City’s Poet Laureate plans to write something for the bicentennial this year
By David Blanchette
The City of Jacksonville’s Poet Laureate, Andy Mitchell, had his bardic beginnings in high school when he wrote a poem to avoid having to get up in front of his fellow classmates in senior English.
“Teacher Tom Smith gave us the option of reciting the work of a famous poet in class or to write an original poem and just hand it in,” Mitchell recalled. “I thought there was no way I was going to get up in front of the class, I didn’t feel comfortable doing that at the time, so I decided well, I guess I’ll write a poem.”
Mitchell didn’t think much of his effort, but his teacher did.
“I guess Mr. Smith took pity on me and gave me an A,” Mitchell said. “It planted the idea that poetry was something that somebody could do.”
Mitchell didn’t write another poem until several years later when he was inspired during a walk home from classes at Illinois College.
“It was autumn and I was crunching the leaves as I walked, so I just went home and wrote a poem about the whole feeling of autumn,” Mitchell said. “That was the first poem that I actually wrote on my own for myself.”
Mitchell’s poetry, published primarily on social media, has since attracted a lot of attention and inspired Mayor Andy Ezard in August 2024 to bestow Mitchell with the honorary title of Poet Laureate for the city.
“It sounds awfully highfalutin, but it’s an honor and it’s a way to encourage others to express themselves through poetry,” Mitchell said. “I’m using the designation as an opportunity to write something for the city’s bicentennial in 2025.”
The Jacksonville Poet Laureate didn’t envision his local literary notoriety during his young adult years. Mitchell attended Illinois College for a few years, lived in Los Angeles for a while, and then moved to Massachusetts where he audited college classes and canvassed for Greenpeace “which was not very fun, going door to door,” he said.
Mitchell then moved back to Jacksonville, worked for the State of Illinois for a while, worked at the Paper Chase bookstore in Springfield, and then took a job at Our Town Books in downtown Jacksonville. Mitchell purchased the local bookstore from its original owners and operated the eclectic shop until December 2018, when he became a librarian at the Jacksonville Public Library.
Mitchell is surrounded at the library by the works of poets he admires, including Sylvia Plath, Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney, John Berryman, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman and William Shakespeare. But his favorite is the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.
“His poetry kind of knocked my socks off and I’ve been trying to put my socks on ever since,” Mitchell said with a chuckle. “Later on I heard these recordings he had done with the BBC, and his majestic baritone voice seemed to be at odds with this Bohemian poet who drank himself to death. He’s kind of this mythical character, and I relate to his inscrutable poems.”
Mitchell is also a fan of American Poet Laureate and Chicago native, the late Gwendolyn Brooks, and got to meet Brooks when she spoke at Illinois College.
“My dad didn’t like to read anything besides sports books but he wanted to go with me to hear Gwendolyn Brooks speak,” Mitchell remembered. “He insisted that I wait afterwards and introduce myself and I’m glad that he did, because she was so gracious and encouraging because I had just started writing more poetry at that time.”
Mitchell draws his poetry inspiration from many sources and often writes about the themes of love and death.
“I seem to write a lot of elegies and eulogies for people when they pass, and when my mother-in-law died I wrote a lot of poems about her,” Mitchell said. “But sometimes I’ll get inspired by seeing someone on the street and just write about them. Or I might take an actual event and fictionalize it if it serves to make the poem better.”
Mitchell learned a thing or two from another well-known local writer.
“I talked to the late Ken Bradbury once, I was concerned about combining fact and fiction,” Mitchell said. “And he said to me, ‘do you think anything I write is true? Of course not, I make everything up.’ That was very liberating to me.”
Mitchell writes poems that rhyme as well as those that do not. He’s generally a stickler for grammar but likes to break the rules occasionally with grammar or punctuation if it serves the poem. And as the city’s latest Poet Laureate, following the late Joe Kozma, Mitchell wants to introduce more people to poetry and has spoken to local schools and retirement communities about the literary art form.
“A lot of young people, high school age especially, kind of flirt with poetry,” Mitchell said. “It’s a good way to express yourself.”
