LINCOLN PARK — For years, longtime Lincoln Park resident Arne Weingart wrote poetry in between running his own graphic design firm.
But even though poetry was "the one thing [he] could do better than anything else," Weingart, now 68, could never dedicate enough hours to it while paying the bills at the same time. Meanwhile, he watched former classmates in his poetry master's program at Columbia University go on to have successful writing careers.
Now, Weingart is finally able to devote more time to the thing he loves the most — a reminder that it's never too late to pursue creative passions.
Weingart won the 2015 laureate of the New American Press Poetry Prize, an award that is given out every year by an independent Milwaukee-based literary publisher. That means a collection of his poems — some written as much as 40 years ago — called "Levitation for Agnostics" will be released by the publisher in February. The book will be available online on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, among other retailers.
"It's like, 'I'm in the game now. I can play now. I can maybe play on a more brightly lit court," Weingart said.
Prior to winning the award, Weingart's work was published in The Georgetown Review, Oberon to Arts & Letters and The Spoon River Poetry Review. He also won the 2013 Sow's Ear poetry review contest.
But getting his first book published is his biggest achievement to date — something he described as "a monkey off his back."
"You need that first book, you need that validation. It was particularly gratifying that a young poet who doesn't know anything about me selected the manuscript because it meant I wasn't out of date," he said.
He said he was always passionate about writing poetry, but he became more determined when he was selected to be a resident at the Atlantic Center for the Arts.
"Doing this type of work was always something I had intended on doing, always something wanted to do, but I never made enough of a commitment to do. My feeling about doing this kind of work was always there. Once you start seeing the world in a certain way that you have to see the world in order to write, your way of seeing the world doesn't change even though you're not writing about it," he said.
A lot of poetry majors go on to teach because it's the only option, he said, but he was never interested in becoming a teacher.
"MFA programs need teachers to turn [students] into teachers someday. Some people think that's kind of a fraudulent promise. I say it's all right, it's not really harming anybody. I'm not sure people have the wrong idea about it. People don't [write poetry] because they expect to get rich and famous."
Weingart, who has lived in a Lincoln Park brownstone since 1978 but is originally from Nashville, Tenn., said his poems have a "narrative through line" and are "accessible" — but contain complex ideas.
"The images are not disjointed. You wouldn't characterize them as experimental in any way," he said. "I don't want anyone reading my stuff to be turned away by the fact that they don't think they can get them."
The first poem of the book is directed at "upscale shoppers, weighed down by their armfuls of arugula in the busy parking lot of a suburban grocery store. Another poem revolves around painter Arshile Gorky, who "appears to contemplate suicide from his self-portrait, hanging in Las Vegas' gaudy Venetian Hotel," according to his publicist.
While Weingart doesn't expect to close his design firm anytime soon and start writing poetry full-time, he's already working on his second book.
"I'm not going to keep on working as a designer forever," he said.
For now, Weingart is content dedicating more time to his passion, saying that he "doesn't want everything to be over without having given some effort."
For more neighborhood news, listen to DNAinfo Radio here:
