Penn State poet Andrew Bode-Lang awarded 2026 Rattle Chapbook Prize

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Poets have described April — recognized by the Academy of American Poets as National Poetry Month — as both the sweetest and the cruelest month. For Andrew Bode-Lang, teaching professor of English at Penn State, it’s turning out to be pretty sweet.

Bode-Lang was named one of three winners of Rattle literary magazine’s 2026 chapbook prize for his manuscript “My Time in the Circus.” A chapbook is a collection of thematically linked poems running between 15 and 40 pages. Bode-Lang’s manuscript tells the story of a boy who grows up in the circus and plays the part of a clown because he seems to lack the skills needed to fulfill other roles. The boy feels out of place there and tries to figure out where he fits into this fantastical world, Bode-Lang explained.

In the following Q&A, Bode-Lang discussed his chapbook, why poetry is still relevant today and why poetry belongs to humans and not to artificial intelligence (AI).

Q: Can you describe the Rattle Chapbook Prize and share some of the themes of your manuscript?

Bode-Lang: Rattle is a fairly large literary journal by circulation, with 11,000 subscribers. And every year, three poets win this prize, including a poet who has yet to publish a full-length book of poetry — this year, I’m that poet. The prize comes with a $5,000 honorarium, 500 copies of the chapbook and most importantly, distribution of the chapbook to all 11,000 of Rattle’s subscribers, which is a crazy reach for any collection of poetry.

The chapbook that I wrote is called “My Time in the Circus.” It is a linked series of poems that tell the story of a boy who grows up in the circus. His father is a lion tamer, his mother is an acrobat and his sister trains elephants. And the poor boy is left playing a clown.

Q: Where did you find the inspiration for the chapbook?

Bode-Lang: When I was growing up, my dad loved the circus and clowns in particular. I found it interesting as a setting. I also studied with a poet in undergrad, Jack Ridl, who grew up with actual members of his family who were in the circus. He used to tell me stories about that. So, I ended up having these characters in this setting come to me as a way of exploring a story of this fictional boy. The boy operates within this world where there are a lot of fantastic things going on, and he's trying to figure out what his place is within it all.

I think that all of us are looking for our place in a world that's swirling around us. And when you figure out where you don't belong, where you do belong, that's a good moment for any human being.

Q: Why is poetry important today?

Bode-Lang: The most valuable commodity on Earth is human attention. There are internet and media companies worth billions of dollars because of where we put our attention. When we passively give our attention over to whatever the algorithm feeds us next, we are giving up our agency. We're giving up our chosen involvement with things that matter to us and have real value to us.

When we engage with poetry, we are making a choice to give deliberate attention to something very specific and real. Whether you are reading a poem or writing a poem, it's that active, focused attention that lets us know we're present, that we are alive in the world and we're part of a shared human family.

The connections that poetry reveals travel across time. I love haiku, and one of my favorite haiku poets is Kobayashi Issa. He has a poem translated by Hiroaki Sato that says, “The world of dew is, yes, a world of dew but even so,” and it captures this idea that life is fleeting, but still can't I hold on to it? He wrote that poem a few hundred years ago, and I can read that poem and be with him, understand what he experienced and felt. And that has meaning to me, too.

Q: What do you say to the person who reads a poem and says, “I don’t get this”?

Bode-Lang: I love this question, and the reason I love this question is somehow our educational system has given us a false set of expectations to have for poetry and for ourselves. People look at a poem and think they are supposed to understand it. They think they're supposed to be able to pick it apart and see what every little part of it means.

I always ask my students, “How many of you understand every word of every song you love?” Nobody can put their hand in the air, and yet they love those songs. They love listening to them, moving to them. A poem is exactly the same. You can read a poem, take in the music of the language, the feeling of it, the tone, the voice of it, the sense of being within the presence of a writer. You don't need to understand every word. Nobody can understand every word of any poem. But it's really that immediate experience of, “I'm experiencing this right now. I'm reading it. I'm enjoying something about it.” That's all we need.

Q: What would you say to encourage someone to give poetry a chance?

Bode-Lang: A poem is a surprise. It's the product of a human intelligence. Somebody who sat down with a feeling, with maybe a phrase in mind, and they started off on this little adventure that they didn't know where they were going, and they ended up someplace new. When you read a poem, you get to have that same arc of experience of not knowing what you're getting into and ending up someplace new, and it can just be fun.

There are a lot of poets who are very accessible, very enjoyable to read. I recommend people start with Mary Oliver and Billy Collins, people who have, in terms of poetry circulation, sold a lot of books and have a lot of readers because their work is accessible and enjoyable, sometimes funny, very often resonant with things that mean something to our lives.

Q: Can large language models write poems?

Bode-Lang: AI is capable of doing many things, many of them useful, many of them interesting. Of course, you can feed AI a prompt, and it will spit out something that looks like a poem. But what AI produces will never have human depth, clarity of insight, richness of experience, any of those things that are uniquely a part of our human lives and our consciousness.

AI does not have consciousness or a soul. If you want to go to a source that's going to tell you something meaningful and valuable about being alive, you need to go to another person. You're never going to get a genuine surprise out of AI. You're never going to get a genuine, breathtaking insight. But that's exactly what poetry gives us.

I think every one of us needs a place in our lives for something that makes us catch our breath. Gives us a shock of recognition, of something that maybe we didn't know was ours. And poetry is one of the best places I know of to get that.