Hello and welcome to The Art Engager podcast with me, Claire Bown. I'm here to share techniques and tools to help you engage with your audience and bring art objects and ideas to life. So let's dive into this week's show. Hello, and welcome to a new episode of The Art Engager. I'm Claire Bown, and today I'm chatting with Tina Demirdjian, a poet and educator who has spent over 30 years transforming how people connect with both poetry and visual art.
But before we dive in, I just want to share a quick note. If you found my resources such as this podcast, the free downloads on my website, or my blog helpful and would like to support my work, you can become a friend of The Art Engager on Patreon, or you could pick up a copy of my book, The Art Engager Reimagining Guided Experiences in Museums. Thank you for your support. Now let me introduce today's guest.
Tina Demirdjian is a poet and educator who has been teaching poetry in Los Angeles for more than 30 years. Tina's someone who in her own words. Changes people's minds specifically about poetry, about themselves, and about their relationship to creative expression. Tina works in schools, museums, and businesses with a focus on second language learners and immigrant communities. Now, Tina didn't expect to become a poet.
In her late twenties, she volunteered at a community center where a poet invited her to try writing that first poem excited her so much, she had to stop on the freeway to write down more lines. Now she brings that same excitement to her workshops, believing she can change people's minds about poetry and help them discover they can write. Tina works with museums and cultural institutions, including running artful conversations at the Brand library.
She's particularly interested in how museums create different atmospheres that support creative work. Tina also trains young poets to facilitate workshops in their communities. Now in our conversation, we explore how visual arts can serve as a bridge into creative writing, why museums provide unique environments for this kind of work and practical approaches like using curator texts and artwork titles as poetry prompts.
We discuss what makes museum spaces different from classrooms for creative expression, and how Tina's methods can help engage diverse audiences, including English language learners. This episode is perfect if you are curious about incorporating poetry into museum programming or want practical ideas for using art to unlock creative expression in your visitors. Enjoy. Hi, Tina, and welcome to The Art Engager Podcast.
Thank you so much, Claire. It's such a pleasure to be here. Well, I'm delighted you could join us here. So could you tell us who you are and what you do? It's so interesting. I've thought about sometimes how I even wanna answer this question at times. One, I am a poet and I've been writing poetry and teaching poetry for more than 30 years in Los Angeles, in schools, museums, and businesses. But the other part of that answer is I change people's minds.
I change people's minds about poetry, Sometimes really about themselves and their relation to poetry and their relation to others, and that's how I like to see myself, somebody who allows someone else to be surprised about themselves and others.
I love that. That's a really beautiful way of describing yourself and the work that you do, and obviously that's the reason I invited you on the podcast. We had a lovely initial chat when I was in LA. Yes. We talked about your work and how it relates to art to museums, the work you do in schools as well. So can you tell us a little bit about how you ended up where you are today?
I will try to make this concise because this story sometimes becomes long, but I can say that it happens in a couple of different ways. First, it was the journey just writing poetry, which is the last thing I ever expected to do. This is why I love to teach poetry. This was not on my radar in my late twenties. And so I was interested, however, in community centers and folklore and storytelling.
And so I happened to go to a community center named Homeland Neighborhood Cultural Center, and I wanted to volunteer my time. I had already graduated college. I was taking some classes at UCLA, had just moved to the west coast from Washington, DC. And I thought, I'll volunteer. And there was a poet in residence and he said, why don't you come up and write poetry with us tonight? And I thought, I don't write poetry, but I stayed.
I wrote, I even took the freeway home, which was a seven 10 freeway to get home to Arcadia where my parents lived, and I was so desperate to stop on the freeway to write a line of a poem. And excited. and I thought, what is happening? What is happening? This is not happened to me before. And so it is with that excitement that I really show up every time I teach.
It's so palpable those moments that I was waiting to stop on the freeway and instead I did wait to get off at the exit and sat at the seven 11 parking lot, which perhaps wasn't also a very great idea, but I couldn't help it. At that point, my life had changed. The other part that brings me to what I do though, is when I came across a poet and just approached him and let him know how much I liked his work. It was my first poetry reading actually, and he said, I liked your work too.
Have you thought about teaching? And I said, teaching? I've been writing for three months. I started to laugh and he said, well, when you are ready, come and find me. And immediately I understood when I went home that night that I needed to find him again. And as luck would have it, or as serendipity occurs, we were asked to be in the same performance group together.
And so started my journey in thinking of myself, not only as a poet, but also as someone who taught poetry, even though it was my beginnings. And I wanna add this other part that's important to me because how I got to connecting it with visual art, which is really important, is that, when I finally started reaching out to school districts and connecting with people to find out how am I gonna do this job? How will I teach poetry? Where am I gonna teach it?
