It’s never too late to be a poet
- Francisco Omar Fernandez Rodriguez
- Sep 19
- 3 min read
By Francisco Omar Fernandez Rodriguez
Arts & Features Editor
About a decade ago, Rachel Trousdale started coming up with the concept for a manuscript. That manuscript became the poetry book “Five Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem” and was published March 25.
She said she had been working on the poems for a while. After an inspiring 10 days at a writers’ conference, she tried to figure out what the poems she liked had in common.
English professor Trousdale teaches multiple courses at FSU. She is not one of the professors who focuses on teaching creative writing courses, but she has experience in the field.
Lisa Eck, the chair of the English Department, and Jennifer De Leon, creative writing professor, both had plenty to say about Trousdale’s poetry book.
Eck said it’s unique for a writer to move from literary criticism to their own work.
“I actually read her work before she came to join our faculty, so I know her as a poetry critic. And then it’s so thrilling to have a whole collection of her poems now,” she said.
She loves that Trousdale’s poems always have humor which comes as a surprise given the serious topics, she added.
“Not only the human topics of love and loss but also really great philosophical debates - the mind body problem,” Eck said.
Eck went to Trousdale’s reading at Belmont Books. She said Trousdale described herself as a love poet. The titular poem, “Five Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem” has romantic and familial love, she added.
“She would have to elaborate on that but I think she’s a successful love poet of the most unusual kind,” she said.
De Leon said it’s rare for a collection of poetry to be lively, serious, and funny, yet Trousdale’s poems are so.
She got to hear some of the poems from the collection over Zoom during the pandemic and at a reading in the Ecumenical Center, she added.
“Her poems are so magnetic and alive and solemn, and then it’ll take a turn and you’ll be laughing,” De Leon said.
She said Trousdale is “the real deal” when it comes to creative writers.
Trousdale said she found a structure for the book with the poem “Five Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem” because it contains the ideas she wanted to focus on.
“So I thought, ‘Great! That is cheap, that is easy. I can borrow the structure I am making fun of in that poem, the dreadful structure of the five paragraph essay, which is limiting and boring, and I can use it for my own book,’” she added.
Trousdale said over the years she reorganized the manuscript. She took out the poems she wasn’t satisfied with and wrote new ones.
She said publishing a poetry book is difficult, as they’re not great sellers.
Most of the time, she said, an author’s first poetry book is published through contests. The manuscript is sent off anonymously to the press running the contest, who selects a few to send to a guest judge.
“Sometimes the press will also take a couple additional ones, but that’s the process by which you can even get anyone to look at your first book,” she said.
Trousdale said she entered several contests, including the Cardinal Poetry Prize from Wesleyan University Press. This contest is specifically for poets over 40 who haven’t published their first poetry book yet.
“It’s a mirror image of a different famous major poetry series called the Yale Younger Poets Prize, which is for poets under 30,” Trousdale said. She used to help read entries for that contest back in graduate school.
She said the guest judge of the Cardinal Poetry Prize, former Poet Laureate of the United States Robert Pinsky, selected her manuscript, to her “unending surprise and delight.”
Previously, she had a small chapbook of poetry published, and some of its poems are reprinted in this book, she said. The chapbook is called “Antiphonal Fugue for Marx Brothers, Elephant and Slide Trombone,” she added.
Trousdale’s parents used to teach at Wesleyan University, she said. The book launch was held there, so both of them were able to attend. If it had been further away, it’s unlikely that her wheelchair bound father would have been able to go, she added.
“Five Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem” is available to buy at Wesleyan University Press, Amazon, Barnes & Nobles, and other various bookstores.
