The poet laureate of Wisconsin and a 2021 Rubinger Fellow, Dasha Kelly Hamilton sat down with LISC to discuss what it means to be a creative change agent, the power of verbs, and why listening is imperative to community wellbeing.
Dasha Kelly Hamilton is a Promethean communicator—an accomplished writer and performance artist as well as a cultural organizer, teacher and mentor, and facilitator of creative dialogues. In myriad ways her work invites people both to speak in their own singular voices and to listen, all in the service of what she calls “human and social wellness.”
Kelly Hamilton has published three poetry collections, four spoken-word albums, and two novels. In 2020 she began a two-year term as poet laureate of Milwaukee, her home base, and in 2021 was inaugurated as poet laureate of Wisconsin, the first Black woman to hold the post.
As an arts envoy for the U.S. Embassy, she has taught, performed, and facilitated community-building projects in Botswana, Mauritius, and Beirut.
In 2000 she founded an open mic night that grew into a busy nonprofit focused on involving young people in creative writing and performance, the Still Waters Collective. Her project as a 2021 Rubinger Fellow will expand on a 2019 Still Waters pilot, Neighborhood Creatives in Residence, that provided 11 Milwaukee “creatives” with immersive, hands-on training in creative placemaking.
When you were a kid, did you imagine you’d become a writer?
I've always loved wordplay, but it wasn’t something I considered as a career or work. I started writing short stories when I was probably 9 or 10. I did my first little children's book as a class project. In between having to write college papers, I was writing little pieces of fiction. And it was just so similar for me to doing crossword puzzles or watercolors, things that people do to relax.
Writing, and especially poetry, is often seen as a solitary endeavor. But your work also has this intensely interactive, social dimension that calls out other voices. Are these aspects of your career connected or do they exist on separate tracks?
Definitely connected for me. I have a friend, she said, "This is one thing I love about you, Dasha: you genuinely believe that everyone can do everything.” I'm great in my own way, but I've always felt that you were also great in your way. It's just how I walk through the world, so it makes sense that it would feed into how I do my work.
In terms of being the person who wants to make sure people aren't left standing out on the outskirts, not being heard, I've been this person since I was a kid. It's great now, but it was not cool at nine. It wasn't people flocking to be in conversation or sit with me at the lunch table in middle school. So I know what it feels like to not quite be understood, to be conveniently overlooked. When I work this idea backwards, I often lean into metaphor and comparisons because I was often misunderstood.
What are your goals as Wisconsin’s new poet laureate?
I want to continue creating poetry-based events that are about getting people in a room together. It's about telegraphing conversation, giving people the chance to be vulnerable. And specifically, my project is creating this hum of awareness and conversation around incarceration and incarcerated folks.
So it will be, at the baseline, a poetry exchange between traditional residents and residents of Wisconsin prisons. Then in year two we’ll have a specific track about going into publishing as an incarcerated person.
That word “conversation” comes up a lot in your work. And it seems like our conversations in this country are broken on a few levels. How can creative expression foster healthier, more nuanced conversations?
We fall into habits of conversation. And the habit is just that, something you don't even tune into. Because we have all this living to do, we don't always pause and interrogate that thought, that phrase, that assumption. But to go through the process of imagining the first line of a poem, you have to ask yourself a lot of questions, make a lot of small and large decisions.
So as an example, I have a workshop about verbs. How you use your verbs can make your writing more accessible, more visceral, more concise. As I talk them through this, I pause and say, for example, "Did the writer inspire or did the writer incite? Was your mother-in-law nagging you, or did your mother-in-law ask a question?" These subtle but never accidental things signal what we're thinking. And more importantly, they communicate to whoever we're talking to or writing for. We're telling them what we want them to think about.
There's not at all the expectation that people will necessarily become wordsmiths, the way I go through my life pulling words out of everything. But it does make them stop and think, "Hmm, maybe I..." And if you can plant that hmm, maybe you've already shifted a habit
Your Soapbox Therapy project was a fascinating example of opening up community dialogue. To summarize, it gave folks around Milwaukee a literal soapbox from which to speak their poems or spontaneous thoughts about the recent killing of 23-year-old Sylville Smith, a Black man, by a Milwaukee police officer. What kinds of response did you see?
Across the board, I would see the response, "Me? Who, me? Why would anyone want to talk to me?” The second thing I took note of was when someone did get up there, they had plenty to say. People got to realizing: No one’s filming. You're not going to end up on the Internet. You're not going to be challenged. This isn't a debate. We're listening. To know that you're really able to speak freely—you could see those shoulders relax.
Let’s turn to your efforts to build capacity and demand for creative placemaking in Milwaukee. The pilot in 2019 gave “creatives” support and coaching to connect with a Milwaukee neighborhood and take on a socially relevant placemaking project. Who are “creatives”?
Creatives are folks who think that way. I call us curlicue thinkers and not straight, right-angle thinkers. So in this cohort, there were folks who were artists. There were researchers. There was a mechanic.
I've been particular about reminding myself to use the language “creative” and not just artist. That is another form of elitism; where we conflate creativity with being an artist, we dismiss the conversation about the value of creativity. You hear people say, "Oh, I'm not creative at all." Well, of course you are. You have a brain. That's what brains do.
And the next step is engaging businesses, institutions, and neighborhood groups, so they understand how to work with the creatives and support creative placemaking?
Yes. With the time and resources that I had for the pilot, it was either get these creatives prepared, or it was spend the time doing the neighborhood organizing bit. I wasn't able to do both. So I cut a corner in that I went to relationships that I had, and did some pre-work for the creatives.
But at the end of it, the institutions all said, "This is great. But we wouldn't know how to start, we wouldn't know how to do this.”
And so this year for me is returning to those notes, returning to those conversations, and then thinking about how to create institutional buy-in, an institutional program.
How has the Rubinger Fellowship advanced your work?
It’s having the luxury of time to do it, to think about it. I've used the language, "I don't have to lay the bricks as I'm also walking the road." This has been my mode for 20 years. I’m now able to pay attention to habits that don't personally serve me, to stressors that don't professionally serve my work.
It’s impacting the outlook of what's possible for me. I do my thing in this city that no one thinks about, and now it's a national cohort that's lending support. It's building muscle, it's repairing some wounds, and it's definitely steadying my feet on another level.
They come from all corners of the country, and all share a deep commitment to helping their communities thrive. Meet the 2021 Fellows.