Poet Sandra Beasley will host a reading Thursday at the Ulrich Museum of Art as part of the “Writing Now, Reading Now” series. Here, Beasley offers a sneak-peek into her perspective on writing in the political moment and the experiences that direct her newest work.

JD: Are you working on any new projects lately, and will we get a glimpse of them during the reading?

SB: Yes. I’m working on my next manuscript of poems — my fourth collection. I’m not putting the title in print yet but I will be reading poems from that work and talking about some of the thematic focal points.

JD: Which ideas are driving your current writing? Which idea out of these intrigues you the most?

SB: The current manuscript is looking very much at American history, but doing so in a way that is grounded in the person rather than in the event. A couple of access points for that is growing up in and around Washington D.C. Also, looking at food, because I think looking at restaurants and certain eating traditions is a great way to learn about family and history. I also have an anthology that will be published this fall from the University of Georgia press that is published for the Southern Foodways Alliance which covers Southern food traditions. While it’s not my work in the collection, I think editing pieces by other folks about food, I started writing about food too.

JD: Is there any recent discovery you have had within art or life that has served as aesthetic inspiration?

SB: I just think we’re in a time when people are being reminded of all the ways the personal and the political intersect. I want my work to authentically and organically represent the concerns I have about our political moment — there’s a lot of friction and I think that the friction will ultimately be useful and constructive. I don’t want to ignore it in my poetry any more than I would want to ignore it in my life.

JD: Out of which part of your life is a poem least likely to appear?

SB: One of the greatest challenges for any poet, and certainly for me, is to be honest about personal and every day. Things like my marriage, my family, my cat and my daily walks in many ways have to fight their way into a poem. I think you have to be, on one hand, careful of the sentimentality of that, and on the other hand, be wary of passing that over just because it’s familiar to you. So, I think that one of the great challenges of poetry is to wake up to details of our every day life, and not be afraid to mix the surreal and the banal.

JD: A last question – if you could imagine yourself giving some epic, ‘dream’ reading, where would it be?

SB: I should say first that as the daughter of one visual artist and the wife of another, reading in art galleries is really one of my favorite things to do. But I hear what you’re saying and I think that taking the opportunity to present poetry in natural spaces, where you can hear and accept the potential distractions of an animal nearby or the sound of rushing water or the movement of plants around you, that interests me because it reminds us that our reading is dynamic and there’s only so much you can plan. I’ve had the opportunity to read on a beach, for example, and that was a great experience. I will say that in terms of sheer majesty, one of my mentors – Rita Dove – got to read in a stadium in Chile. There was enough interest to justify a stadium. There were pamphlets dropped from overhead that had the poet’s work on them. And I thought, that’s it – to be in another country and having an exchange at that level – to be reminded that there are places where poetry is revered in that way – that would really mean something amazing.