Living poets society

MOSES LAKE — Area poets and patrons of the arts turned out to appreciate one another Tuesday.

As part of the Poetry Roadshow, sponsored by Humanities Washington and the Washington Poets Association, Seattle poet Elizabeth Austen led an hour-long workshop in the afternoon at Big Bend Community College's ATEC Building.

There, Austen, college students and community members discussed poems written in reply to other poems, either consciously or self-consciously. Austen's lecture included an opportunity for those in attendance to write their own poetry in reply to fragments of poems written by Stanley Kunitz.

Community college student Ashley Sorenson wryly noted she was present because her creative instructor made her class attend, but she had also taken a poetry class last quarter.

"It's kind of my first cold splash into poetry," Sorenson said. "It's kind of nice to be able to branch out."

Sorenson liked Austen's point about all poems being in communication with every other poem ever written.

"It was kind of an eye-opening experience for me," she said.

"I personally really like poetry, but I have a hard time sometimes understanding, more branching out from the basic, what you grow up with teen poetry," fellow student Analiesse Isherwood said. "I really liked it. I was surprised I liked it as much as I did, but she offered new ideas how to write poetry, as well as her own thoughts on how to interprete."

Later, Austen read a number of her own poems at the Moses Lake Museum and Art Center, followed by offerings from several community members during an open microphone part of the session.

Ethylmarie Greeley was in attendance for both the afternoon and the evening event.

"Because I'm a rhymer, and I want to see and hear what other people are saying," she said.

Greeley said her poems might be at a lower level than others, and are situational and timely, as she does eulogies in reverence and respect for a person in her own work.

Greeley had hoped to hear more from other poets at the evening performance, but said she thought Austen's presentation in the afternoon should have been a requirement or offered as extra credit by the college.

"I would have liked to have seen more students out there," she said.

Austen next presents in Longview in the fall as part of the roadshow program.

"When there's a live poetry reading, the poems are a little bit different as every person receives them," she said. "I speak the poem, and the people in the audience each engage with the poem through the filter of their own imagination, life history and experience. And so something particular takes place in each of them. To me, that's very exciting."

Austen always hopes to convey poetry is "not an exclusive club," and not something to which one must bring special knowledge. She especially loves how students and the general community mingle at workshops.

"I think it's wonderful for them to hear each other's questions and their take on the poem," she said. "Anytime you have people in the community coming together to listen to and write poetry, you have a chance to interact with people in a completely different way than we do most of the time."