Poetry festival - Sublime and a little naughty

Two of literature’s wittiest voices took the stage in La Conner last Thursday for the opening of the Skagit River Poetry Festival.

When asked what inspired him to write, author Tom Robbins launched into what he’d have you believe is his personal story.

Voice as deadpan as Garrison Keillor on the “Prairie Home Companion,” the author of “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” claimed it all started when he opened the door of a cheap hotel room at midnight to a dwarf, who handed him a box of manuscripts wrapped in brown-paper bags. He was given instructions to open them only once every five years, or he would suffer the consequences of a dire curse.

Robbins said the dwarf had received the box of manuscripts from a blond woman to show her appreciation to him for having saved her from drowning in an underground lake below Graceland just after the death of Elvis. Since then, his story goes, every five years Robbins opens a manuscript, signs his name to it and sends it off for publishing.

Native American author Sherman Alexie claimed he met the same dwarf. Then he went on to share some of his personal information — that he is “lactose intolerant” and admitted he wears a loincloth under his clothes.

Alexie, author of “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven,” challenged the hundreds of people who attended Thursday’s festival opening to expose their own secrets — he said it is the only way they can be successful in their writing.

Thus, Alexie and Robbins opened the eighth biennial Skagit River Poetry Festival held this past weekend, celebrating words through reading, singing, dancing, music and comedy.

The intent of the festival is to generate funding to place poets and writers in school programs throughout Western Washington to promote lifelong literacy and cultural diversity. “You see magic happen every day when the poets are in the classrooms,” said Skagit River Poetry Foundation board member Bobbie Krebs-McMullen.

Each year some of the world’s top poets have been placed in schools for up to two weeks, inspiring students across diverse cultures to use language as creation. Additionally, the poets have provided support to local teachers so they can continue instruction long after the poets have gone home.

“These are the best of the best,” said Krebs. “We have three past and current poet laureates… this festival gives them a chance to perform for the community… and a chance to converse with each other.”

On Friday, hundreds of high school and college students in schools from Bellingham to Oak Harbor poured out of buses and followed two dozen poets around like they were rock stars.

Irreverent, sometimes ribald, heart-breaking, and comedic, but somehow always sacred, poets from as far as Ghana, Canada and as close as downtown La Conner, read poetry of lost love, of gardening, lynchings, exile, vulnerability and alienation.

“I think a lot of the reason we became writers is because we were disconnected — separate,” said Alexie.

In all, the 24 poets participating included former and present laureates from the U.S. and Canada. They are English professors, editors, stand-up comics and art educators. Many have been on the New York Time’s Best Seller List. They claim awards from the National Endowment of the Humanities, Fulbright awards, the T.S. Eliot Prize, National Book Awards, the American Book Award from Before Columbus foundation and some are Pulitzer Prize winners.

For two days at venues all over town, they told tales of old people making love, sex, vasectomies and more, much more — the love of butternut ice cream, salmon, whales, baseball and redemption — and all through it, the love of language and words, like a quilt overlaid with agates.

“La Conner changes during the poetry festival. There is a kind of magic in the air that lasts for days. It’s palpable — something shop keepers and people on the street feel,” said the foundation’s Executive Director Molly McNulty.