Get to Know a Local Poet

From running “Cheap Wine and Poetry” and working at Hugo House, I know many people in the literary community, but there are few who I enjoy more than Elizabeth Austen. I first met Elizabeth four or five years ago when I enrolled in her class, “The Poet’s Toolbox,” at Hugo House, and after she skewered my use of gerunds in a certain, never-to-be-published poem, I knew she meant business.

I didn’t understand what Emily Dickinson meant when she said, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry,” until I stumbled on “Garcia Lorca.” It’s a poem that starts “Green I want you green” and loops between sense and sound and image so fast it made (still makes) my head spin. The author, Kary Wayson, was local—even better, she was teaching a class at Hugo House that quarter.

The first time I heard Jack McCarthy was several years ago in Bellingham, Washington. Poetry Night was having their monthly slam, and there were an assortment of fairly well-versed performers, generally flashy, young things drawing heavily on pop culture, hip hop and the sort of sex-life revelations often saved for therapists.

As I poked my head into a classroom at Hugo House last Saturday, I didn’t even have to ask if I had found the Emily Dickinson class yet. I knew I had to keep moving because I didn’t recognize anyone from my previous courses with Deborah Woodard (Walt Whitman and Generating Prose Poems), even though it was the first day of class. I finally found my room by the pleasant look of familiar faces alone.