I came across this woman, Lila Silver, who worked for LA Unified School District, and she worked for the Emergency Immigrant Education Program, EIEP, and she said to me, ' I would like to use poetry to work with second language learners because so many of the gifted and talented students, which is GATE, which is a program in the United States for gifted and talented education, would bring poetry to those students, but I think my students should have access to that.'
That's really where my journey as an educator began working with second language learners. And then I had to think, well, how am I gonna do this? How am I gonna connect with these students? Remembered all the postcards I had from my travels in England and in Europe at the time in the eighties. And I would love to collect all these postcards. And remember back then people actually wrote you postcards. Absolutely. So, so I had postcards also that I had kept, and so I thought I'll start using art.
And that's how I started to be connected. With art and poetry as well.
And you mentioned there that you use these postcards that you had been collecting for many years and use that as a bridge To get students English language learners, second language learners into writing poetry. But what is it, do you think about visual art that makes it so powerful for poetry writing for creative expression?
Well, first of all, I think it's part of creating the ease that I talk about because it gives everyone something to see. And when I teach, I notice that when, even though I talk about the five senses, the one that most people connect with is what they see. So right away the art, whether it's the postcard or it's actually in the museum gallery, people can start to feel at ease when I start to ask them questions about simile. I talk about what simile is: comparing to things using 'like an as'.
And at first they might not know what the word means, but they use it all the time in their own language or they've heard similes. So right away the art itself has all the senses. Even if it doesn't have the music playing, I can play with the idea of what music do you think is playing? What instrument do you hear in that painting? If that painting, if that woman in the painting were to ask you a question, what would it be? So right away there's that connectivity.
And I think that sometimes, we're not used to having the opportunity to connect, especially in this age. Like we're connecting on screen on our phones all the time, but how are we thinking about what we're seeing? And so this gives everyone a chance to open up.
I love the sound of that. I think it's very powerful using art as a bridge, as a prompt, as a way of kind of opening up the creative process as it were. But how do you think that looking at art really changes the process of writing poetry compared to all the other sorts of prompts and other exercises we might do? What's so special about looking at art?
Well, it is certainly one thing to look at the postcard in the classroom, right? And it's another thing to look at the painting or the artwork, sculpture, whatever it may be in the museum. So I will say a couple of things about that. First, I'll start with a postcard. I have forgotten about this story until just now. So I had been working in this middle school for many years. And the principal wanted me to work with her teachers as a professional development opportunity.
And funny thing about teachers, me being one of them too, by the way, is we talk a lot. And so they, the middle school students, they taught were more well behaved than the teachers were in that classroom where I was working. I love teachers. No, nothing bad about teachers, but I thought, why are they talking so much? It just seemed a little extra, and then I noticed there was one ringleader that was causing a little bit of the commotion.
And so I had already given out the postcards and at this point I was walking around, trying to connect with everybody. So I get to her and I wonder what's happening. So I see the first line she has, and I can't remember the first line, but I remember thinking, oh, that's a good first line. Can you tell me about that? I ask her, and in the meantime, even while I'm talking with her, she's trying to communicate with the others around her.
And she has a Rembrandt in front of her and she says to me as she's speaking, well, she says, 'all this reminds me of is the muddiness during Katrina'. And Katrina, I don't know if you recall, was devastating in New Orleans. She was someone who had come to Los Angeles after her place was destroyed, and I thought, yes, this is what's happening. And of course, she stopped talking after that, she started to write and she had the most powerful piece in the room.
It was not just the poetry, it was the image. It was the painting. It was the colors Rembrandt used. Because you see, I think language is memory, and memory is language. So that connectivity happens on many levels when we're dealing both with poetry and with visual art, with art. No matter what kind it is, there's something in the movement of some of peace.
There's something in the color that's used, or maybe it's a painting of an image that is familiar because it reminds you of someone you know. So right away I believe that the artwork is actually creating a sense of ease. Even if it might, in this woman's case, create tension as well. Right. But, something I heard, which I hadn't heard before, is tension helps create change. Even like the I, the simple idea of if you wanna shoot a rubber band across the room. You have to create tension first.
I remember hearing that. 'cause at first I didn't understand what it meant. And so that is part of what happens when you use art.
Yeah, and I've seen it so many times over the years working with objects as well as artworks in different types of museums and the different connections and links and stories that those artworks are able to surface from people that are so unexpected a lot of the time, not connections that you would imagine to happen. And you mentioned there about there is a difference between doing this kind of work in a classroom with a postcard and being in a museum environment.
