Star Coulbrooke on Poetry

Interviewed by Mia Nielsen

Star Coulbrooke learned to call herself a poet at thirteen. She grew up in an Idaho farmhouse surrounded by the classics: Robert Frost and Edna St. Vincent Millay, but it wasn’t until she enrolled in a speech class that she discovered her own voice. 

“Just before the class ended, the teacher asked us to write a poem, so I wrote a poem about my dad. It was in rhyming quatrains. My dad just loved to be outdoors. I'd never shut him in with all those chairs and floors. And so it went on like that,” Coulbrooke said.  “I took it up and put it on her desk, because it just came out, because my dad died when I was 11.” 

Her teacher asked where she had copied the poem from.  

“When I convinced her that I had written the poem, she made the class stay after the bell and read them my poem. And so of course, how could you not be a poet after that?” Coulbrooke said. 

Coulbrooke’s home of Riverdale sits five miles north of the bigger city Preston, Idaho, a town which today boasts a population of about 5000 people. 

“There wasn't anything to do but read,” she said. “We were out there in Riverdale, where the nearest house was a quarter mile away, and it was my uncle's, and the next house was half a mile away, and it was another uncle's.” 

Between what she called the angst and boredom of rural childhood; she found the heartbeat of her surroundings.  

“I had the emotion and the rhythm of nature, the river, and books like poetry books and Bible verses and things that were musical,” Coulbrooke said.  

Her advice to aspiring writers is simple: read. 

“Read the old poets as well as the new poets, and read aloud and listen to your breath. Listen to your heartbeat as you read the poems and take breaths where you think the breath is important because poetry is not something you can just generate through words. Poetry is something that's generated through the emotions, as any of the old classic poets will tell you, and it's important to study a lot of different kinds of poetry and model the poets that you really love, and then find out how you can break away from that modeling and be your own voice.” 

Coulbrooke taught poetry writing, directed Utah State University’s writing center, organized Helicon West, a bi-monthly reading series, and served as the Poet Laureate of Logan, Utah. 

As Poet Laureate, she brought poetry to unexpected corners of the city-poetry on the bus, poetry with dogs, and poetry at a gravestone cemetery, where the flawed monuments are kept.  

Coulbrooke encouraged local writers trying to find their voice to come to Helicon West. 

"There's always somebody in open mic who reads a poem that just blows you away,” she said. “They come to Helicon West and they're scared, and they get up and they read it anyway, and people clap, and they are so surprised and happy that their words really mean something. I wish every student would come to Helicon West and just sit and listen, or bring something and get brave and read it for us.” 

For Logan readers: Helicon West takes place on the second and fourth Thursday of the month at the Logan City Library. Recordings are also available online. 

For those elsewhere: these moments of quiet bravery happen at poetry readings around the world. Bring a poem, listen, learn, and if you’re feeling brave, share your work.