Jean Prokott is Rochester's 'Poetry Girl'

Jean Prokott is afraid of the moon. There’s a word for it, she says: selenophobia. An intense fear of the moon or moonlight. “I know what it is … I know very much how the moon does its thing, but it’s beautiful and it’s scary. Sometimes it’s bigger, sometimes it’s smaller,” she says with a laugh. “I know why it is, but I don’t really, and that’s awesome.”

For Prokott, the fear started with a documentary she watched many years ago. The film demonstrated what might happen to the Earth if the moon didn’t exist. (Imagine our planet as a wobbly top of splashing oceans and organic bits of space junk falling from the sky.)

While she doesn’t necessarily walk around and look over her shoulder for falling moon chunks, she does spend a lot of time writing about outer space in her poetry. Prolific in her output, Prokott also writes about politics, mental health, her pets, her husband, and her formative years in central Minnesota.

Prokott grew up in the Minnesota towns of Maple Grove and Albertsville. “Before the construction of the outlet mall,” she emphasizes, “It was just farm fields at the time.” She graduated in a class of about 150 students and credits high school as the start of her desire to be the “poetry girl.”

“Music was part of it. I used to write little song lyrics and stuff,” she says. “They were not good, and then in high school, we started reading formal poetry, like Dickinson and Maya Angelou, and it was more like I wanted to be a poetry kid more than I actually wanted to understand poetry. I felt like I should like it … and then it just kind of evolved,” she says. “You know how in high school there’s sort of the English girl, and there’s the horse girl, and the words girl, and the Honor Society girl? There’s the poetry girl, and I just wanted to fit that mold and so I sort of forced myself into it and then actually did like it.”

Contributed

Although her reflective experience as the high school poetry girl is a fond one, it probably isn’t a label that fits Prokott anymore.

Instead, Prokott has become the poet laureate of Rochester (the third poet laureate for the city, which created the role in 2012) and a 2024 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow.

She is the author of the poetry collection The Second Longest Day of the Year, which won the Howling Bird Press Book Prize and was published with Howling Bird Press in November 2021, and of the chapbook The Birthday Effect.

She is a recipient of the AWP Intro Journals Award and the John Calvin Rezmerski Memorial Grand Prize with the League of Minnesota Poets, and she has poetry and nonfiction published in Verse Daily, Rattle, Arts & Letters, Great Lakes Review, RHINO, Red Wheelbarrow, and Sierra Nevada Review, among other journals.

That’s a lot of labels and offers just a peek into her impressive ability as a poet and writer. To get an insight into the mind of a poet laureate, Rochester Magazine sat down with Prokott and asked her about space, teaching, and other inspirations.

In addition to her fear of the moon, Prokott has thoughts on outer space in general and in particular NASA’s Voyager spacecrafts–which Jimmy Carter launched in 1977, five years before Prokott was born.

For readers unfamiliar with Voyager 1 and 2, the twin crafts have currently reached interstellar space, more than 15 billion miles and 13 billion miles from Earth, respectively. President Carter created a Golden Record for Voyager 1, a vinyl record containing voices, languages, and electronic images of Earth for any interstellar beings who might happen upon the spacecraft. The thought of its existence inspires both poetry and panic in Prokott.

The inspiration, she feels, is represented in the recently published poem,“Voyager,” which she wrote, celebrating Carter’s life.
The poem includes lines like, “I consider the void,/I consider America, and I would like/ to blast our failures into space,/but Jimmy Carter sent good will,/because only some of us can see/a burden as a blessing…do you know/how lucky we are to have sent/the best of us into the stars?”

The commonality between Carter and Prokott’s desire to do good work is more evident than Prokott admits, but is apparent when she talks about her role as a poet: “Now more than ever,” Prokott says, “artists have a job to do. The world needs us. Sometimes I think, ‘it’s just a poem. It doesn’t matter.’ But the world is falling apart, and it matters. Art matters,” she says.

The space metaphor she thinks is probably too obvious, and she understands the cliche of poets and the moon, but there’s inspiration to be mined there, too, in all of our man-made space junk. “We just throw our sh#@ in space, because we can’t deal with it. What a human thing to do,” she says.

Rather than just throwing her own struggles into space, she puts them on paper and is using her talents to bring an event to Rochester to support mental health.

The “Trust the Hours” event, for which Prokott received a $50,000 American Academy of Poet’s grant, will “explore how diverse voices of poets and artists can help heal and create empathy in Rochester regarding mental health.”

The project involves a multidisciplinary exhibition of poetry and artwork to be hosted at the Historic Chateau Theater in Peace Plaza, downtown Rochester, as well as citywide distribution of Broadsides, including an additional take-home poetry magnet that lists mental health resources.

Contributed

The goal is to bring in diverse voices and examine how mental health can impact groups differently, including youth, BIPOC communities, LGBTQ+ individuals, veterans, and underserved populations. The exhibit will open, with a reading, on Saturday, April 26, and will stay open, free to the public, until the first weekend of June.

While the conversation has slightly shifted on the stigma of mental illness, the reality is the struggle still persists, and many suffer alone or feel lost in helping their loved ones. Prokott hopes this project is a way to bring people together, to celebrate survival, to find that poetry and art are, as Nietzsche believed, the highest form of self-expression when it can otherwise feel impossible.

Like art, Prokott believes visibility matters, and the event is one way to destigmatize mental illness and advocate for loved ones.

Prokott remembers a class in college with a professor who would give student poems a check minus, check, or a check plus: “I remember it got very competitive, like, ooooh, you got a check plus. But I wrote a prose poem in that class about a fire drill, and he liked it. I thought that was interesting and contemporary, and so I experimented with forms a little bit more. That was sort of a pinnacle for me, because it was finally pushing what I knew poetry was.”

Now Prokott uses her own experiences to help expose her Century High School students do something a little different: “I read a lot. I consume a lot of media. I can remember reading a book in high school, Catcher in the Rye. Life changing, but not a poem. I want to show my students, like, you guys, look at the poet, Rudy Francisco. This is someone that writes something that you might be thinking,” she says.

When she transitions to discussing her students’ writing, she gets a little teary, “There’s a student who used an allegory recently of being in the woods and picking mushrooms. It’s the most beautiful student essay, and I was like, did Annie Dillard write this? It was so good, and I’m going to submit it into some contests for (the student) ... If that kid doesn’t write for a living, I will be legit angry.”