Bay College Hosts Michigan Poet

News

By Nanci Love
Published November 1, 2024

Bay College will be hosting a reading by Michigan poet, John LaPine, on Thursday, November 21 at 2pm ET in the Bay College Library on the Escanaba Campus. The poetry reading is free and open to the public, as well as students and staff at Bay College. This event is presented by the college’s Creative Writing class in conjunction with the Diversity Committee and the Bay College Library.

A graduate of Ishpeming High School, LaPine finished his undergraduate degree at Northern Michigan University and completed his MFA in Poetry from the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities. He now teaches at Century College in White Bear Lake, in Minnesota.

“While the UP comes up more in my essays, living in the Upper Peninsula comes into my poetry too,” shares LaPine. “But I’m not a ‘nature poet.’ I think I’d call myself a Social Issues Poet.”

LaPine’s poetry explores many contemporary issues and themes. “One thing I’ve learned is that identity isn’t a singularity. I think we’re all trying to find which box we fit in, but I find that it’s boxes, not one single box. Like Prince’s song ‘Controversy.’ I’m definitely a black poet, but I’m a white poet too,” says Lapine.

“My poetry is more about queerness, but race and blackness come up in my poems too,” LaPine continues. “I grew up in white culture in the UP, so I grew up as ‘other.’ That shaped my writing a lot.”

“Poetry started, for me, as a place of fewer rules,” LaPine concludes. “I came to poetry by way of essay writing which has rules, grammar, structure. Plotting and order. Poetry was this place that I felt this sense of freedom. Poetry is almost like you put all the other rules in a blender and come up with a distillation. Almost like painting as an impressionist, putting colors or imagery together and then stepping back to see what it looks like.”

LaPine’s work has appeared in: The Rising Phoenix Review, Hot Metal Bridge, The /Temz/ Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Under the Gum Tree, Rhythm & Bones, Midwestern Gothic, Underblong, and more. His upcoming chapbook of essays, An Unstable Container, is being published by Bull City Press.

“We are really excited to be hosting this reading,” shares Bay College Instructor, Nanci Love. “It’s the first time our Creative Writing class has hosted a writer since the class went exclusively online. Students learn a lot by working with published writers, and John’s poetry is current and topical—it’s about things they grapple with in their own lives.”

For questions or more information, contact the Diversity Committee at diversity_FROM_BAY_COLLEGE.

Bay College is the community’s college with a mission of: Student Success, Community Success, and Culture of Success. Bay is devoted to each individual’s achievement in the classroom, on-campus, online, in the community and into the workforce by providing career certificates, associate degrees, transferable university credits, industry certifications, trainings, and professional development programs which develop skillsets, enrich individuals, and advance careers. #BayIsTheWay

The Bay College Diversity Committee is a dynamic group of staff, faculty, and students working together to further the foundation of diversity, equity, and belonging that is the “through-line” of all that we do at Bay. This group helps to steer and amplify events on campus, working broadly with the entire campus to represent a wide array of interests and activities.