Poetic convergence

I am a border in Mexico. I am a border in Gaza. I am a child getting shot through a border fence as I play in the sand. I am a word. I am a phosphorous cloud. I am a sprinkling of stars. I am an echocardiogram. I am the smell of a pony. I am a poem with "promises to keep / and miles to go before I sleep."

The Skagit River Poetry Foundation's biannual festival Oct. 4-5 at Maple Hall and other venues around La Conner inspired the above paragraph. The festival was attended Friday morning by over 130 students from schools in Oak Harbor and Whatcom and Skagit counties. Maple Hall overflowed with students, poets, volunteers and the indomitable Foundation's board members who put on another spectacular weekend of words and impressions.

Maeve McCormick, a La Conner student, said she had never heard anything like it. She had studied the holocaust in high school, but when she heard "As easy as turning on the evening news to hear the fractured screams of a father – his child killed by mortar fire" from "Check Point" by Susan Rich – a Jewish poet who worked in Gaza – it touched her. "It was very moving – different when the person is reading a poem," she explained.

Yes, Maeve, poetry is meant to be read out loud. Tawanda Mulalu, a poet from Botswana – that's in southern Africa – reads a poem out loud over and over all day, to get it right, he says.

His first book "Please Make Me Pretty, I Don't Want to Die" was selected for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets and was listed as the best poetry collection for 2022 by the Boston Globe, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

He was just one of many exceptional poets at the festival that our kids are so fortunate to have work with them to their schools.

The packed Maple Hall audience was rapt hearing "pregnant with the dead" and "enough time spent in nightmares," from Gaza poet Mosab Abu Toha's, "Sometimes I Still Look for My Friends," read by Susan Rich.

From "The War Works Hard" by Dunya Mikhail, an Iraqi exile and poet, and read by Claudia Castro Luna: "It inspires / to deliver long speeches / awards medals to generals / and themes to poets / it contributes to the industry / of artificial limbs / provides food for flies."

Castro Luna grew up in El Salvador in the early 1980s during that country's civil war. Her poetry is born of a childhood torn by terror and war. She is the first immigrant and non-native English speaker chosen poet laureate in Washington state.

When asked "What is your impulse to want to write about war in a poem?" Castro Luna said, "LOOK WHAT HAPPENED! LOOK OVER HERE!"

Twice she was hospitalized thinking she had had a heart attack. But she would decline a different life, if offered. "We still love despite what's going on," she insists.

"I want the hard things to be outside of my body," Rich told the students.

Real news is not pretty. And neither is its poetry. But poetry is more than just war stories. It's humor, it's love. It's "A hummingbird kissing a flower."

It's an Irishman who thought a hummingbird was a big bug! While visiting his friends Philip and Anne McCracken on Guemes Island one year, Tony Curtis, an Irish twinkling-eyed poet, thought the hummingbird at their feeder was a large bug. A big bee. "We don't get them in Ireland," he said in his thick Irish brogue.

In addition to teaching in our schools Curtis reads at prisons and mental institutions in Ireland. "I met Moses in the Mental Asylum... who said, 'I have a friend I value here – it is a quiet mind.'"

Poetry is the smell of a pony.

From Curtis' "Old Books and Riverbanks:" "When her granddaughter, / Amelia,/ joined us, / I asked her what ponies smelt of. / 'Dust,' she said, 'fairy dust.' / Then I asked a small boy. / He said, 'The men's toilet / After the big match: / Guinness, farts and wet grass.' / And me? I think ponies/ Smell of old books, riverbanks, / Bogs, and wool just washed / And hung out in the wind to dry."

The Foundation was created in 1998 "To support lifelong literacy and cultural diversity through the writing, reading, performing and teaching of poetry in Northwest Washington schools and global communities."

This year's festival is dedicated to Anne McCracken, a founding member of the Skagit River Poetry Foundation who died in 2023.

More on the festival next week.