Poet’s work focuses on multicultural issues
Former USU faculty member Maria Melendez revisited Logan’s campus Thursday as a guest in the Global Odysseys Outreach program series, which she pioneered to share literature that would address Cache Valley’s multicultural issues.
“She is a tireless originator (of the Global Odysseys Outreach program) … a community organizer and poetry spokesperson,” said Michael Sowder, a USU poetry professor.
The program is now headed by English professor Keri Holt, who said this program allows high school students in the area to think about a future career in the humanities by gaining access to resources that will help to diversify their English curriculum.
Melendez’s poetry tends to be humorous, Sowder said, and many of her works revolve around the themes of survival and extinction as well as compassion.
“When I was a kid there wasn’t zoo camp and all the others things they have now in the summer,” Melendez said. “It was just you and the sunburn you were about to get. My mother created a poetry incentive program instead, so five poems was an ice cone.”
Not only did she share her published poetry, but gave aspiring writers words of wisdom that will hopefully help them reach their literary goals and touched on the benefits of journal writing, relentless revisions, setting blocks of time aside to write and being an interactive reader, Melendez said.
“I am new to journal writing … it’s a way of uncluttering the head and heart space,” she said.
The majority of the time Melendez spends writing poetry is devoted to her poems’ revisions, she said, and if she revises them 20-30 times she considers it to be a quick process. Melendez said writing has become more subconscious the more she writes.
During her visit to Cache Valley, Melendez was able to interact with local high school students at Mountain Crest High School, and shared new and old poems to an audience of locals at the True Aggie Cafe’s bi-monthly open-mic event, Helicon West.
Melendez “wants to create a new country called the United States of Poetry,” Sowder said. “This will be a country I immigrate to whether she found it or not.”
The first poem Melendez read was titled “Visitation,” from her earlier works. The poem reflects on the birth of her son while she was living in the Jackson Hole, Wyo., area, and more recently she wrote a poem about her son in his teenage years. During her son’s childhood, reading and writing was a refuge for Melendez and kept her company when she felt isolated due to the circumstances that accompanied taking care of him.
She also read poems that were published in the literary magazine “Pilgrimage,” which she now publishes. The magazine has been alive for 40 years and has featured a number of USU professors’ work.
“There is a wonderful network of writers here which I really missed when I moved to Colorado,” Melendez said.
– catherine.meidell@aggiemail.usu.edu