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Western Washington Poetry Network

In January I traveled to Book Tree in Kirkland to attend a celebration for the launch of the Western Washington Poetry Network. It’s been around for at least a year or two, but this was the official “big deal” launch. Representatives from almost every writing group and open mike from Vancouver, Washington, to Bellingham to Duvall were there. There were cookies and wine. It was raucous good fun.

I was asked to speak about our poetry group—the only showing (so far) from Mukilteo—and, in part because I’m not sure we want new members, I talked instead about this blog. I told them how many poetry books I read in 2024, and how many book reviews. I invited people to take a look. I promised to promote WWPN.

And, as a result, I was handed several books by local poets. Like I needed more poetry books! (Of course I did.)

One of these was a coil-bound 5×8 collection with a tan cover bearing only the title, Five Oaks, and the poet’s name, all in lower-case: chris dusterhoff. I think chris himself handed me this book, but I’m not sure. I looked him up at the WWPN site, and found his name (again lowercase) associated with the 2024 letterpress anthology, The Examined Life.

Five Oaks was originally published in 1999 by Spankstra Press. This edition, the third printing, is from New Pacific Press, 2023. In the introduction chris explains an old goal to publish a chapbook a year, and that—in the midst of a too-busy year—he chose to unearth poems from earlier in his life. Some are from high school, some about his sister Laura (to whose memory the book is dedicated), some are about youthful traveling, “headlites glowed / & trees wept on the shoulder” (from “in subtle darkness”).

The poems are in lowercase and nearly free of punctuation (even apostrophes for contractions are left out), and occasionally include beatnik spellings (cupajava) or possibly misspellings or typos—who knows!—and even so I enjoyed  reading Five Oaks all the way through. It allowed me to glimpse a young poet testing the wheels on a new vehicle, experimenting with form and language and voice.

Yes, a few of the poems are long and as meandering as the journeys they depict:

into Bismarck over Missouri rvr
revisited
molten rvr of ice
11:45 am              out of Bismarck
through fargo, n.d. on borderline

           w/ the model for modeltrain depot

(from “Starting from Portland – Dec 1991”)

But even in these, in places, the language can turn magical: “leaves dance / a marionette jig… / with VanGogh pulling / the strings” (from “Vacation”). In another: “mystic paleblue morning / lavender / birdsong – what bird? / Portland city gray skycloud” (from “6:30 am September 2 ad 1991”).

So, I enjoyed reading Five Oaks and getting to know the young chris dusterhoff as he, a while back, “walked out / into applecore / days” (from “day of a hundred reckonings”). And if that isn’t a good reason to keep reading and sharing with you, I can’t think of any other.

getting to know the young chris dusterhoff as he, a while back, “walked out / into applecore / days”

 

Thanks for riding along with me. And don’t forget to take a look at WWPN. Maybe your path will cross with someone unexpected.

Bethany

Photo by Immortal shots from Pexels

Where’d You Go, Bethany?

This coming Saturday, January 18, at 4:30, I’m leading a poetry workshop at The Book Tree in Kirkland, a book store owned and operated by poet Chris Jarmick. I’m also the featured reader a little later in the evening. Open mic runs until 8 p.m., and if you show up, there are many fine restaurants within walking distance. We will decompress together.

Meanwhile, our dog, Pabu, is convalescing from surgery and I’m doing quite a lot of hanging out with him, and reading. A bit from my list:

Rita’s Notebook, a blog I follow and which always has exceptional posts, and often includes amazing links to more poetry and creative writing news. The link will take you to an “In Memoriam” post about the man who published my first book, The Coyotes and My Mom, and to whom I will be forever grateful.

The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, by Dominic Smith. In 2019 I read mystery after mystery after mystery (hoping to understand how it’s done), but over the Christmas break I picked up this book and could not put it down. A forgery of a 17th century Dutch painting lies at the heart of this novel, and the writing is detailed and … well, mind-blowing. The novel’s construction–braiding together 21st century Australia with 1950s Manhattan and the Netherlands in the 1600s–dazzled me.

I have also been rereading Write Away by Elizabeth George. I can’t say enough about this book. George explains how she creates her characters (I’m quite hooked on her Inspector Lynley mysteries, which are chock-full of literary magic) and pretty much every nuance of her process. She also shares snippets from her own journal. Here’s one that especially resonates with me:

“This is the moment when faith is called for. Faith is the creative spirit within me, which is part of what I’ve been given by God; faith in the process; faith in my intelligence and imagination. If I’ve managed to imagine these characters and this situation into being, doesn’t it follow that I should also be able to imagine my way through to the end of the book? It seems so. Thus…I suit up and show up. I sit down at the computer and I do the work, moving it forward a sentence at a time, which is ultimately the only way there is to write a book.” — Elizabeth George (Journal of a Novel, July 6, 1998), Write Away

It would be lovely to see you on Saturday at The Book Tree.