So I'd like just to talk about that a little bit. So Absolutely. What is it about being in the museum that really supports the creative process?
So, when you're in the classroom. You might see the artwork in a very clear way, but you might not because you're distracted by your peers, the bell going off the clock ticking, you have all of that happening in the classroom. And I still get the poems out of them, but what in the museum? You, this is my opinion, of course, you are entering what I consider sacred space because there's a certain hum in the museum. The hum is different than what's in the classroom.
The hum in the museum is about people whispering. It's about a certain level of light. It is about, if people are talking a little bit louder, it's about art. Then you have the work on the walls or in the center of the Romes, if there's sculptures and so forth, and you have history. You have so much history. You have the energy of the creativity of the people who created the works.
And all the people who walked through the museum to have looked at this work to have engaged with this work in one way or another. Whether some engaged on a more deeper level or some just wanted to see the work and the beauty. And also. Here's the other thing.
It's that when they write the poetry, this is something I was thinking about since we connected as well, that even though it's something I had thought about, is how when I work in a museum setting that while I say that we are connecting with the past. Because we're connecting with those who created the work, those who walked through those museum halls in the past, and of course, we're connecting with the present.
What happens when we're writing the poems is that we're also connecting to a future. Like a way of seeing the world that hadn't been spoken yet or written about yet because you just wrote that poem. And also I think that this is a way of having agency. Our presence in the world is that we can look at something and we can start asking it questions to also be connected with it in a way that brings us to a different space that is beyond those cubic feet in the museum gallery.
There's a very special atmosphere in museums. You can see it as soon as people cross the threshold, there's a different atmosphere there. And even, if yourself, you're feeling stuck in your work and you're able to take half an hour in a museum in the middle of the day. I don't know what it is, but there's something about the environment itself that really fires up your creativity. So tell me about the different types of museum programs you facilitated.
I know you've worked with Mocha in la you also do artful conversations at the Brand library. So tell us about the different sorts of programs you do and then maybe what a typical session might look like.
Sure. I'll tell you like some of the little ways, some of the ways I've gotten my students into the museum. So I had a job where I live at the Glendale Youth Alliance. And I remember Lisa McMurray, bless her, she had hired me to teach for one month. One month of poetry, four days a week. Four hours a day. And I thought, oh, either these kids are gonna love me or not love me at all by the time this is over. Right. I loved it.
It was the, it was probably the most concentrated time of, poetry that I've ever experienced in my life. And I will tell you with them, we wrote, they were second language learners also, and then I took them I took them to two museums. I took them to the Getty, but we had been writing so much poetry and, it always happens, the student most unlikely to want to write poetry, becomes the student who writes the most powerful work.
And the other boys would come to me and say, ' did he really write that or did he, did you, did he take it from somewhere?' I said 'No. He wrote that'. And so in that case, I took him to the Getty. They wrote poetry and I took him to the Peterson Automotive Museum and I took them there and they all sat in front of the cars. And what I did was I talked about how are you going to write this poem. Initially I would start with similes, metaphors and onomatopoeia.
It was the easiest way to really connect. So, I would do, let's write a simile. Someone find the color. Someone would point out a color, someone write as simile, what is a simile for that color? And then we do the same with metaphor, trying to really scaffold the learning of figures of speech with what was happening in the museum and what was available for them to connect with. So that was one way I connected students. As time progressed though.
I started thinking about how I wanted them to connect with the work. So then, especially when I started artful conversations at brand library, I started to take what the curators wrote about the concept of the work in the gallery, and I said, oh, I do plenty of found poetry using other text, like, I'll just go off for a second. When students are having difficulty with science, for example, I'll say, go into a science book.
Let's pick out a paragraph and let's do some work with found and redacted poetry. What that means is, when they're looking at the concept of what the curators wrote, what they really saw as a power of the work in the gallery, and they took the writing on the wall. I said I usually make a copy on a worksheet so they have it in front of them, and I say, I want you to pick out your favorite words. Pick out your favorite words and circle them.
And I said another part of the assignment can be is you can walk around the gallery and pick out your favorite titles of the art pieces as well. And so with that, we're gonna write a spine poem. And the spine poem is exactly what it is. It's a spine down our back. I say one to three words per line. And what that does is it helps us focus, absolutely focus without having any extra words, on what seems to be most important. And suddenly the curator's concept expands. It's still what they said.
But it actually gives new life to what it is. And I actually can read a couple, if that would be of interest to you. That would be great. Here's the piece written by Jean Hartman, a Wing and a Prayer, which was the title of the artwork, but also the exhibit thrown away, forgotten, used up. Yet become something new. Flying above the past, sending solace to those who have read you over and over.
