10th Biennial Poetry Festival a hit

La Conner, flooded with poets and students from eight area school districts, hosted the 10th Biennial Skagit Valley Poetry Festival last weekend.

The Poets Table Soiree kicked off the event Thursday night at Maple Hall with appetizers, wine and dinner. Random Acts of Food catered it.

Hot Damn Scandal broke into song at the elementary school gym – musical poetry – singing their “outlaw ballads, dirty jazz, circus freak outs, shanty-rags, string band funk, lonesome heart-breakers and whiskey bottle love songs.”

Focusing on the theme “Poems of Resistance and Hope in a Time of Turmoil,” three-time U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinksy, Ada Limon, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha and Brian Turner followed.

Limon, articulate and lyrical, swayed back and forth from one foot to another, re-arranged her long, dark hair and read in her clear, rhythmic voice, poems of honoring parents, hubcaps and – birthing horses.

Brian Porter read of his experiences in Bosnia and Iraq – of hell-fire missiles, sand flies, mortars, the howling of orphans, explosions and bayonets. “We are at war in this country. Many wars. What do we do about that?” Of his poems, Porter said: “Their landscape is war. Their subject is not war. Their subject is love and loss.”

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, a first-generation immigrant from Palestine said, “When you give up your homeland you lose the solace of language,” and used a poem to tell how to serve “the perfect cup of Arabic coffee.”

Robert Pinsky read of Jacky Robinson, baseball stories – and libation palaces on the water of ethanol, butylene and ethylene gases. “What gods made this?”

On Friday, poetry readings, conversation and workshops were devoted until 2 p.m. to the hundreds of students who spilled out of yellow buses from around the Salish Sea with their purple hair, torn jeans, ball caps, coffee cups and cell phones, puppies tumbling all over each other.

They listened to poems about bullets, exile, pork chops, refineries, baseball, Jacky Robinson, Crazy Horse, kisses, bayonets, the Euphrates River, silence, Arabic coffee, slave ships, borders, bars, sex, love and tortillas.

Shades of T. S. Elliott and Pablo Neruda filled First Street and wound down the channel as students from Whatcom, Skagit and Island counties listened – first loud and raucous and then silent, as they listened to poets speaking the consciousness of a people.

Said one student: “It helps me look outside the box to find new solutions to problems. It opens my mind and lets me express myself wholly.”

Ellen Bass read “Ode’s to the God of Atheists:” “The god of atheists won’t burn you at the stake or pry off your fingernails. Nor will it make you bow or beg, rake your skin with thorns, or buy gold leaf and stained-glass windows. It won’t insist you fast or twist the shape of your sexual hunger. There are no wars fought for it, no women stoned for it. You don’t have to veil your face for it or bloody your knees. You don’t have to sing … .”

And Tony Curtis, with his Irish brogue, slack-jawed listeners with his humor, impish eyes, his touseled curly brown hair, white starched shirt and the ghosts he talks to – inside mental asylums and prisons he visits around the world – a cross between Johnny Cash and Robin Williams, lifted his audience up. You could almost see him dancing down First Street with his guitar, students following him like the pied piper. “I have a friend here and it’s a quiet mind” – from his poem about a mental asylum.

Claudia Castro Luna, Washington state poet laureate, said, “Writing poetry is the single vehicle of which I have been able to make sense of my life.” Having experienced war and exile in El Salvador, she insisted “poetry is not a luxury; it is a vital necessity of our existence, so we can name the unnamable … a revolutionary act.”

Sam Green noted: “We write for those who cannot speak for themselves. We can speak for the dead ... We are archivists of the imagination.” Poets are the conscience of the people.

So many poets, so little time.

The Phyllis L. Ennes Poetry Contest winners also read: Michael Bonacci, Carla Homstad, Edith Walden and student poet Jade Carter, finalists out of 196 poems submitted.

Executive Director of the Skagit River Poetry Festival Molly McNulty and a dedicated team of volunteers once again marvelously put the festival together as they do year after every other year.

Since 1998, the Skagit River Poetry Foundation has trained teachers using professional poets to help build literacy skills in our classrooms to “Engage, Inspire and Transform.”

In more than 100 classrooms and in eight school districts students have found their voices and built literacy skills with poetry 175 days each year.