The Education of a Poet

I subscribe to a web based listserve from ASLE, The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. The questions come in daily from all over the world, and once or twice a week there will be a topic that catches my attention enough to get me to write a response.

Last week someone wanted to know if poetry could play a role locally in environmental politics. I thought this was a pretty good question in the midst of our current election season, and it made me think of an incident in my own political education from long ago.

In 1978 and 1979 I found myself working for Copper Canyon Press in Port Townsend, Washington. I'd come there in July of '78 with no intention to stay. I was just a year out of Wofford College, a Southern boy with a folder of adolescent poems and a love for modern poets like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.

I'd never traveled much. I saw an ad for the Port Townsend Writers Conference, and so I saved some money and flew to Seattle, hitched to Port Townsend, and registered for the conference. I arrived in PT early in the morning after catching a ride with a preacher out of Seattle.

When I arrived in Port Townsend I went down to a local hippy café on Water Street and ordered an egg breakfast. The waitress listened to my deep Southern accent and asked me if I was from Australia. I knew I was on the road, far from home.

I fell in with poet Sam Hamill and book designer Tree Swenson at Copper Canyon Press that week, hit it off, and when the conference was over, they asked me if I wanted to stay at the press and work for a year as an apprentice. They had some money from the National Endowment for the Arts for the program, and I could print a chapbook of my own work letterpress and also help with other press projects. I said yes, went back east, got my car and drove to PT where I spent a very important year in my education as a poet.

The most memorable incident for me that year concerned a battle to save the Kah Tai lagoon on the edge of town. A year or so before I arrived the city had begun plans to fill the lagoon, an important nesting ground for wading birds, and Safeway wanted to build a 40,000-square-foot store there. Sam Hamill was in the middle of the fight to stop it.

He'd helped form the Kah Tai Alliance, and one of the things the alliance did was get famous west coast poet Gary Snyder to agree to allow the publication of a small collection of his poems called SONGS FOR GAIA as a fundraiser. The book came out in an expensive hardcover (now worth $400 on used book market) and a trade paper edition in stapled soft covers.

My education came when I helped set the type for that little book of poems and was there as Sam Hamill designed the layout, corresponded with artist Michael Core about the woodblock prints, and stamped out the little book on an old printing press. I saw how "the real work" of poetry can focus community action.

We didn't win. In spite of the poetry the Safeway was built, but my experience in that year in the fight to "save Kah Tai" led to my own activism and local commitment to writing and community.

As Sam Hamill said in a recent interview, "I wrote a number of poems about Kah Tai lagoon, when Safeway was building that huge, ugly store down there where I used to love to watch the birds nest. That political poem, or environmental poem, was unsuccessful because Safeway built there anyway. And yet the poem has something to say today, as it did then… The agenda for every poet has to be different because most of us write from direct human experience in the world."

That was all thirty years ago. I'm still writing poetry and still looking around to see what needs saving in the world. There's still a connection for me between a well-made thing like a letter press poetry book and a cause worth serving.