Poet Tara Betts, PhD ’14, returns to Binghamton for reading from new collection
Tara Betts, PhD ’14, is returning to Binghamton University Friday, Feb. 24, for a reading from her new collection Refuse to Disappear. A declaration of one’s own existence and importance, the collection marks her growth away from a difficult time in her life.
Betts started writing her own poetry at age 13. During her time as a PhD candidate, she wrote the bulk of her full-length sophomore collection Break the Habit and founded the Literati Series, which draws together poets from all walks of life.
A lifelong advocate for the sharing of knowledge, she is the poetry editor at The Langston Hughes Review and the founder of the Chicago-based nonprofit Whirlwind Learning Center.
QUESTION: Can you tell us about your time at Binghamton University, both as a PhD student and a teacher?
ANSWER: I came to Binghamton after a dramatic life change, and for some years a dream of mine was to do my PhD. [Professor Emeritus] Maria Gillan was really instrumental in bringing me to the campus — she reached out to me directly, right when I was thinking about applying. When I came up there, I felt like I had done so much as a writer before I got the PhD. I had been teaching at Rutgers.
The faculty at Binghamton were very supportive; they wanted to see me win. They really believed in my writing and my work. It was challenging at times because it’s not like living in a major American city, but it did remind me a lot of home; I grew up in a small town, so in some ways, it was comforting. I was able to study and read a lot, and I made some friends that I still stay in touch with from the program. That time was the key to where I am now.
[Gillan] has been in touch with so many amazing writers, including one of my mentors, Afaa Michael Weaver. Without them, I don’t think I would be the poet that I am. They both encourage you not just to write narrative poems. We’re in an era where a lot of people do formal poems and poems that have different kinds of clever structures and conceits, but there’s strength in writing something where you feel vulnerable.
Q: There are many ways to be a writer — fiction, nonfiction and poetry. What is it about poetry that caught your attention?
A: I started writing poetry as a very young person. I grew up reading Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Paul Laurence Dunbar and all these really classic Black poets, and something about them spoke to me in a way that fiction did not. Maybe because it’s a shorter medium, it feels a little less intimidating.
I’m also part of the earlier hip hop generation, so in a way hip hop was very instrumental in me understanding poetry as well. I go back to that sometimes now, even though the music has changed so much. A lot of people talk about how music is so prevalent in my work.
Q: You start your own nonprofit, the Whirlwind Learning Center, and you’ve also worked with several nonprofits throughout your career. What brought you to nonprofit as an avenue for activism and education?
A: I started working with nonprofits shortly after I got out of undergrad, and that was what made me fall in love with teaching. I taught the Young Chicago Authors and Gallery 37 here in Chicago, and then Urban Word NYC in New York. I also did a lot of community organizing in Chicago.
That made me see that sharing literature, sharing ideas and helping people get together are very important to how we understand the world. I continue to do some of that work at the university level, but I often feel frustrated at how often all these resources and all this knowledge that we get at colleges aren’t shared; if you don’t go to college, you don’t have access to it. Sometimes this is not the most practical stuff; I wish people knew how to fix and build things. I wish we had more financial education. I wish we had better healthcare. Some of the texts that you read at school make you start to question some of that and think more deeply about the world around you.
About the Whirlwind Learning Center: We started doing a comedy showcase featuring community comedians of African-American descent here in the city. We also made a very concerted effort to include LGBTQ voices in that showcase, so we could bring people together and get them thinking about a range of issues. It’s been really exciting.
We also want to do some community-based writing workshops, book clubs, and thinking about some of these larger ideas that come up in the news. Things such as a critical race theory discussion group, a bell hooks discussion group, a sci-fi and speculative fiction workshop. So there are lots of things in the works. It’s just me doing it without a staff and volunteers right now; we’re planning more slowly but surely.
Q: You’ve been in plays, a freelance writer, lecturer, editor and other roles. How do you find balance between these external responsilbilities and working on your own creative projects?
A: In some ways, I’ve just kind of juggled what I could. I try to prioritize certain things, and I don’t have children, so that makes it a lot easier. But it’s tough to negotiate it. And then with the pandemic, a lot of us are looking more closely at our healthcare, trying to align our finances. I was and still am not working full-time anywhere; I’m teaching in several places. So in order to stay afloat, you find a balancing act to help you get where you need to be.
Sometimes your own creative projects do take a backseat. The advice I’ve often given other writers and students, which I should take more often myself, is to do short bursts of writing. I’ve told my students, “Can you write a page or a paragraph a day? Can you write for 15 minutes every day, or a sentence?” Even if you write something short, you’re still accumulating variety. It’s better than looking at a blank page, and you may have a kernel of something or make progress on an ongoing thing.
Q: You will read from your newest poetry collection, Refuse to Disappear, on your visit to Binghamton. Can you talk a bit about this collection?
A: Refuse to Disappear is definitely the work I wrote after I’d left Binghamton. I wrote my last book, Break the Habit, almost entirely at Binghamton, with a good chunk in Maria Gillan’s workshops.
Refuse to Disappear is a gathering of the poems that I wrote once I moved back to Chicago in 2015. It reflects this propulsion out of a time that was really difficult and traumatic for me, into being insistent: “Look, I’m here!” I think we have to make that kind of declaration sometimes. “We’re here and we’re going nowhere!” No matter how you identify in the world, it’s important to declare that your life matters, that your people and your community matter, and that you can do that without harming or disrespecting others.
Q: How do you keep each visit/reading fresh? Do you learn anything from doing them over and over again?
A: I’ve gotten more comfortable with doing readings over time, so I don’t feel the need to be as boisterous or performative or loud as I used to. Every poem doesn’t require that. Maybe you want people to really focus on the idea; it doesn’t mean you don’t read it well, or you don’t read it with expression. But you don’t have to get into the whole routine for effort.
I sometimes have dialogue with poets and younger writers, and their questions can really inform what I’m thinking about.
Q: You’ve given advice on how to keep writing. How about advice for young writers trying to get their works out to the world?
A: There’s so many ways to do that now with all these electronic Submittable things that you can do, all these ways you can send out poems via email versus mailing them in, which is what people used to do. A lot of literary magazines post calls on Twitter.
It’s also good to start getting experience with a literary magazine, like Harpur Palate at Binghamton University. This is where the reading part can be useful. Think about the presses and the journals and the books that you like, and what do you like about them. Who’s working on those? That’s a really great start in terms of thinking about your education as a writer and what you want to do.
Writing programs at universities sometimes encourage students to go to conferences. If you’re close to New York City like Binghamton is, maybe you can go for a weekend and check out some of the readings there, like Poets House, Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and many other spots. There’s a whole range of places where you can meet people, but it depends on what you gravitate toward as a writer.
Q: Is there anything else you want to add?
A: I’m very glad to be coming back. I’ve missed the community of writers that I knew on campus and off campus. There’s always been a small cadre of poets that aren’t students. I wish there was more of a conversation between them and the student poets. I tried to foster that when I was hosting a reading series in downtown Binghamton with the Broome County Arts Council, and Professor Joe Weil helped start it. It was called the Literati Series. I hope that’s still going, but if it’s not, I hope somebody reboots it again. We need poets from all different kinds of experiences and conversations connecting with each other.