Poetry is 'like falling in love' at Seattle Reads

This is the KUOW Book Club, and we've been reading "You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World" in partnership with Seattle Reads. I'm your guide, Katie Campbell, and I joined poets Laura Da' and Cedar Sigo at the Seattle Central Library to talk about their contributions to the collection.

S

ometimes, as a journalist, I can tell an interview is going to be good from the start. There's a vibe, a tone, an honesty that the interviewee hits you with, and you kind of sigh with relief inside.

To be vulnerable with a bunch of people you don't know, let alone an interviewer you just met, is tough. But when someone is willing to open up and be sharp, even critical, that's a gift.

RELATED: Subscribe to the KUOW Book Club newsletter here

Sigo and Da' gave our live audience several gifts last week as they reflected on the "You Are Here" collection and the poems they wrote for it on pretty short notice.

"I don't write nature poetry," said Sigo, who grew up on the Suquamish Reservation, before he read his poem, "Close-Knit Flower Sack." "Although, because I'm Native, people look to me for answers about nature all the time, awkwardly enough."

"I will write poems about Native history or contemporary Native life. But that's not all I do," Sigo added. "I found that it was like a straightjacket, at least being a person of color, writer of color in this country, especially in the 90s. They expected everything to be beaded and feathered and blah, blah, blah. ... People didn't know what to do with me."

See? Honesty. I did a little dance of excitement inside — maybe even a little on the outside, too.

Check out our full conversation here:

Writers of all kinds are fascinating people to talk to, but poets are — to borrow a word Da' later used to describe humans by and large — a little mystifying to me. I'm jealous of how carefully they choose their words. There's an erudite way about a poet. And that can be intimidating, steering away some folks who don't feel posh enough (totally speaking from experience here).

When the event was over and the mics were off, I said something to that effect to Sigo, and he said that's because of the way we teach poetry, the wrong-headedness of it.

He's right, I think. Because if teaching poetry looked more like the conversation we had at the library, the craft might seem a lot more inviting.

"The great thing about poetry is, to me at least, it's an incredibly disciplined analytical art and craft," Da' said. "But there's a space in there where... it's like falling in love. You get to be a little bit less in charge."

I felt that in Da's poem, "Bad Wolf," especially in this portion of her poem, on page 51 of "You Are Here":

Da' was in Bonnie Lake when she wrote her poem for "You Are Here," searching for markers that "indicated elements of the treaty wars." Da' is Eastern Shawnee.

"Every poem is kind of an artifact of moments in time," she said. "[My poem] does indicate some of my great poetic interests. One is kind of being on the land and kind of peeling through different layers of land. And the other, of course, is just language and how impossible it is. How as soon as you say something, it's gone. It is a revealing poem in that regard."

Their poems were revealing of the poets themselves as well as the places they reflected upon. The Pacific Northwest is part of Da' and Sigo's poems as much as it is a part of them, even in its darkest form.

"The airiness of the Pacific Northwest is in me, like a David Lynch version of the Pacific Northwest," Sigo quipped. "Sometimes I just think of the Northwest as a form of cinematography that I'm chasing. Not so much a set of characters or a prayer to nature or anything so contained. It's much more sinister."

RELATED: 'You Are Here' and you are writing. Readers get creative for National Poetry Month

Nature isn't all rainbows and sunshine after all.

In response to an audience question, I wondered aloud about what it means that we have so many mechanized, dystopian visions of the future, often from white writers. Sigo, with a frankness I appreciated, pointed out that image of the future I had evoked is already here for some peoples and has been since European ships landed on these shores.

"We live in a dystopian novel," he said. "I don't understand why people are being like, 'Oh my god, the world's falling apart.' Our world fell apart a hundred years ago."

Our conversation, as I hope you can tell, went far beyond poetry. That's a testament to poetry, that it could inspire these challenging questions and deep responses.

One family in attendance shared that they were newcomers to the West Coast and had just seen their first sunset. A man read a poem he'd written for his late wife, carefully pronouncing the Lushootseed names for the mountains that surround us. And a woman who went to the same university I did introduced herself and her young daughter, who she'd brought along for an evening of poetry.

"You Are Here" and the poets who contributed to it did all of that: They pushed readers to acknowledge that the land we are on is stolen and has been changed irrevocably. But they brought us together to reflect on it as a community. There's power in that.

It was an honor to be a part of this year's Seattle Reads programming. I'm grateful to Da' and Sigo for making it special for our readers and those who attended our talk. There are still opportunities to join the conversation, though.

Find other Seattle Reads events here, and don't miss these opportunities to meet the person who made "You Are Here" happen, 24th U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón:

• Central Library on May 16 at 7 p.m.
• Green Lake Branch on May 17 at 11 a.m.
• Columbia Branch on May 17 at 3 p.m.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Spoiler alert: For those of you who like to plan ahead, our May pick is "The Return of Ellie Black" by Emiko Jean. Jean has kindly agreed to an interview at the end of May to cap off our reading!

Detective Chelsey Calhoun’s sister vanished when they were teenagers, and ever since she’s been searching: for signs, for closure, for other missing girls. Then, her life is turned upside down when local teenager Ellie Black is found alive in the woods of Washington state — two years after she disappeared without a trace.

"The Return of Ellie Black" made the 2024 NPR "Books We Love" list, which I'd say bodes well for us readers — but maybe not so well for the characters at Jean's mercy.

RELATED: NPR's 'Books We Love' returns. 5 books for your Pacific Northwest reading list