On Jan. 15 at the historic Seibels House, Ed Madden was officially announced as the city’s first poet laureate for the city of Columbia. Madden is an associate professor of English and the director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at USC.
“I am excited to have been chosen for this position and really honored to be the first poet selected,” Madden said in an interview with Free Times. “Columbia is a city so rich in writers. I’m also very humbled.”
Prior to serving as Columbia’s City Poet Laureate, Madden was the writer in residence at the Riverbanks Zoo’s Botanical Garden where he encouraged members of the community to engage in the writing of poetry and exploration of literary arts. He has also written three books of poetry, with a fourth, “Ark,” due out in 2016.
“I anticipate learning the city,” Madden said in an interview with USC. “One of the things I want to do is to get to know the stories of the city, historical and contemporary. I feel like my job is not just to promote the arts but to document this city at this moment.”
This new-to-Columbia position was created in Oct. 2014 by the city and the nonprofit organization, One Columbia for Arts and History.
“There are measurable ways to gauge the effectiveness of the position: How many workshops did you set up? How many readings? How many young writers did you help get into print?” he said in a USC interview. “But there are also less tangible measures, like how strong a sense of literary community we build and how the literary arts contribute to the life and livelihood of the city.”
As the poet laureate, Madden will have a $2,000 annual budget to work with throughout the year in order to promote and strengthen the fine arts community within local schools, libraries and writing groups.
Madden hopes that his poetry and opportunity as poet laureate will reach deeper than just poetry and offer a unique perspective on life experiences.
“If poetry can be one of the ways we explore what’s deeply human about us, it would be really nice to create a forum for exploring ways in which words can also be part of the healing process,” Madden said in his USC interview.
Madden’s first readings as official City Poet Laureate will be on Jan. 20 at the State of the City Address and Feb. 17 at the commemoration events for the 150th anniversary of the burning of Columbia, but he hopes his appointment as poet laureate will be more than just poetry readings and work-hops. Madden hopes that his poetry will offer a unique perspective on life experiences.
“I’m poet laureate, my focus is poetry, but I think my charge is to promote the literary arts in general,” Madden said, in his interview with USC. “I want a community where we not only know each other but support each other and are willing to critique each other. There’s a point in building a community where you move past the rah-rah promotion of the arts to serious reflection on the quality of the arts. In the literary community, we still need to do both, I think.”
Madden will serve the city of Columbia for a four-year term beginning this year.