Garrett Neese/Daily Mining Gazette Michigan Poet Laureate Nandi Comer speaks during an appearance at Portage Lake Public Library Friday night. She and M. Bartley Seigel, past Upper Peninsula poet laureate, read their poetry and took questions from the crowd of more than 30 people.

HOUGHTON — Michigan’s first poet laureate in more than 60 years stopped at the Portage Lake District Library Friday night, reading poems and answering questions with Houghton poet M. Bartley Seigel, a past Upper Peninsula poet laureate.

The Library of Michigan and Michigan Department of Education appointed Comer as state’s poet laureate in 2023. In the position, she meets with students, teachers and residents across the state to promote poetry, spoken word and literary arts.

Comer had always written poetry growing up in Detroit, but for a long time thought they would never make it past her notebooks. In her mid-20s, she was mentored by the poet Vievee Francis, who also helped establish the careers of other award-winning Detroit poets. Francis would give them weekly or monthly classes on how to pursue a master of fine arts degree, or literary journals that might one day publish their work.

“She gave us the recipe for, ‘This is how you enter the field and you get it done,'” she said.

When Comer’s work has an impact on someone, she hopes it can become a more lasting relationship.

Comer had recently been in Washington, D.C. for the Library of Congress’s Festival of Books. Despite an “awful reading” where the poets were constantly drowned out by surrounding noises, the one poem she read found a fan who’d never heard her work before. The student, who was heading to graduate school in two weeks for a master of fine arts degree, told Comer she was “shaking” after hearing her poem.

“I immediately gave her the book out of my hand and wrote my e-mail,” she said. “…MFAs are terribly hard for students, especially students of color, and she’s a Black woman. I was just like ‘OK, if we’re going to make some impact, let’s make some impact. Let’s keep it going.’ I was like ‘You need to send me work. I’m an editor.’ If somebody is like ‘I am doing this because you did it,’ I want to be like, ‘What do you need?'”

Even for a successful poet, the process can be humbling. The day Comer found out she’d been named poet laureate, she also got two rejection letters.

One piece of advice she received was a counterintuitive one: set a goal for rejection, so that even two letters means you’re 50 shy of your yearly goal.

“We’re all writing, which means we’re all engaged in trying to communicate,” she said. “I say that to say, ‘Write it. Don’t hold it back.'”

Comer read pieces from her collection “Tapping Out,” inspired by the Mexican wrestling she absorbed while living in Mexico, and pieces from a new project inspired by growing up in Detroit during the post-industrial era. Some come from her own experience; others blended other voices, such as one culled from interviews she did with Detroit techno artists about their lives and music.

Before Comer’s term ends in December, she’s visiting schools and libraries around Michigan.

As much as she views being poet laureate as an honor, she said, she doesn’t want to be the only one people know.

She makes a point of including local poets as part of her library visits. She’s also working to share the spotlight in her capstone project: a billboard campaign that highlights poets from across the state, pairing their photos with excerpts from their work.

From the start, Comer knew she wanted to include Seigel, whose work she first came across a year-and-a-half ago online.

“While he may not want to be ‘Hey is that you?’ in the grocery store, maybe don’t want people tugging at you to ask about that billboard, I want people to acknowledge their poets in their communities,” she said.

Seigel’s most resonant experience was visiting schools across the Upper Peninsula as poet laureate. While the communities all varied, it’s generally working-class. Having a “tall, bearded, gruff-voiced dude” telling kids it was fine to write poetry can be important, he said.

“Poetry is probably our very first art form,” he said. “Symbolic language is what we do, right? It’s not frontal lobes and opposable thumbs, it’s symbolic language.”

Comer will also talk with the Upper Peninsula’s current poet laureate, Beverly Matherne, next week in Marquette at the Michigan Humanities event “Bridging Michigan: Building Understanding Through Poetry.” The conversation will take place at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Northern Center in Marquette.