Westminster Welcomes Seventh Poet

Ms. Nye began her visit on a Monday evening, giving the Westminster community a lively reading of a number of her poems in the Werner Centennial Center. She talked about why she writes poetry, what inspired her to write various poems. She said she was very proud to be part of the Westminster poetry series and was “deeply touched by the care given to my poems here.” She ended the reading by singing a lullaby while playing the guitar.

The following morning, Ms. Nye met with faculty in the English Department and talked about poets, individual poems she has written, how she selects and arranges poems in her books, how teachers can include more poetry in the classroom and how her second-grade teacher in St. Louis helped spark her love of poetry. She told the faculty that they had noticed things in her poems that no one had ever mentioned to her before.

After meeting with the faculty, Ms. Nye spent the remainder of the day meeting with students in various English classes, giving them the opportunity to get to know a writer they had been studying in class. She invited their questions on any subject and urged them to write at least three lines in a writing notebook every day. “You will never regret it, and it will help you with all of your writing,” she said.

She told the students it takes her a minimum of three drafts and as many as 50 drafts, with space in between each draft, to write a poem. “Often you overwrite and then you cut it back,” she said. “I love the power of cutting words out and making it cleaner and cleaner. That is a creative act as well.”

Ms. Nye ended her visit by saying, “I am deeply touched by the Westminster community, the campus, the students, the teachers and the whole atmosphere here,” she added. “It is a place to be proud of and I am proud to have come here.”