Tara Walker
Sample Work
Artist Discipline: Literary
Artist Bio
Tara G. Walker is a poet, jewelry designer and arts educator living in Chicago. She graduated magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa with a BA in English and Creative Writing from Coe College and received her MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Tara grew up in Denver, Colorado and attended the Denver School of the Arts magnet school from grades 6-12, giving her an appreciation for multiple artistic pursuits and the vital role that art plays in education and individual development. Tara received the Paul Engle prize and the Heritage Club prize for poetry in 2005. Her chapbook Sewn Into the Nest was released earlier this year by Icebox press.
Artist Statement
I recently wrote this statement in my journal: "I am a poet because I'm interested in everything." It was such a ridiculously simply thing to say, and yet I feel that it pretty much sums up why I do what I do. The capacity for poetry to discover, to explore the world and document the most ordinary but incredibly significant things is boundless. I do my best writing when I find myself immersed in a subject or question. Poetry is another form of research -- of trying to understand the world through observation. I am especially fascinated by the visual possibilties of language. In my own work, I often rearrange and reinterpret language to give a unique and unexpected visual presentation of poetry, utlizing borrowed and recycled text and images from a variety of sources including vintage and contemporary print advertisements, old books, photographs of signage and even crossword puzzles. I employ constraint-based techniques including the rearrangement and erasure of letters and words, revealing the continuum on which all language exists, despite its function. I am constantly exploring new sources from which to get new and exciting material and I like to encourage students to do the same -- look under every rock and up every tree and in the bottom of every cereal box -- poetry is everywhere.
Educational Philosophy
As a teacher I seek to make poetry more accessible to students, to take it off its high shelf and make it relevant to their lives. All of us, especially as children, have a natural creativity and curiosity within us, and unfortunately we learn to push it aside. With students, I try to help them understand that they all have the ability to be good observers, to notice the things that other people pass by. In "Writing Down the Bons," Natalie Goldberg says creativity is the opposite of an inward need for control, "it is a loss of control." In environments like public school where students are constantly having to reel themselves in, to behave properly and write complete sentences and have the correct answers, writing poetry is a private space, a free space. It is the process of seeing and it is also the process of letting go -- of letting yourself unlearn the rules in the space that you've cleared to be creative in. I like to provide my students with their own private journals that they can customize and truly make their own, to serve as a home for their brainstorms and curiosity. I challenge my students to think about the sources for poems, igniting discussion regarding the humble origins of ideas, from lists of words to favorite colors to street signs, pulling something large and limitless from something small and ordinary.