Kathleen Lavey

Lansing State Journal

Lansing has picked its first poet laureate, Dennis Hinrichsen.

And the former Lansing Community College prof is already hard at work, preparing to share the joy of the written and spoken word with people in Ingham, Eaton and Clinton counties. He has a Facebook page, a web site (lansingpoet.weebly.com) and plans to work with middle and high school students across the tri-county area.

"There's a lot of excitement today," Hinrichsen said Wednesday morning after his appointment was announced. "I can't wait to see how it unfolds."

Hinrichsen said he'll focus the first year of his two-year appointment on helping people across the area focus explore where they live.

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"The overriding project is just to write poems about place, to investigate our diverse lives in all these diverse landscapes," he said. "Maybe there is some pleasure you take in fishing, something special about your town that you want everybody else in the community to know."

Those may be poems of celebration as well as poems of resistance.

"My goal is to help everyone find their own particular wavelength relative to putting words on the page."

Hinrichsen, 64, lives in Lansing and taught creative writing at Lansing Community College for 27 years. He has published nine books of poetry, most recently "Skin Music."

Hinrichsen's two-year-appointment, for which he earns $2,000 a year, is sponsored by the Lansing Economic Area Partnership, the Lansing Poetry Club and the Michigan State University Residential College in the Arts and Humanities Center for Poetry.

"He is an enormously gifted poet. He's a fabulous writer and a fabulous teacher. He knows more about the architecture of poetry than anybody else I know," said Ruelaine Stokes of the Lansing Poetry Club. She was on the committee that reviewed 13 applicants for the poet laureate job and described competition as strong.

"We have a lot of gifted writers who have really contributed a lot to the literary community in this area, so it wasn't an easy decision," she said.

In his high school days, Hinrichsen was an honors student in math and expecting his career to head in that direction when he encountered a dynamic force: Bob Dylan's song "Visions of Johanna."

A line jumped out: "The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face."

"I saw the image, and I had a physical reaction, and it just blew me away, and that was a special sort of moment, in how poetic image can impact the reader," he said.

After a similar experience in college, he decided to start writing.

"I wanted to be on the other side of that and find a way to create that magic with my own words and create that feeling in an audience," he said. "Forty years later here I am. I've kept at it all this time."

Hinrichsen taught fourth- and fifth-graders in LCC's gifted and talented program for years and has worked on poetry-in-school efforts in Grand Ledge and Lansing. That's why he proposed working with middle and high school students as poet laureate.

"That fit my skill set and it seemed like a good place to go," he said. 'It gets writing into their lives, and all those bigger outcomes: critical thinking, problem solving, being alert in the world."

He'll also offer workshops for adults and explore possibilities of pairing poetry with video or other media.

"I'm really excited about running into a lot of people throughout the three counties and see how to blend those skill sets with writing skill sets to do a wide variety of things besides putting words on the page," he said.

Contact Kathleen Lavey at (517) 377-1251 or klavey@lsj.com. Follow her on Twitter @kathleenlavey.

From "Little Hydra, Little Garden"

By Dennis Hinrichsen

Two trains meet and for a moment

their horns collide, open

like a great wing in the night—

car parts to the other side of town,

Port Huron bound train to the east.

And then that fade, collapse.

Worm of absence.

The sound of the river re-inserts

itself. Rush of the outtake vents

pouring heat into the current

so fish can loll above the dam

before they sluice the gate

into hook and meat.

Downstream: turtles, heron

stalking a patch of mud for something

narrow, silver—minnow,

belly of frog. Newborn ducks

punked out and vulnerable.

All of us in linger and float, awaiting

placement. Angle of vision.

Meet the poet

Dennis Hinrichsen will read poetry and meet guest during "Arts Night Out" in Old Town on May 5.

The event is 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. at MICA Gallery, 1210 Turner St.