Roslye Ultan is an education associate, also known as a paraprofessional, at Edina High School. All day long she works around the building supporting students and teachers, but outside EHS walls, she follows her passion of poetry.
“I’ve been working on poetry for about 20 to 25 years, but I decided to be much more serious about it because I was collecting reams of three-ring binders,” Ultan said. “I said, maybe it’s time to share this with the world and get it away from me so that I don’t own it anymore.”
And that’s what she did. “Convergence” is her newest collection of poems that she has been writing for about five years. It touches on themes from loss and grief to success and joy, looking back through her childhood all the way from growing up to the point where she is now. She connects these themes with nature, heritage, culture, tradition, mythology, and a deeper level of emotional and intellectual thinking.
“Poetry, like any of the arts, is an opportunity to clarify how you feel about yourself and the rest of the world because it takes you into a transcendent place where you are both connected and separated because you are going inside of yourself to reach an emotional awareness and emotional depth, a greater realization of consciousness that comes out of writing,” she said.
Initially, the poems and thoughts she began writing down were focused on family relations and the intricacies that go into raising a family, but she soon began to expand her horizons.
“If I can [write poetry about family], maybe I can look out into society and how societal function and systems affect my thinking,” she said.
After years of collecting her works and others around her publishing their work, she finally decided it was the right moment.
The sharing of new ideas from workshops and weekly meetings with other emerging and accomplished poets gave Ultan the realization that “it was time to go beyond the table talk and put [my poetry] into [a] concrete product.”
Time was a key factor in the publishing process. She transported the poems collected in three-ring binders and reorganized them to create a manuscript to send to a publisher. The next thing she knew, it was the beginning of the publishing process.
For the next nine months she edited, reorganized, and put in order “Convergence.”
Ultan’s publisher, Poetry Playhouse Publications, set up a reading in Placitas, New Mexico, for Ultan to share her story for the first time publicly. She was invited to an event called Chatter, a musical event featuring traditional and innovative music along with the words of a poet.
When she arrived, she asked if she could move down to speak at the same level as the audience. That communication sparked something incredible among herself and her audience.
“I had them in the palm of my hands because I was on their level. There wasn’t a pin that dropped, and I knew at that moment, I knew there was something special,” she said.
Ultan has put every part of her life into “Convergence.” EHS was even able to make a special appearance in the poem “A Stroll Among Urban Camelbacks,” illustrating a key part of her life for the past seven years and the impact she has left both in and out of the building.
