Poetry Reading Friday, January 27 Featuring Megan Snyder-Camp and Christopher Howell

If you live in or near Whatcom County, be sure to catch Christopher Howell and Megan Snyder-Camp’s reading at the Lucia Douglas Gallery in Fairhaven (1415 13th St.) on Friday evening, January 27, at 7:00 p.m.  This event, sponsored by The Poet As Art, a branch of the Whatcom Poetry Series, is free, though a $5 donation is welcomed if you can manage it.

Here’s more information about the poets, compiled by Jim Bertolino:

Christopher Howell was born in Portland, Oregon, and grew up on an ancestral farm which the city (and Highway 205) has now completely devoured. He was enrolled in the local public schools, and later attended Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, where he began writing poems, originally as a means of understanding poems his course work required him to read. The first contemporary poet he read with complete enjoyment and understanding was W.D. Snodgrass.

He was a Navy Journalist during the Viet Nam War and afterward earned graduate degrees from Portland State University and the University of Massachusetts, where he read deeply and productively from the work of W.S. Merwin, Galway Kinnell, Robert Bly, and James Wright—poets of the so-called “Deep Image” school. His principal teachers included Henry Carlile, James Tate, Maxine Kumin, and Joseph Langland. He was close to the late William Stafford and learned (and continues to learn) much from him, as well.

About writing itself he has said, “Poetry, for me, is the only means of reconciling the objective, everyday world with the inner life, the ego with the self. In that reconciliation, that enactment, it seems to me very like worship: a humane and primary response. If I felt otherwise, it would not be worth doing.”

The most recent of his nine full-length collections of poems are Memory and Heaven (Eastern Washington University Press, 1996), Just Waking (Lost Horse Press, 2003), Light’s Ladder (University of Washington Press, 2004), and Dreamless and Possible: Poems New & Selected (University of Washington Press, 2010). A new collection, Gaze, will be published by Milkweed Editions in February.

He has received two National Endowment Fellowships, fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission and the Washington Artist Trust, and three Pushcart Prizes. His work has twice won the Washington State Book Award. He was director and senior editor for Eastern Washington University Press from 1998 to 2010, and for thirty-six years has been principal editor for Lynx House Press, and in 2006 was awarded the Stanley W. Lindberg Award for Editorial Excellence in recognition of this long service. 

He has taught at the University of Massachusetts, Portland State University, Colorado State University, Willamette University, The Pacific NW College of Art, Pittsburg State University (Kansas), Whitman College, Emporia State University, and, since 1996, at Eastern Washington University where he is also Director for Willow Springs Editions.

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Megan Snyder-Camp’s first collection, The Forest of Sure Things (2010), won the Tupelo Press/Crazyhorse Book Award. She has received a 2010 Individual Artist Award from Washington’s 4Culture Foundation, as well as scholarships and residencies from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Espy Foundation, Djerassi Resident Artist Program, and the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest’s Long Term Ecological Reflections program. Her poems have appeared in the Antioch Review, Field, ZYZZYVA, the Sonora Review, the Cincinnati Review, 88, and elsewhere, and have twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has taught at the University of Washington and the Richard Hugo House in Seattle, where she lives with her family. She is the Advisory Board Chair of Seattle’s chapter of the national literacy nonprofit First Book.

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On Saturday, January 28, from 10:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., Chris Howell will teach a poetry writing workshop at Egress Studio. The charge for the workshop will be $50, and participants are encouraged to register in advance by calling Jim Bertolino or Anita Boyle at 398-7870 or by sending a check made out to Whatcom Poetry Series, 5581 Noon Road, Bellingham, WA 98226. Here is Chris Howell’s description of the workshop:

“Ezra Pound said that poetry is comprised of a variable and a constant.  There are all kinds of ways of interpreting this binary assertion; in this workshop we will think of it in terms of Image and Voice, their differential, their interplay, their effect on a poem’s movement and structure. Examples of how each facet may be made to work will be followed by corresponding in-class writing assignments and discussion of the resulting poems. Sounds serious, I know, but it will be serious fun, I promise.”

I hope to see you at the reading, the workshop, or both!

On Knowing versus Being “Baffled,” and Which One Is More Productive, with Sincere Thanks to Wendell Berry

I enjoy not being certain about most things. But on one burning issue, I’m impatient for clarity.  Last fall, a recurring preoccupation of mine re-recurred.  (It has to do with being horrified by the foundational narrative of monotheism; I’ll post more on this soon.) This resurfacing of an earlier issue sent me to some fascinating books on psychoanalysis, theology, language, and myth–a couple of which I’d read before, and one new to me–for some solid, or at least plausible, answers.

But then, I had the poetry reading to prepare for, and after that, the holidays were suddenly demanding my attention, and then, a visiting family member treacherously introduced me to the crime series Lie to Me, and I put my reading on hold. Consequently, having stalled in my quest for answers, I put writing about everything on hold.

Then, today, I happened on this tasty morsel from a poem by one of my favorite nature writers, Wendell Berry, that a friend had emailed me months ago:

THE REAL WORK

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.

(From Wendell Berry, Collected Poems)

This lovely passage got me started again. Not on the reading–that will happen when it happens, in the slivers of time between everything else–but on writing, and particularly, blogging. I’d somehow, subliminally, talked myself into the perception that until I’ve untangled the whole knotty theological problem I’m confronting, I won’t have anything to write about it.  However, as I told my first-year writing students over and over for twenty-odd years, having everything figured out comes at the end of a writing project (if ever), not at the beginning of it. It’s in the process of writing that I can discover what I think and what I have to say.

This is, naturally, the first thing I learned in graduate school about how to teach writing:   writing is a means of discovery. How easy this principle is to forget, though, when what I’m after is an answer, an explanation, a nice, hefty chunk of certainty. But if I attain that certainty, what then? I’ll need to find a new problem to be “baffled” by, since, as Berry says, “The mind that is not baffled is not employed.”

As WordPress is reminding me in the lower right-hand corner of this page I’m drafting (and revising and editing and re-arranging and re-reading), “Just write.” Okay, I will.

More, and right soon,
Jennifer