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Poetry power Ashland High School students listen Wednesday to poet Natalie Diaz read selections from her book "When My Brother was An Aztec." Mail Tribune / Denise Baratta Monday Oct 24, 2016 at 3:21 PM Oct 25, 2016 at 2:12 PM By Joe Zavala for the Mail Tribune For Natalie Diaz, every syllable matters and is there for a reason, so it's no accident when she uses the word “lucky” to describe the knee injury that ended her professional basketball career. The acclaimed author of “When My Brother Was An Aztec,” her debut book of poems that made the 2013 PEN/Open Book Award shortlist, Diaz was shooting hoops with some former teammates at Old Dominion University when she blew out her knee. A gym rat who loved to read but didn’t write often, she was convinced by a professor on campus to make good use of her rehab time on campus by taking some writing classes. Diaz did, and she was surprised to discover that much of what she loved about playing ball she also felt while trying to express herself on the page. “Writing ... still makes me quiet inside, still lets me escape, the same way basketball did,” she told a group of about 70 Ashland High School students last week during a workshop put on Chautauqua Poets and Writers. After the students dispersed, Diaz elaborated on what it’s like to share her innermost feelings before an audience of strangers. The former point guard said it’s not unlike pulling up for a jump shot in front of a packed house at Old Dominion back when she played in the late 1990s. “It’s almost the same kind of ritual for reading poetry that it is for basketball,” she said. “In the beginning, I used to try to dress like I would dress for a big event, and then I thought, you know, I need to be able to feel like I can move the way I would move even on the court. Even when I read, it’s kind of physical. I move my feet around. So it’s similar in a way, and it is a performance.” Diaz’s work, which delves into such subjects as drug abuse and violence, has been praised for its “mythic power,” dark humor and skillful use of metaphor. Ashland High students were introduced to all three during Diaz’s reading of “Catching Copper,” part of her “Aztec” collection. Clad in a black, leather jacket, blue jeans and a pair of Nike sneakers, Diaz enunciated with melodic precision, carefully unfolding each word. Her eyes moved back and forth from the sheets in front of her on the podium to the audience, and she rocked forward in time to the final syllable of each stanza. “My brothers break and dance for their bullet — the jerk, the stanky leg. They pop, lock and drop for their bullet, a move that has them writhing on the ground — the worm, my brothers call it. Yes, my brothers go all worm for their bullet.” Diaz told the students that poetry is “a way for me to engage with things that are happening in the world,” such as police shootings. Not that she’s limited herself to heavy subject matters. Near the end of Wednesday’s workshop, she talked about the inspiration behind a poem titled, “I Watch Her Eat the Apple.” As she sat in a workshop, Diaz watched someone eat an apple and challenged herself to write a “love poem” describing something as ordinary as that seemingly mundane task. The result was a 349-word ode that somehow manages to inject a sense of wonder into a subject that turns out to be not so ordinary after all. “She twists the stem, pulls it like the pin of a grenade, and I just know somewhere someone is sitting alone on a porch, bruised, opened up to their wet, white ribs, riddled by her teeth — lucky.” Diaz’s surgical precision with language came up in a question-and-answer session when a girl asked why she chooses to write poetry over prose. Diaz said she is drawn to the discipline that poetry demands. She also prefers what she called the “momentum” of poetry, and used a basketball analogy to illustrate her point: The Cleveland Cavaliers withstanding the surges of the Golden State Warriors to win the 2016 NBA championship. And when LeBron James drives and dunks, she explained, there’s a lot more going on that you can’t appreciate until you re-examine the slow-motion replay from several different angles. “It feels a lot like that to me, and I think that’s why it feels so important to me,” she said. “It feels slow. It feels very precise, very intentional in ways that sometimes prose doesn’t because you know you’re supposed to go from here to here and you’ll get there, so we’re just willing to push through. Whereas poetry sometimes feels like it slows you down, that I’m aware of my body and aware of how things matter, and I like that attention to detail.” As Diaz was gathering her things, AHS sophomore Jazmin Rivera asked whether there were any copies of “Aztec” left to purchase. Diaz told the girl to keep her money. Later, Rivera received a signed copy. “I’ve never thought of writing anything, ever,” Rivera said when asked why she wanted the book. “I don’t really like to read. But just how I can relate to her started a spark, kind of. It inspired me. And meeting her and hearing her speak, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have felt that connection if I just read her work. … I felt a real connection, not between me and her or me and her work, but between me and my own family and my own experiences.” Diaz, a creative writing professor at Arizona State University who’s on the back end of a 17-day regional tour, said the exchange with Rivera is why she makes it a habit to visit local high schools while on tour. “I just wish I had found poetry earlier,” she said. “I didn’t get it until college, but I think, especially now — there’s so few ways for young people to express themselves that aren’t fast, things like Facebook. But to really stop and feel their feelings, and I think poetry is a place where you can do that.” — Joe Zavala is a reporter for the Ashland Daily Tidings. Reach him at 541-821-0829 or [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter at @Joe_Zavala99.