A Defense of Poetry: storytelling within the bounds of verse

Katrina’s talk will not demystify the art form; rather, she will show poetry’s role through abstraction, impression, expression, and even performance as a means of glorifying paradox. That same paradox at the heart of the Gospel is what breaths within the lines of great poetic works.

Katrina Atsinger is an Adjunct Professor of English at the United States Naval Academy; amateur poet; compulsive essay writer; life-long dancer; Christian school volunteer on the East and West coasts; dual citizen of the U.K. and U.S.; and, with her husband, co-creator of poetic events.

When Katrina was 13, she performed Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and won a regional poetry recitation contest. In the experience of performance, she discovered that “still point of the turning world” where the “dance is” though she had no means of such expression or understanding at the time, because she was yet to encounter Eliot! Reading for a degree in English Literature and Language at Oxford University intensified her exposure to the variations in form, fashion, and genius from Anglo-Saxon to the present but it was only when she started teaching British poetry to 10th Graders in California that her personal connection with the art form flourished.

For a season that included four years in The Netherlands, motherhood became her poetic experience, but she craved a return to more formal study. A move to Annapolis eventually led to such an opportunity and a proper venture into the Great Books that sit behind the greatest works of English Literature as she pursued her master’s degree at St. John’s College, where she could really attempt to understand Eliot and where her award-winning essay on Joyce is published in the St. John’s library.

Five years ago, she re-entered the classroom in a teaching capacity and now, every Spring, she takes her Plebe-year Midshipmen on a rapid journey through the poetic landscape of the English language. Their first formal essay of the semester is “A Defense of Poetry” - a worthy exercise for men and women who need to make an intentional effort to encounter and grow that part of themselves unserved by STEM and the mental, physical, and technical demands of their routine and highly challenging existence.

Whether entertaining preschoolers every week at the Annapolis Bookstore (now Old Fox Books), recording “salon” videos for Elan Ensemble during the Covid shutdown or matching and reciting poetry to a program of baroque classical music and historic seasonal favorites in the ballroom at the Hammond Harwood House, Katrina continues to enjoy recitation and composition of poetry in its many forms. Most recently, she is preparing to narrate the libretto for a new one act ballet, performed by the Ballet Theater of Maryland.

Host or Publisher Eliot Society