Project 7 Article Draft

My topic is poetry and I decided to write a profile piece on my friend Tara Hart, a poet whom I created a chapbook for last year as one of my projects for Visual and Verbal Rhetoric. The obvious choice for this piece is in Poets & Writers magazine--I really don't know if I can see it fitting anywhere else. If you have other magazine suggestions, I'd love to hear them. Stephanie warned me that profiles are difficult to write--any and all feedback is welcome. I only have half of the article written at this time.

Tara Hart: her call to poetry

Tara Hart makes her living through words—not by selling them, but by teaching them—so it is not surprising that she turned to words to help her cope with a traumatic life event. After earning her Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Maryland, College Park, Hart began her teaching career as an associate professor at Howard Community College in 1997. She spent years teaching freshman how to formulate and research essays in college composition and imparting her love for the classics to students of English and British literature. While Hart taught an occasional creative writing class, her primary focus was on teaching composition and literature. She worked her way up the ranks to full professor and in 2001 Hart was appointed chair of the English/World Languages Division at Howard Community College. Once chair, her teaching duties lessened and eventually halted so she could focus on the numerous administrative duties that the position entailed.

At this time in her life, “poet” was not a title one would associate with Hart. She began writing poetry at age eight and had a poem published in grade school. She wrote on and off growing up and wrote more seriously in graduate school, but she did not fervently pursue the art. Even though Hart was elated to have a poem, “The Platform of Absolute Rest”, published in the Baltimore City Paper in 2001, she primarily kept her writing to herself and had no strong desire to send her poems out. In 2004, however, this would change.

Hart and her husband Stephen Horvath, also an administrator at Howard Community College, were expecting their first child in 2004. Hart went into labor four months early and delivered Tessa Hart Horvath on October 12 who weighed just over one pound. In addition to being severely premature, Tessa was born with a rare blood disease—she died just five days later. No one can ever prepare for the death of a loved one, especially a child. Hart and her husband were drowning in sorrow and it was at this time poetry became as vital to Hart as breathing.

I sat down with Hart in April 2011 to talk about her poetry. She told me that the loss of her first daughter filled her with a “compelling need to read more poetry and to write to try to capture for [herself] or articulate what [she] was going through.” For Hart, poetry is not so much a profession as it is a calling, and a poet is something that you become. She thinks we are all poets, but in varying degrees of practice and acknowledgment. In 2004, poetry called to her in a way it had not before; it became her sustenance, something she needed, and a necessary part of her day and life.

The loss of Hart’s daughter filled her not only with sorrow, but also with anger. She was angry at circumstance, angry at God, angry at the church’s lack of solace in her time of need and grief. In 200?, she wrote “Patronized,” the pinnacle poem that ...[to be continued]