By Zach Manges
Fans of friendly primates and linguistics alike, mark your calendars. Joyce Brinkman, Indiana’s first poet laureate, will be holding the Poetry and Primates event for the monthly Poetry on Brick Street program on at 6:30 p.m., June 5, in the SullivanMunce Cultural Center. She will share her poetry and experiences in the newly opened International Orangutan Center at the Indianapolis Zoo, where she had the opportunity to work with the animals up close and personal.
“I love to do unusual things and get poetry out places where people aren’t expecting it,” Brinkman said. “I also like to collaborate a lot. I’ve collaborated with other writers and many kinds of visual artists. It was interesting to finally do some cross-species collaboration.”
Brinkman’s project consisted of reading poetry to six orangutans and interacting in order to get to know them and write a poem based on each. Of all the unique aspects of the beautiful and unfortunately endangered primates, Brinkman believes their individual personalities shine through the most.
“I think as humans we tend to not notice the individuality of other creatures,” Brinkman said. “With the orangutans, it’s obvious that you can’t spend much time with them without seeing that they all have different personalities and minds of their own.
Beginning her poetry writing at the age of nine, Brinkman became the state’s first poet laureate from 2002 to 2008, acting as an ambassador for poetry to encourage people to share and enjoy it. The year after, she was integral in the creation of the recurring Poetry on Brick Street program, which additionally publishes a literary journal. Her work can also be seen on the stained glass displays at the Indianapolis Airport. Through her latest project with the orangutans, Brinkman addressed a concept fundamental to her understanding of the arts.
“Human beings are the only creatures that write. Birds make tools and whales sing, but there are no other animals that write,” Brinkman said. “I found out about the orangutans that were coming to the zoo and everybody talked about how intelligent they were, so I set out to disprove my own theory: to see if I could teach the orangutans poetry.”
To find out the outcome to that question, Brinkman says residents will just have to come and hear for themselves at the event on Thursday.
