Poetry month morphs into Poetry Festival

National Poetry month ends Monday. In La Conner, lucky us: consider it spring training, the warm up for the Skagit River Poetry Festival arriving in three weeks, starting May 17. Full disclosure and transparency: I am on this Poetry Foundation’s board of directors.

A poetry festival in La Conner. Actually, the 10th biennial Skagit River Poetry Festival. Starting in 2000, hardworking English teachers (primarily, with many other dedicated volunteers) have insisted upon bringing the nation’s and the region’s best poets to La Conner to read, discuss, consider and teach poetry. And, the kids come first. This four-day festival dedicates Friday daytime to poets and students. Throughout the school year, for 20 years the Skagit River Poetry Foundation has placed poets in classrooms throughout Skagit, Whatcom and Island counties.

That is an amazing feat, and La Conner and Skagit Valley residents can take pride in the work that school teachers, administrators and their neighbors and friends are doing to help children from second through twelfth grades learn about English, literature and poetry, yes, but more: Poetry, as with every art, challenges people to explore that most complex of deep, unknown, uncertain and scary worlds: the innermost self. Not every person who reads or learns poetry goes there, but the invitation is open to everyone, especially when a poet-teacher is in charge.

The Poetry Foundation’s motto is “Students at the Heart,” and their tagline is “Engage. Inspire. Transform.” In mid-May adults get a chance to engage with poets, be inspired and have the invitation to transform open to them at the Poetry Festival. It’s an invitation that comes with an admission fee: you have to buy a ticket. But, as the cliché goes: you get what you pay for.

The word unique is often misused. But believe this: this is the premiere poetry festival in the state of Washington. Love Arts Alive!? Arts Alive! is wonderful, but no other town hosts a poetry festival of the scope and magnitude and with the all-star, stellar poets that will be walking the streets of La Conner. Walking the streets? Poets will sit down with you, if you attend. That is art alive, in the flesh and right next to you.

Not every town, indeed, not every state, has a poetry festival of this caliber. Attend. Participate. Support it for your own sake, for the sake of students in seven school districts, for future poets in future students’ classrooms and for students blossoming into poets in future years.

That is quite a legacy, for us, and for us to leave.