Now, finding a new soul, sharing an old knowledge, remembering what used to be important, wrapping me in inspiration.
Now, the person who wrote that, had they written any poetry before? Yeah. Was it a student? Was it an adult?
It was an adult. and most of the people I work with, there are a few who will say, ' I write poetry'. Very few. I would say 10%, 20, if i'm lucky, but not even lucky. I'm actually more lucky when they haven't written poetry because this is the part that I shared in the beginning is where I change people's minds. All of a sudden it's something they didn't think they can do. And here's the other part I wanted to share with you as well is that it is because I know they will write a poem.
That I believe creates part of that ease for them. I already know they're gonna write a poem. I consider myself someone who brings poetry with me when I enter the room, whatever room it is, whether it's a boardroom, a classroom, or a museum gallery, I already know that. So my job is always how am I gonna connect with that person to accomplish what I know is going to happen anyway? It's a little bit, it might sound a little strange, but it's very true. This happens with my students as well.
Even if I'm gonna have them, let's say for five sessions, they're second language learners, and it's the older students that are always more concerning than the younger students. The younger students are always very excited to do anything. Once they hit sixth, seventh grade, then I know I need to be pulling a little bit more from them. Engaging them more, but still, I believe it's the ease that helps engage them and brings access to poetry and to art to those students or those adults.
Can you talk a little bit about that sense of ease, because we talked as well off air about people feeling intimidated by art, by museums as well, and also by poetry. And I've done activities before around poetry which have, like you say, always created poems, always created fantastic poems. When you first introduce the idea, now we're gonna create a poem. There's sometimes a little ripple through the room or maybe an eye roll or I can't do poetry.
So how do you create that sense of ease that you talk about and get people over that hurdle of feeling intimidated?
I think that people forget. That they're really part of the world. It's a strange thing to say, but when I start to just talk about poetry and also sometimes read poems and say how I've connected with poetry and how I also used to be nervous when I would read out loud, that I understand that and that I never liked to write before. I also like to go right into it, because I think sometimes I don't like to say too much without going right into it, because then I, I don't wanna create that tension.
I rather create the tension of them trying to think what kind of blue that is in the painting. Is it the morning sky or the night sky? And right away when I start using poetry and that process, I believe it creates the ease and suddenly it doesn't seem so hard. And to be honest with you, sometimes the hardest part really is not when I have the people around me and I have their attention, it's getting them there.
It's using the word poetry in the title of an event that is probably the hardest sell. Because right away people, un people will say, 'oh yeah I don't like poetry' 'Oh, I had a teacher who told me I was terrible and I never wanna write a poem again'. I've had many adults tell me that. Also, sometimes , they have a certain standard of poetry and poets that they want to live up to and feel like if they can't, then they're certainly not somebody who can write a poem.
So sometimes I also have to dismantle that as well. And when I have longer periods of time to teach, usually let's say. Like at Artful Conversations, we have an hour and a half, but really I only have 45 minutes because Valerie Taylor, who's a wonderful art historian and also my colleague, she takes the first amount of time to really walk us through the exhibit. Now, that's a completely different experience because she's doing part of the work that I might do when I'm teaching.
But when I have more time, editing has become one of the most important aspects of writing that I advocate for now. Years ago, I created simple 10 steps to editing your poem to create to, for your poem to become more powerful. And this is where I let people know that they have agency over their work. Sometimes people think things will just come down and they'll be inspired, but the inspiration just doesn't come from top down. It actually comes from inside out. So all of us have that capacity.
And so when I talk about editing, especially my students, and I'll say, in my classroom or in my workshop, ' is this powerful? Or can it make it more powerful?' And so that gives the participants the idea that they have agency over what they wrote. And not only do I think everyone has a poem in them, but everyone has at least one powerful poem in them. Beyond that, it's their choice. It's their decision whether they choose to be a poet or not, or live in the world in that way.
So that ease is also created with my understanding, but also with the work itself. You are connected to so much in history and suddenly you don't realize it. So when I bring it back to their being part of that history, I think it opens people up.
So I love that idea of opening people up. One thing that you were mentioning there was the editing process, and I'm fascinated by that, that's part of the process of writing a poem. It doesn't just stop once you have your first draft. Right. There's an editing process that you work through, and then also there's the reading part of the poem. Yes. Which you emphasize as well.
And i'd love for you to talk a little bit about that, because I think that's another layer of building confidence that we're adding on here. Confidence in writing poetry, confidence in editing the poetry, and then reading it aloud. So perhaps you could talk us through that a little bit.
