On this strange Wednesday, the first day of the federal government shutdown, host Ali Muldrow looks to poetry and two local poets for respite and guidance. We’re joined by Madison poet laureate Steven Espada Dawson and Madison youth poet laureate Octavia Ikard. They talk about the role of poetry in self-expression and healing but also in response to political life.

Dawson says he’s still figuring out what it means to be a poet laureate, but he takes seriously the work of using writing to put reality into perspective. He reads the sonnet, “A River Is A Body Running,” from his collection, Late to the Search Party, a book about his mother and his brother who grappled with addiction. Dawson says that poetry helps him reach into the past and think about it differently. Writing about family can be challenging, but Dawson says that “the shadow of addiction is larger than the individual.”

Ikard describes what it’s like to be a writer at a time in life when you’re still figuring out who you are. They say that it takes honesty to investigate parts of yourself. They take inspiration from their elders, the Black women in the rural South who didn’t have access to writing poetry as such, but who were poets in their own lives.

They also talk about privilege and politicized identities, how art responds to and drives political life, the idea of selfishness and self-expression, how formal poetry can bring order to chaos.

Steven Espada Dawson is the author of Late to the Search Party (Scribner, 2025). From East Los Angeles and the son of a Mexican immigrant, he has received fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Foundation, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. His poems appear in many journals and anthologies. He has taught creative writing at universities, libraries, and prisons across the country and lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where he serves as poet laureate.

Octavia Ikard is a creative writing major and First Wave scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They are also the city’s current youth poet laureate. They got their start in spoken word clubs, and they write about moving far away from family and their experience as a young Black poet.

Featured image: photo of Steven Espada Dawson, Octavia Ikard, and Ali Muldrow courtesy of Sara Gabler/WORT.

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