Poet Laureate Rena Priest read at Lincoln Saturday

“When you are poeting, you are making the world, creating the universe out of nothing,” Washington State Poet Laureate Rena Priest said last Saturday at the Lincoln Theatre.

That’s because the word poet comes from the Greek word poesis or “maker,” she explained.

During the 90-minute reading and workshop, Priest introduced herself and her work to an audience of about 50. Several La Conner-area residents were among those listening as she shared stories from her own life, wisdom from other poets and her own work.

Dr. Seuss’s “Red Fish Blue Fish” was an early influence on the state’s first Indigenous poet laureate. After the local newspaper published her poem when she was just seven years old, she told herself, “I’m going to be a poet.”

“My teacher said I should be a lawyer’ and I thought, ‘I’ll show you.’”

Today the Western Washington University graduate and 2022 Maxine Cushing Gray Distinguished Writing Fellow likes to write in the middle of the night when she is fully awake but her filters are down. Writing on road trips when someone else is driving is also fruitful.

Appointed by Gov. Jay Inslee, the state’s sixth poet laureate brings poetry to communities throughout the state. During her two-year tenure she plans to celebrate poetry in Washington’s tribal communities and to use poetry to increase appreciation of the natural world and the many threats facing it.

“In my culture, when you are confronted by the awful, you dance,” she said, introducing her new collection, “Dancing to the Ticking of the Doomsday Clock.” “We recognize what we love and hold dear in order to change. This gratitude is urgency.”

The poems she read from her book, “Patriarchy Blues and Sublime Subliminal” probe the awful with humor and grace. Her first selection, “Welcome to Indian Country” appears in this month’s Poetry magazine. Lilting and humorous, it ends with a punch – “because humor tells the truth quickly and directly and in poetry, that happens even faster,” she said.

One poem looked at the inner life of a glass of water, while “Nail Salon” dove into the dizzying array of shades of red. Between poems she talked about how she chooses words and uses metaphor.

“The wit of her brilliant mind and the subtle humor in her poems captured both our Indian perspective and the modern,” said attendee “ska je tah lo” Lona Wilbur, who shares many family connections with Priest.

Priest’s teaching skills were evident during the second half of the evening. Her workshop, “How to Catch a Salmon Poem,” sought to inspire poems for an anthology of salmon poetry.

“By celebrating salmon through poetry in every corner of the state, I hope to raise goodwill and a feeling of reverence for the salmon, a feeling that my people have felt since time immemorial,” says Priest on her website. Salmon poems can be submitted until Sept. 18 at http://www.renapriest.com.

“I once heard an elder say of another that ‘her presence graces us,’” said Wilbur. “I feel like Rena’s presence graces us and her works as a poet grace us as tribal people.”

After “catching” more salmon poems in workshops at Hugo House in Seattle, the Suquamish Museum and the Lummi Library at Northwest Indian College, Priest will come to La Conner for the Skagit River Poetry Festival, Oct. 6-8.