All eyes were on the woman in the flowered dress standing at the front of the room. With a book in one hand and a microphone in the other, she read to the closed-eyed audience as they listened to her every word.
“To actually hear someone putting words to everything that you feel,” said Loye Barnard, a member of the audience. “It’s a lovely thing to do.”
Bard & Broadside, a poetry festival held in Gainesville, hosted a creative writing workshop and poetry reading that Lola Haskins led at the Alachua County Library District headquarters on Sunday. The festival is the only one of its kind completely dedicated to poetry in North Central Florida.
Haskins, a longtime Gainesville resident, has published 15 books of poetry and three of prose. Her work has been published in The Atlantic, the London Magazine and other publications as well as been broadcast on NPR and BBC Radio.
“Lola has been making art for quite a while and I thought it would be cool to feature her,” said E. Stanley Richardson, founder and director of ARTSPEAKSgnv and Alachua County poet laureate. “I thought it would be cool to have someone local.”
Richardson’s organization has organized this festival annually for the past three years. Each year, it picks a featured poet. While last year’s featured poet, Natalie Graham, is from Gainesville and earned her MFA at the University of Florida, Haskins is the first to currently reside in the city.
Haskins has taught workshops prior to Sunday’s, including at Santa Fe College. She said she loves spreading poetry because it has been so important to her life.
“I love to help people. It’s my favorite thing in the world,” Haskins said. “My goal in teaching, in working with people who are aspiring or anybody else, is to teach them to be independent of me.”
Haskins is a former University of Florida professor who taught computer science at the school, she said. She’s had an array of jobs from teaching to working in mental health.
Haskins said she never intended to write professionally, despite always being passionate about poetry. While studying at Stanford University, her favorite subject was Greek theater, she said. So, Haskins moved to Greece.
“I had to see what it was in the landscape that made them want to write the way they did,” she said. “When I found why and how they got to do that, somehow that was what solidified my own determination to write. I wasn’t thinking professional but passionately.”
Haskins has lived all over the world from California to Greece to England. But she said Gainesville has a special place in her heart.
“The great thing about Gainesville is that whatever you want to know there’s someone here who knows it,” Haskins said. “The second great thing about Gainesville is that you can hear a lot of languages spoken. It makes me happy to live in a place where there are people from everywhere.”
Her time in Florida has also inspired some of her work. Nature and the outdoors are the focus of some of her writing, and the local landscape has contributed to that. Haskins said that one of her books is only about walking in the woods and kayaking.
“People say they have landscapes of their hearts…they’re part of my soul and so are the landscapes of Florida,” she said. “I love the woods. I absolutely adore being on the water. It just feeds me.”
Haskins chose to read from her new collection “Like Zeros, Like Pearls” on Sunday. The book, like much of her other work, pulls from her love of nature. It focuses on the human attitude towards insects, according to its preface.
“I was very intent on listening to her read anything,” Barnard said about Haskins. “She’s such an amazing spirit of all of Earth and the universe. She’s a connector and the interconnectedness shows through all of her work.”
While poetry may seem like a one-person effort, Haskins said she loves to collaborate with other artists. She’s worked with UF music faculty to create recordings and a local dance company called Dance Alive National Ballet to create pieces that combined poetry, dance and music, among others.
Judy Skinner, choreographer in residence at Dance Alive, has worked with Haskins personally on two projects while the company itself has collaborated on three. She said Haskins has created poetry for the ballet and even portrayed her own character in it.
“Poetry is not easy for me,” Skinner said. “But for some weird reason hers speaks to me. There are times when I’m looking through and I have to fight to have the words make sense to me. Lola’s poetry speaks to me. It just does.”
Beyond just her poetic talent, Skinner said that Haskins was an easy artist to collaborate with. She said that together they presented Haskins poetry in a more tangible way.
“It was more than just a private thing,” Skinner said. “It went out and touched other people in different ways.”
Even beyond Haskins, both Skinner and Richardson preached the impact of the arts on people. Skinner said that the local area is fortunate to have a strong arts community.
Richardson agreed, saying Gainesville is lucky to have scholars and artists from all over the world. However, as an Alachua County native, he hopes his organization and this event can work to make an even bigger impact on the rural community surrounding the city.
“As a kid no one ever told me that I could be an artist,” Richardson said. “I want to make sure that little kids who grew up in rural communities like me can know that the thing they’re doing is cool. It is a cool thing that you can be a poet, you can be an artist.”