By Hannah O'Neill & Carissa Hansen

Welcome back to U of M Radio on Your Historic Dial!

In addition to our day to day work, there are always a number of fascinating projects underway in the University of Minnesota Libraries Archives and Special Collections. One of them, formally known as  “Preservation of Minnesota’s Radio History,” is the Radio KUOM project that produces this podcast. In this program, we will hear about another project based in the University’s Upper Midwest Literary Archives, with a focus on the poet Margaret Hasse.

You can listen to the episode here in the browser and read the script below.

Episode 12: Of Poets and Podcasts

Hello! This is Hannah over in University Archives, and this U of M Radio on Your Historic Dial, Episode 12: Of Poets and Podcasts. You’ve likely noticed the outro that accompanies the end of each podcast episode, which states that funding for this project comes from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund administered by the Minnesota Historical Society. This grant has enabled numerous projects here at University Archives and within the University of Minnesota Libraries Archives and Special Collections, as well as at other Minnesota cultural institutions.

While there is always regular staff to carry out day to day operations related to the collection, maintenance, and promotion of our materials, grant funded projects allow us to focus on one collection or area in particular, singling it out for detailed processing and description, as well as unique promotional activities such as this podcast. The project featured in this episode focuses on Minnesota’s literary heritage, embodied in the personal collections of poets Robert Bly, Bill Holm, and Margaret Hasse, as well as the papers of Milkweed Editions. Now I’m going to pass the mic to the project manager, Carissa Hansen.

Hi, this is Carissa from the Upper Midwest Literary Archives. Thanks to Hannah for inviting me to join her for this podcast! Margaret Hasse is one of three Minnesota poets’ collections I am working with as part of a grant project titled “Prairie Poets and Press: Literary Lives of the Upper Midwest.”

Photograph of Margaret Hasse from the Milkweed Editions records in the Upper Midwest Literary Archives

Margaret Hasse was born in Aberdeen, South Dakota in 1950, and has spent much of her adult life in Minneapolis. She’s well-known for being a poet, but Hasse is also a teacher, arts administrator, and arts consultant.

This installment of the KUOM program Minnesota Issues features Hasse in her role as Executive Director for the Minnesota Alliance for Arts in Education. The year was 1984 and plans were underway for the establishment of an arts high school in Minnesota. Governor Rudy Perpich had implemented a task force to conduct a feasibility study for the establishment of the school.

Can you guess what school this would become? That’s right, Minnesota was already laying the groundwork for the Perpich Center for Arts Education that operates today in Golden Valley. Not everyone was in favor of establishing a school that would centralize funding for arts education in the state. Margaret Hasse and the Minnesota Alliance for Arts in Education had concerns about the establishment of the school.

There was a great need for more arts education of all kinds in schools across the state of Minnesota. The establishment of an arts high school was certainly an exciting proposition, and one that would represent a commitment to the arts and youth in the state, but the question of proper disbursement of funding remained. Should the state’s resources be focused on one school, or should they be spread out, encompassing more grade levels and areas of Minnesota?