Further reflections on Skagit Poetry Festival

Last week's article on the Skagit River Poetry Festival ended with us giggling over the smell of ponies; Moses stepped into our lives; and we were stupefied by the violence of war.

The Skagit River Poetry Foundation's bi-annual festival Oct. 4-5 at Maple Hall was attended Friday by over 130 students from Oak Harbor and Whatcom and Skagit counties school districts, as well as a supportive and paying public.

The festival, though, is "just the icing on the cake" said Executive Director Molly McNulty.

"Our main mission is to put poets in classrooms. We do a teacher training each year to help teachers host poets and then take what they learn to apply when the poets aren't in their classrooms," explained McNulty.

Poets spend an average of three weeks a year in various districts in Whatcom, Skagit and Island counties. "More than 10,000 local students have had the experience of playing with words while reading and writing poetry one-on-one with experts," the Foundation's website summarizes.

McNulty says the number of residencies "depends on demand and funding. School districts support the program with funding, but we also do a lot of fundraising and grant writing to guarantee that any teacher who wants a poet can get one. Traditionally we put teaching poets in classrooms for over 120 days in the school year. Last year it was less."

During the festival, each poet has a host family if they are from out of the area. This year poets graced La Conner from states including Texas, New Mexico, New Jersey and Idaho, while several live within driving distance. Many were born outside the United States including Guatemala and Botswana.

"Endangered: Disappearing Nature" was a session's theme on Oct. 5 at the Garden Club. Featured were Elizabeth Bradfield, Derek Shelfield and CMarie Fuhrman, exceptional naturalists, poets and editors of "Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry" – a guide of 128 beings.

What a gem. It has sold 14,000 copies in its first couple years in print. This is no coffee table book. It is part science, part "spiritual meditation," part art and part poetry; it gives grace and honor to the disappearance of species in our beloved Pacific Northwest.

"All things are wild and free – including your poems," said Shelfield. "Biodiversity is super power – so is social diversity."

Bradfield, a naturalist and poet, loves his native Cape Cod "Because it is the Serengeti of the ocean. Not only are species endangered, but our relationships with these creatures is endangered also," he reflected.

One "poetry sampler" at the stained-glassed windowed Methodist church featured Chen Chen, Tony Curtis and Tawanda Mulalu.

In his soft, gentle African voice, Mulalu explained how he read his poems over and over out loud all day to get it right. One line: "If I saw a black child dying, I would not think to take a picture first."

Chen Chen, from New York, read cat poems, love poems – his boyfriend is NOT a cat – "more like a golden retriever," and gave an elegy for the 49 people killed in a nightclub where "... bodies become song and light."

This session ended with Curtis tickling the guitar, inviting the audience to sing along with his own version of Robert Frost's "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening."

This is a small sample of the nearly 40 poets. And I haven't even touched on how great the volunteers were, who the Foundation is made up of – or how many paying guests showed up.

McNulty, executive director since 2007 joined the board in 2003. Directing and coordinating the every-other-year festivals, thousands of students, world-renowned poets, caterers, tables, brochures, procuring funding – endless things to do – she always gets the job done and always with a smile. No question from any student or mishap was too much for her. Thank you.

Many of these poets' books can be found at Watermark Books in Anacortes and Seaport Books in La Conner.

Here is a poem a sixth-grade student from Samish Elementary School wrote at the Festival:

Poem To Coyote

Coyote,

I think of you running through the woods

like lightning hiding in a cloud,

like a shadow in the fog.

Teach me to run,

escaping trouble, disappearing like wind,

dodging trees,

getting away quickly,

becoming invisible,

disappearing like mist.