Jesse Koenig commutes daily from his home in L'Anse to Northern, his alma mater, where he serves as a senior success adviser for multiple academic departments. Given his time on the road for his profession, it is perhaps not surprising that Koenig was behind the wheel when he received a phone call about an achievement related to one of his favorite personal pastimes: creative expression through prose. He was recently selected for a two-year term as the new U.P. Poet Laureate.
“I was pretty surprised,” he said. “It's a great honor. I thought I was getting the ‘let you down gently' call, and suddenly I heard, ‘Congratulations! Do you accept?'”
According to the U.P. Poet Laureate Foundation, the position encourages appreciation of the art form by a wide range of U.P. residents through public readings, workshops, virtual events and digital platforms. Applicants must be nominated and provide credentials and examples demonstrating their literary talents. They also propose a related project that serves the region.
Koenig's project choice was inspired by the decade he spent as head of the liberal studies department at Keweenaw Bay Ojibwa Community College. He taught a variety of writing and literature courses to students ranging in age from 17-80. He also inherited the college and community writing group, expecting a lively community. Instead, Koenig found himself sitting across from only one attendee who was awkwardly intimidated and didn't return.
“It was like dropping blocks into a swamp; I wasn't getting anywhere,” he recalled. “Everything changed when I talked with those running established community writing groups in Houghton and Marquette. Once we piggybacked on that, we had a group of writers waiting for us and it saved the project.”
Koenig said his laureate project will be to further strengthen and connect isolated writing groups across the region so that no writers feel like they're working alone.
A native of southeastern Wisconsin who spent summer periods visiting his grandparents in Phelps, near the U.P. border, Koenig traces his interest in poetry back to his self-described “angry teenager” phase.
“My official 'Genesis story' I always tell is that my single mother was trying to figure out how to deal with that, and she brought home Kenneth Patchen's What Shall We Do Without Us? He was famous for his painted poems, which were actually drug-induced because he had a lot of back problems and was always on pain meds. But for some reason, they really struck me, and I started writing. I seem to be more inspired by the things that kind of tick me off, but some of my pieces connect abstract ideas like beauty and rougher aspects of the U.P. I highlighted those regional aspects in my application.”
After graduating from NMU in 2004 with a bachelor's in philosophy, Koenig earned a master's in English from Central Michigan University before joining the staff at Keweenaw Bay Ojibwe Community College. In 2022, he pursued a new opportunity as a success adviser at NMU.
“The holistic approach to advising really attracted me to this job because it ties back to the tribal college and the medicine wheel's cultural emphasis on whole-person wellness," Koenig explained. "Obviously, we help students with the logistical elements of college that they need to address, but beyond that, we assist with factors that may be limiting their academic success, such as food insecurity and lack of housing related to financial challenges, or relationship issues, and direct them to the appropriate resources for qualified assistance.”
Koenig and colleague Ryan Bond assist students in the following departments: Communication and Media Studies; English; Political Science; History; Economics; and Languages, Literatures and International Studies (LLIS).
“I think the success advisers across campus have done a good job of connecting with the faculty in their departments,” Koenig said. “Our role is to serve as a bridge between them and their students. Faculty are the mentors and information keepers. We let them focus on what they do best and respect their busy schedules by handling some of the nitty-gritty academic processes that can overwhelm students. These include degree planning, selecting courses, and exploring majors and careers.”
In his spare time—more limited because of his weekday commute—Koenig enjoys spending time with his wife, Karina, a mental health professional for the Copper Country Intermediate School District, and his daughter Akira, a sophomore at NMU currently studying abroad in South Korea. Snowshoeing and writing are also favorite hobbies. While the pristine U.P. environment rarely directly makes it into his prose, he does appreciate the beautiful and expansive “thinking space” it affords.
Koenig has been announced as the new U.P. Poet Laureate, but the torch will officially be passed when he participates in a joint January reading with laureate predecessor and NMU Professor Emeritus Beverly Matherne. In the meantime, he will fine-tune his project to build connections among U.P. writing communities.
Koenig's poetry has been published in local magazines and anthologies such as Marquette Monthly and Superior Voyage. He has also done readings on Public Radio 90 and on Gordon Publication's website. His most recent book, a collection of short prose poems, Brief Perversions, was published by Burdock Press. Here is one of his prose poems:
WORLD OF BULLIES
“Tell me a story about when you were a little boy,” says my daughter.
So, I tell her about the time I was pedaling my red, metal, hand-me-down tricycle through the alley, and the bully came, tricked me off my trike, and tossed it into the trash. Someone had put out an old rusty grill, and the bully jammed the handlebar through the weakened metal. After he left, I tried to free my trike from the grill, but I was too small and too weak. I left it in the trash and walked home, crying.
A few days later, my mother asked me where my trike was. I told her what happened. We walked to the trash, but it was too late: the garbage men had taken it away. She asked me why I didn't come to her and tell her right away, but I couldn't answer her. She asked again and again, each time more angrily, but I had no words to make her understand my shame.
Now, my daughter always asks for this particular story: “Tell me about the time the bully took your trike and threw it in the trash.”
Of all the stories from my childhood, this is her favorite, and my least favorite. I'm surprised that, after all these years, it still bothers me, that feeling of being so little and helpless in this big old world of bullies.
