Lansing Poetry Club Keeping Prose Alive in Mid-Michigan

The Lansing Poetry Club has been supporting poets and advocating for a state poet laureate for 70 years.

According to excerpts from the article.

Now celebrating its 70th year of existence, the Lansing Poetry Club has been a longtime advocate for verse in Michigan’s capital city, including a stalled effort to create a poet laureate position for the state. 

Len Petersen, of Lansing, who has been a club member for 10 years, said bills that would have created the mostly symbolic position passed the House and Senate in 2000 but were never signed into law by Gov. John Engler. Dennis North, president of the Lansing Poetry Club, said more than 40 states have poet laureates.

At one time (1952-1959), Edgar Guest was Michigan’s. Guest, Michigan’s only formal poet laureate, was mostly known for his daily, syndicated poems, which appeared in the Detroit Free Press and 300 other newspapers from the 1920s to the 1950s. North, who writes poetry in rhyme, free verse and haiku, said the idea of having a poet laureate goes back several hundred years to Britain. The United States has had a poet laureate since 1937.

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