With release of ‘WA129,’ Washington poet laureate Tod Marshall celebrates the state of poetry
Tod Marshall has fulfilled his promise.
When he applied to be Washington’s poet laureate, the prize-winning Spokane poet and Gonzaga University professor had a idea to create a poetry anthology for the Evergreen State.
His construct? The book would contain one poem for each of Washington’s years of statehood - 129 by the end of his laureate term in 2018.
In Olympia on Thursday, Marshall will gather with the Bushwick Book Club band, various state officials, and as many of the 129 poets who want to attend for an official book launch celebration that coincides with National Poetry Month. (A celebration in Spokane is in the works for later this year.)
The featured poets come from Seattle and Spokane, Friday Harbor and Walla Walla, Bellingham and Deer Park. They are MacArthur fellows and poets laureate, novelists and professors. Two writers have work published posthumously, Lucia Perillo and former Spokesman-Review music writer Isamu Jordan. While there are many established poets on the list – Sherman Alexie, Kathleen Flenniken, John Whalen, Maya Jewell Zeller, Ellen Welcker, Dan Butterworth, Nance Van Winckel, Laura Read, among them – others are amateurs or up-and-coming writers.
Actually, one of the biggest “names” in the book is a relative newbie when it comes to poetry: novelist Tom Robbins, author of “Still Life With Woodpecker,” “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” and “Jitterbug Perfume.”
“I got some luminaries with Sherman, and Tom Robbins I think was a coup,” Marshall said. “He said this is his only published poem. He said in ‘Even Cowgirls,’ one of his characters wrote poems, and he wrote those, but this is the only time he’s had a poem by him in print.”
Marshall himself whittled down the 129 poems from 2,150 submissions. “I hated poets for about a day at the end of January,” Marshall joked, “because I got 600 poems in the last three days of January. Submissions started in March (2016) and they waited. I think I got two dozen poems in the last hour.”
The submitted poems are in a variety of forms and genres. There are prose poems, cowboy poems, ballads, sonnets, classic rhyming poems, and free verse poems. “I strove for a really wide aesthetic range,” he said. As for the subject matter? “Lots of salmon. Lots of mountains. … And streams and Mt. Rainier and Mt. St. Helens and bigfoot poems. Lots of bigfoot poems.”
At least one of those bigfoot poems made it into the book. “I’d say 85 or 90 percent of the poems in the book directly connect on Washingtonness. And I said in my call for submissions that I would privilege those poems,” Marshall said. “But I also have a handful of poems that don’t, because I thought they were either excellent for their craft or their thematic subject matter was incredibly important.”
The book isn’t the final stop in this project, either. A web component is in the works.
“I still have to get started on the digital project,” he said. “I have about 100 poems I set aside that were wonderful, but I could only have 129. Those poems I’m having some GU students help me a digital presentation of them.”
The completion of “WA129” comes as Marshall reaches about the halfway mark of his two-year term as poet laureate. It’s been an invigorating and exhausting experience. He’s put more than 36,000 miles on his trusty Subaru as he’s criss-crossed the state in all kinds of weather. With National Poetry Month this month in full swing, Marshall is all over the place. In recent weeks he’s held poetry workshops with prisoners at the correctional facility in Airway Heights, worked with students in the Stevens County community of Valley, and done readings at libraries in the San Juan Islands.
This coming Thursday, the day of the “WA129” launch, he predicts will be “representative of the whole gig in some ways.”
In the morning, he’ll be at a South Puget Sound literacy fundraising breakfast. He’ll then read at the Washington Senate to open the legislative day. He’ll visit a high school, then come back to the Capitol for the launch party. That evening, he’ll head out to the Old Growth Poetry Collective Slam Festival at “this amazing dive bar in Olympia. … I’ve gone to two of their events so far, and they’re a rowdy bunch. So I from literacy to education outreach, to this poetry-schmoetry gathering in the Capitol building to poetry rowdiness.”