Meet Julie E. Bloemeke | Poet and Author

We had the good fortune of connecting with Julie E. Bloemeke and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Julie E., is your business focused on helping the community? If so, how?
How about this – how does being a poet help community or the world?

As a poet, I am also a communicator, though maybe not in the way one might suspect. In our results-driven culture, we tend to anchor communication to capitalism, to how we can profit, streamline, multitask. Often being a communicator can be anything but.

My purpose as a poet is more in the “commune” aspect of communication – to “get low” with, to serve as a conduit, to create space within my own inner work to allow the energy of the thing to travel through me to get to the page. One must listen and trust the poem to emerge, all with the assurance that we will eventually arrive into some form of understanding. There are not necessarily timelines for this – it is about the expanse and the work, but also about the discernment. As Lucille Clifton says, “Poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing.”

I also bring my reading experience into how I shape and hone the poem on the page. Ultimately, I hope I create space for the poem to come to print as it would wish itself to be, never in the way that I alone might see it. It is being of service to the work. It is a form of prayer, of devotion, of art being an act of worship. It is something I have always felt, but only began to understand in my studies with James Dickey and Jane Hirshfield, and it has become my practice in how I also move through the world – or at least hope I do. As artists, we are more in community than we often know, quite likely because of the solitude the work requires. Being able to ask this question of Ethan Hawke was a reminder of the reach of this.

We tend to forget too that part of communication is truly listening. That is also how I make space for the poem – by following where art takes us, and by continually learning from that process, and actively resisting complacency in it.
To return to your question – how does being a poet help community? Poems themselves are alchemists; they teach us things we didn’t think we knew. When they resonate, when they hit that exact vibration of words with such precision that you cannot forget them, that is where they also do their work. They remind us we are never alone in it; that there is always a way we are seen in it. They companion us. And in our depths, when it seems we have nothing else, we have these poems, giving back to us, holding us even still.

Think of poems that have never left you, precisely for their precision: Dryden calls a thorn “perplexing” – how else to be so exacting about the thorn-ness of the thorn? Perplexing. We can’t let go of James Dickey’s “sovereign floating of joy,” or the “lechery so solid/you could build a table on it” from Lynn Emanuel, or, perhaps, to conclude with Marianne Moore – “this is life/to do less would be nothing but dishonesty.”

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
My first full-length collection of poetry, Slide to Unlock, was published March 12, 2020 with Sibling Rivalry Press. A book that navigates the boundaries of intimacy in screen culture, it had an oddly serendipitous and utterly inconceivable arrival window into the world. Reading poems about how we experience touch without physical touch over Zoom added an unforeseen layer of interpretation within the poems that none of us could have anticipated – except maybe the poems themselves. And yet, that is where poetry resides – in all of the spaces we cannot possibly fathom.

In that same congregation of all that seems beyond the possible, I also co-edited (along with Dustin Brookshire) an anthology of poems that pay homage to Dolly Parton called Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology (Madville Publishing, 2023). This September, selections of poems and Dolly songs will be performed by a Broadway cast at Joe’s Pub in NYC. To work with Poetry Well and The Public Theater is, as Dolly might say, “beyond compare.” To witness contributor poems leap from the page and into song, performance, and the encompassing love of Dollyverse space – spangles included – speaks to the power of collaboration in the arts. We could not be more humbled or thrilled – and we can hardly wait to celebrate this fall. It is hard not to note what a contrast this is to the necessity of social distance that ushered in Slide to Unlock.

I am a believer in putting dreams out there, so I will share a few: I hope to one day read the Shakespeare-and-Company-based poems in Slide to Unlock at Shakespeare and Company in Paris. Residencies in Italy are also on my list, as is another on Côte d’Azur, in part because Monet continues to be a throughline in my work – for his paintings, yes, but also because of his translated letters on artistic process, specifically in Antibes: “I am fencing and wrestling with the sun. And what a sun it is!” I hope to one day witness that light, to see how it finds itself through language and to the page.

