For an island with a small population, Vashon boasts a large number of poets. According to island poet laureate Cal Kinnear, the number is upwards of 80. Recently, Kinnear and co-poet laureate, Lonny Kaneko, approached The Beachcomber about publishing island poetry. After some discussion, The Poetry Well, a column that will showcase local poetry once a month, was created.
April marks the 20th anniversary of National Poetry Month, which seemed like a good time to launch The Poetry Well. According to the Academy of American Poets, which established the commemorative month, the event has grown into “the largest literary celebration in the world with schools, publishers, libraries, booksellers and poets celebrating poetry’s vital place in our culture.”
Celebrating the culture of poetry on Vashon four years ago, an ad-hoc committee of island poets dedicated to community engagement in the poetic arts nominated Vashon’s first poet laureate, Ann Spiers, and anchored the honor with a two-year term. Ina Whitlock became the second poet laureate along with two teens, Zauxie Sackman and Lily Robinthal. Last summer, the titles went to Kaneko, Kinnear and Vashon High School student Maijah Sanson-Frey.
When asked why poetry matters and why the island seems to attract poets, Kinnear answered in an email:
“Writing poetry is its own sort of writing. It is not at all like the writing we were taught in school. We don’t write an outline and go to work. Poetry is a way of life. Poetry is attention to our lives. We listen, and when the time is right, we hear. We hear what we didn’t know we knew — about what it is to be a person, to feel the world within and around, to say what it is we feel, which is a vaster knowledge than science. And after what we have heard, the work begins — to bring from language more than it knew it had to say; by sharpening our senses and finding the words to convey what we sense; by condensing, saying as much as we can in as few words as possible; by singing, which means hearing the music in the sound of words and their rhythms; by metaphor, by pun, by all the figures of speech we have ever come upon; by turning time upside down and inside out, even finding ways to speak of the joy-and grief-filled suspensions of time. The island is a place to write poetry, a place with its own quiet, its own calm, in which poetry may be heard read aloud, or, as here, heard rising silently from the page. But heard, truly heard.”
This month features a poem by Maijah to be heard:
Hallway Dayze
September fog seemed to be less thick
than October’s.
She swam in it,
heavy like her heart.
She didn’t even feel her feet
on the floor
Because her weight
was all around her.
When your head’s in foggy water
the only voices you can hear
are your own.
(Sorry to hear that, buddy)
But no one can get her in deep sea!
(Just leave me alone)
It’s like a bad body-
high-up
in space.
She has breathing problems today.
Who really needs oxygen, though?
Not foggy-water fish
in a hallway
daze.
In her biography, Maijah, 15, wrote she is a singer-songwriter and performer with “a passion for poetry, music, love and stars, and enjoys mixing them together through songs, writing and photography.”
She is inspired by deep emotions and colors, and says her poems “aim to invoke empathy from the reader and tease their previous walls of reality.” Her poetry through song has been heard in events like Vashon Allied Arts’ “I Am Vashon Guitar Project.”
