KEARNEY — Understanding poetry can be as simple as finding the right text — or the right person behind the words.
“Some people say they don’t understand poetry,” said poet Julie Paschold. “I like to tell them that they haven’t found the right poem or the right poet yet. That’s what I want to encourage in my readings. My poems are for the average person. They tell stories, they sometimes educate and they entertain. I like to involve the reader or the listener. I don’t want to talk to them, I want to talk with them.”
Poet Julie Paschold will present her work at two readings in central Nebraska: August 29 at 5:30 p.m. at the Wilson Public Library in Cozad and August 30 at 7 p.m. on the lawn in front of the GW Frank Museum of History and Culture. Admission to both readings is free.
COURTESY OF JULIE PASCHOLD
When Paschold, who uses the pronoun “she,” sits down to write a poem, he wants to give something to the reader or listener.
“When someone reads or hears a poem, I want them to take something away from it at the end,” they said. “It’s not just words on a page. It actually takes them somewhere. It’s important that they take something away from it — or that I take something away from it when I read it again.”
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In poetry, the author pays attention to the musicality of the texts.
“I think a poem is more musical than an essay,” said Paschold. “It can break grammar rules – but you have to know the rules to be able to break them. A poem tells a story in less time with fewer words, but its intonation is more musical.”
Paschold will present his poems at two readings in central Nebraska, presented by Prairie Art Brothers, on August 29 at 5:30 p.m. at the Wilson Public Library in Cozad and on August 30 at 7 p.m. on the lawn of the Frank Museum, West Campus of the University of Nebraska in Kearney. Admission to both events is free.
Paschold’s website describes her as “an anxious, alcoholic, bipolar, gender-fluid, queer poet and artist with complex PTSD, sensory sensitivity, synesthesia, and borderline lupus who likes animals, plants, and earth.” Her work has appeared in AKA’s Advocate, Fine Lines, Plainsongs, The Awakenings Review, the Nebraska Writer’s Guild, The Raven’s Perch, Iconoclast, The Radical Teacher, and several publications on Medium.com. Two of her paperback novels received honorable mention in Writer’s Digest contests in 2021 and 2022.
Beyond the serious points, Paschold recognizes the necessity of whimsy in poetry.
“Playfulness is important in a poem,” they said. “Even a serious poem must have some kind of playfulness, whether it’s hidden lines, changes, or a repeated phrase – something in there that plays with the words.”
Poems also have the effect of revealing different or deeper meanings when read repeatedly.
“I have a poem that’s about not wanting to eat fries,” Paschold said. “When you read it, you realize it’s not really about fries. Sometimes these poems are about something else. If you read it at a different time in your life, you can get a different meaning out of it.”
The poet lives in Norfolk and knows how a sense of place can add weight and authority to a poem.
“Sometimes a sense of place is important,” Paschold said. “Sometimes the reader creates their own place. They can take a poem and create their own world, but often, when my poems are very personal, it’s important to me to create a sense of place.”
Occasionally, Paschold reveals a passage at the end of a poem. This device encourages readers to reread the poem with new knowledge.
“And the reader might say, ‘Let me read this again now that I know how it ends,'” they said.
As an author, Paschold tries to walk a tightrope between playfulness, ambiguity and the use of direct images.
“I’ve met people who say that poems have hidden meanings, or that they just don’t understand the obscure meanings,” they said. “Or maybe they don’t understand the text. That can happen when they read older poems – and some poets choose to be obscure.”
Paschold’s son, an electrician by profession, has been interested in poetry throughout his life because of his mother’s writings.
“He doesn’t have the mind of a poet, but he inadvertently wrote a poem with me while we were sitting in the backyard,” they said. “To anyone who says, ‘I can’t write a poem,’ I always say that. If my son can write a poem with me, anyone can. I also have a friend who said he didn’t understand poetry, but he corrected one of my poems.”
Paschold plans to publish this poem in her third volume of poetry.
“He corrected one of my poems by adding a line, and I said to him, ‘You don’t understand poetry, but you understand this one,’ which leads me to believe that when it comes to poetry, people know more than they think.”