I am working on a second collection now, more rooted in the physical body, but also in the way we perceive and receive visual art, and come to experience self-interrogation through it.

In other writing orbits, I am a contract-based manuscript editor and consultant, and a communications specialist. I also am available for guest lectures and I teach online poetry workshops. You can find out more on my website at jebloemeke.com

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
I get jazzed by mixing old faves with new experiences. We’d make a stop at the Atlanta Hyatt (I mean, how can you not?) and dive into mocktails, dinner, and views at Polaris. Walks around Decatur and Castleberry Hill are a must, as is catching a reading at Georgia Center for the Book. I’d work in a service at Ebeneezer Baptist, a visit to the MLK center, and high tea at Dr. Bombay’s Underwater Tea Party. And, I have been itching to try Sober Social and Slutty Vegan too.

Art forays: MODA, MOCA, Callanwolde Fine Arts Center – one of the first places I read poems publicly after moving to Atlanta that remains dear to me. Hiking and the falls at Vickery Creek in Roswell are a fun aside, as is a stint on the BeltLine too. Treats: Leon’s in Decatur for drinks, Pops Coffee in Roswell for a latte, definitely King of Pops, and Jardí (along with the newly launched Atlanta Candy Kitchen – I mean, dark chocolate turtles, enough said)!

I’d bring in a little EW&F “spice of life” with a turn at Johnny’s Hideaway, and since I am about meditation and deep relaxation, I would also schedule a visit to Jeju and a massage at the hidden gem LaVida Massage in Sugar Hill.

And I am always up for a great rooftop pool party, so that is a thought too.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
My first book, Slide to Unlock, would not have come into the world without dedicated time away from the world. Being able to commune with the poems, to attune to words, takes on a whole other resonance when we are able to be in places of creative expanse, untied from the demands of life. Yes, we can – and must – write in the whirl; I am thinking of drafting poems in carpool, editing in coffee shops, jotting down lines on receipts. However, when it comes to engaging with the intention of a book, to really listening to how the poems are in conversation, that requires us to do the most rare of creative acts: to be.

It took me a long time to understand that part of how poems choose us is when we also choose – to look out the window in contemplation, to take long walks (without music), to engage with presence, to meditate, to connect deeper.
This is a complex way of saying my books would not be here without residency space, without being able to step out from the speed of life, and step into the depth of the work. The abiding support of Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, South Porch Artists Residency, and the Bowers House has been essential. These places too are creators; they nurture sanctuary. VCCA and South Porch invite us to be in community, to have dedicated conversation musing over creative process – a gift which only opens us further into the knowing: of self as artist, of service as literary citizen, as conduit for the work. How does one even begin to offer thanks for this?

I also owe much to a cottage on Bird Lake that has been so generously shared with me every summer – even as it has changed hands over the years. Once my childhood family cottage, it has become a testament. Three families – all beginning as strangers, and later becoming friends –- have each welcomed me into that sacred space to write, and all with such reverence, unmitigated joy, and kindness. Their commitment, and their love and support for the arts, is a continual reminder of the reach (and serendipitous magic) of true community.

Website: https://jebloemeke.com

Instagram: @julieebloemeke

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julie-e-bloemeke/

Twitter: @jebloemeke

Other: https://linktr.ee/julieebloemeke

Image Credits
1. Self-portrait by Julie E. Bloemeke in Toledo, Ohio
2. Photo by Doug Hinebaugh (at Pineapple Press and Design with Sven Olaf Nelson)
3. Photo by Julie E. Bloemeke (Shakespeare and Company)
4. Photo by Julie E. Bloemeke (Toledo Museum of Art)
5. Photo by Anne Stameshkin (Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology reading)
6. Photo by Julie E. Bloemeke (with Nancy Drew anthology)
7. Photo by Julie E. Bloemeke (with Slide to Unlock on Bird Lake)