Absolutely. I love having this as part of the work because something different happens to us when we read our work aloud. It changes. And I also use it as part of the editing process.
'and stand up even when you're just in your house, stand up and recite the poem, because look at your words, because that rhythm is created'. How do you create that rhythm? How do you hear your poem? What is happening? And that connection to poetry and the arts and the process of creativity, different parts of our brain are lighting up. In fact, on a tiny tangent, if I may, this is how I got interested in neuroscience and what was happening in my brain when I had the first draft of the poem.
But then what was happening in my brain when I started to make changes. And part of that process is through recitation. So I really believe something changes in the students when they get up to recite and they have a certain value that they didn't have of themselves before. And sometimes, depending on how nervous a student is, now I have learned, over my 30 plus years, how to add some tension and allow my students or workshop participants to be slightly uncomfortable.
It's okay to then get up and recite their poem. And to be open also, if they cry. I have cried many times when I recited my poems. I don't like it still, I have to admit all these years later. But it's that absolute connection to people in the audience, whether they're in the gallery or they're in the classroom, or they're in your workspace. That reminds us that we are human.
So sometimes what I'll do with my students, especially the middle to high school age, I don't really usually have to do this with the adults, but middle to high school age I'll stand with them. I just stand next to them. And sometimes I have students that will talk like this. You just, you don't know what you're gonna do to be able to raise their voice and be able to project. But you know what, I think of that as a special challenge because I want them to hear themselves. I really do.
And sometimes they're just people who are always quiet. And then sometimes they're just people who suddenly don't know how they're gonna be vulnerable in front of their classmates, who think of them in another way. Right. So, I will stand next to them and try to create as much ease. Like, I don't want them to be nervous, but I'll say, oh, we're gonna do this together. I'm gonna say the first line, and I want you to meet the pitch of my voice. I want you to be as loud as me.
And so that's how we work it out. And. I love it when suddenly by the end of the series they're getting up without any issue.
And I'd like to just look to the future. Perhaps we can look ahead, what's next for you? Perhaps if you could tell us how people can find out more about you and how they can get in touch.
Absolutely. Thank you so much for this opportunity, Claire. It's been such a pleasure. So first of all, I'm poetry consults. That's the name of my business. Poetry consults.com. You're welcome to write to me. I'm my Instagram handle's a little bit different. It's @poetinastudio. You can find me there, you can see some videos I've created of some of our times at Brand Library doing the artful conversations.
You can see a recent publication called Remain in Light, where I was part of an anthology of photographers and poets through uc, LA's Fowler Museum program that we had there. And, i'm working on my next book, working title is Artemis and the book of Questions. But also A couple of things. that I'm very excited about. So one of the things that I'm working toward is literacy and leadership.
Whereby I would like to train a cadre of poets, young poets in the community to learn how to facilitate the writing of poetry and to bring them into a museum or gallery with me, and to become the leads in creating poetry with the community. So that's one. And then the other also is the Neuroscience Resource Center. I am very excited to be connected with this project called the Neuro Arts Blueprint.
I'd love to be teaching a poetry workshop with a neuroscientist, doing the practical and then the research. And finally, I'm going to say that.
The next step in some of my workshops and museums is I'm looking at making the connection with neuroscience myself in using a museum's collection, to create lessons that help attendees consider uncertainty, build resilience and using art and poetry as an avenue toward building wellness in a way that maybe art and poetry wasn't used before, because we have different language around all of this.
And so those are some of the things that I'm very excited about and very happy that I have the opportunity to share them and to connect with other people who are connected with you and in the very important work that you do in bringing engagement to museums.
Thank you so much for sharing that. Lots of exciting things on the horizon. Thank you so much for taking the time to share all the details about your work. It's been absolute pleasure talking to you. Thank you, Tina.
Thank you so much, Claire.
So a huge thank you to Tina for being on the show today. You can find out more about Tina and her work@poetryconsults.com, or you can follow her on Instagram. Go to the show notes for all the relevant links for today's episode. And if you've enjoyed this episode or if any of our previous episodes have helped you in your work, please consider supporting The Art Engager. Become a friend of the podcast on Patreon, your support. Helps keep this content free and accessible.
Or you can pick up a copy of my book, The Art Engager Reimagining Guided Experiences in Museums Available now wherever you buy your books. That's it for today. Thank you so much for joining us. See you next time. Thank you for listening to The Art Engager podcast with me, Claire Bown.
You can find more art engagement resources by visiting my website, thinkingmuseum.com, and you can also find me on Instagram at Thinking Museum, where I regularly share tips and tools on how to bring art to life and engage your audience. If you've enjoyed this episode, please share with others and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you next time.