The novelist Salman Rushdie once said a poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.
Next Wednesday, islanders will have the opportunity to wake up through poetry at a free workshop and reading sponsored by Vashon Friends of the Library and Vashon poets laureate, Ina Whitlock and Ann Spiers.
Yakima poet Terry Martin will read her recently published third book of poetry, “The Light You Find.” While Martin captures the beauty of Eastern Washington, according to Spiers she also uses the terrain to explore the travails and redemption of life.
“Terry Martin, as do many of the Eastern Washington’s poets, writes poems that emanate the heat, dryness and openness of the Columbia Plateau,” Spiers said. “I enjoy the contrast to our island poems featuring a closed greenness and grey rain. Terry uses this landscape to define family, love and memory” — as seen in the following excerpt from Martin’s poem “Retrieval.”
By flowing water
rough edges soften
and I come to remember myself.
Along the riverbed,
branching trees point
to the quiet passage of the moon.
Tonight, even cobwebs
vibrating silver in the air
invite notice.
This river smoothes me,
like one of its stones.
Washington state poet laureate Elizabeth Austen wrote that Martin’s poems “sing a hard-earned love song to central Washington’s Yakima valley, the hills surrounding it, and the river that is still transforming it. ‘I’ve come to let the river work on me,’ writes Terry Martin. And in poem after poem, she shows how our beloved places might work on us, too: ‘Fill your empty place/with this horizon.’ Loss and anger find voice here, but so do acceptance, compassion and gratitude. These are poems to savor and share.”
When Martin is not writing poetry, essays and articles, she is teaching English at Central Washington University, where she won the Distinguished Professor Teaching Award. She has been honored as a U.S. Professor of the Year by the CASE/Carnegie Foundation, which recognizes extraordinary commitment and contribution to undergraduate education.
Like Martin, Spiers is not only a celebrated poet but also a committed teacher with 20 years of teaching creative writing at Highline College, workshops at Hugo House, Vashon Poetry Fest and Vashon College.
Spiers will lead a prose and poetry writing workshop for teens and adults before Martin’s reading. Using examples and writing prompts, the workshop — “Breaking the Timeline” — will focus on how to shake up time as a way to create, edit and vivify writing.
Spiers’ most recent book of poetry, “Bunker Trail,” published in 2013, details a dramatic year she and her family experienced while living in the walk-in community of Bunker Trail.
The workshop “Breaking the Timeline,” led by Ann Spiers, will be held from 3 to 5 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 29. The poetry reading with Terry Martin will follow the workshop at 6:30 p.m. Both events will be held at the Vashon Library.
