Holly Iglesias’ work includes three books of poetry—Sleeping Things (Press 53), Angles of

Approach (White Pines Press), and Souvenirs of a Shrunken World (Kore Press, first book

award)—a critical work, Boxing Inside the Box:

’

Women s Prose Poetry, and two collaborative

chapbooks, Myth America and How to Get Into Trouble (both from Anhinga Press). She is the

recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts

Council, the Edward Albee Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

PRESENTATION OUTLINE:

1. The learning experience. My first book was a learning experience as a new writer starting later in life. Researching the Fair (the largest ever held) was overwhelming because of its size and scope. I also was just learning that intimate details make a bigger impression in poems than big abstract ideas or emotions not grounded in the senses.

2. The world on display, a university of the common man. The ideas that undergirded the fair seduced everybody—organizers, investors, attenders, workers, politicians, even the indigenous peoples brought as part of an ethnological zoo. So many players. I watched the project grow cumbersome, awkward, too intellectual at the expense of artistic expression. (I am a historian first, a poet second.

3. The personal connection: All of my grandparents attended the Fair as teenagers, new Americans in an era of huge waves of immigration as well as heightened anti-immigrant prejudice. Part of the Fair’s agenda was to educate and model what an American looks like and America’s place in the world as a new imperialist power. But to young people it was just one wonder after the next, traveling around the world in a single day, observing inventions and entertainments few had ever seen. In my 50s as I wrote the poems, feeling the memory of my grandparents-as-children, remembering my own feelings as a child when they told me about their days at the Fair—this changed everything. It vaulted my perspective beyond my greatest expectations.

4. The personal translated into the poetic. Thinking particularly of my paternal grandmother, who lived to be 101, who was 12 at the time of the Fair, I began to sense the Fair in my body and spirit, feel it acting upon me as though I too had been a spectator of such wonders. This change of perspective helped me find my voice as a poet by writing persona poems and to find my form by shaping them as prose poems, which are visual analogs of postcards and snapshots, both items of great significance to Fairgoers. Also, because the Fair was remembered through souvenir mementos bought on the fairgrounds, the manuscript became inhabited by trinkets and knick-knacks stashed in the back of dresser drawers for years and years. It became tactile and real and grounded in the world of the senses.

5. Conclusion: This journey from historian to poet carried me “from the ground up to the moon.” I had thought that, as a scholar, my perspective was broad, but when I began to translate intellectual content based on research into persona prose poems voiced by people at the Fair, my perspective expanded considerably. The creative journey had made my perspective not only broad but deep

​