence of working class life without sentimentality but with deep love and respect” said English professor and poet Valerie Neiman.

His next published work of poetry is scheduled to be released in the Fall and is called “Concertina” which references the razor sharp and coiled wire that runs along the top of prison fences. The work reveals and describes the constraints of jail life as well as Bathanti’s own personal constraints.

Joseph Bathanti also encourages young writers to read more especially more contemporary work because it gives them a more modern voice than that of Edgar-Allan Poe, but feels that the classics should still be read as well.

“As a poet, hearing his words and hearing his story it just inspires me because in poetry it’s self-explanatory and there are things in life that we don’t understand,” said Khari Baker, a freshman biomedical engineering major, “but hearing it in another person’s perspective we get closer to understanding.”

Bathanti has written four books of poetry with his first being “Communion Partners” which was published in 1986. Banthani has also written a semi-autobiographical novel called “East Liberty”, which was the first novel, not set in North Carolina to win the Carolina Novel Award, and a collection of short stories called “The High Heart.” Besides the Carolina Novel Award, he has also won many other awards including the Novello Literary Award for his Novel Coventry, the Linda Flowers Prize, and the Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry.

In August 2012, Governor Bev Perdue named Bathanti N.C.’s Poet Laureate. He currently teaches creative writing at Appalachian State University.

• Stephanie Banaci, Contributor