Poet laureate will speak at EWU

CHENEY – Today is a day of firsts for Sam Green. He is the state’s first poet laureate and this is his first public presentation on the East Side. It is also the first major literary presentation sponsored by the Eastern Washington University Friends of the Library.

Green’s 4:30 p.m. talk on “Poetry in the Every Day” at the JFK Library on the EWU campus in Cheney is a happy marriage for both the poet laureate and the FOL, said Robbie Jackson, chair of the FOL executive committee.

Green was named the state’s poet laureate last December by Gov. Chris Gregoire, who stated at the time that Green’s charge was to “encourage people across our state to learn about and appreciate poetry.” The FOL, a support group originally formed in 1998 to promote the EWU libraries and their services and help with library programming, re-formed this past year to help get the word out to the public about the electronic and traditional resources the university’s libraries have available to them.

“We want to raise the visibility of the library as a center for learning and enrichment for the public, and here we are with this wonderful opportunity to present Sam Green to the public,” said Jackson, a faculty member in the EWU Department of Communication Disorders.

Green said he has been enjoying his role as poet laureate and showing people how to find the poetry in their daily lives.

“Poetry is all around you,” he said. “It’s not in some special place – like going to an aviary to visit the exotic birds. It’s in the robins and sparrows you see every day.”

One of the favorite questions he’s ever gotten at one of his presentations, he said, was from a man who asked how poetry would make him a better farmer. “And so, I told him,” Green said. “I told him about poetry as relationships, just as his fields are full of relationships. Poetry deals with patterns and language and how we speak to ourselves.”

Sam Green, whose book “Vertebrae: Poems 1972-1996” was published by the EWU Press, is a Washington native whose poems have appeared in numerous journals and 10 collections of poetry. For the past 25 years he and his wife, Sally, with whom he operates Brooding Heron Press, which produces fine letterpress editions of works of poetry, have lived in a log home he built himself on a small island in the San Juan Islands.

Today’s presentation, which is followed by a reception and refreshments, is free to the public. Donations to help support the activities of Friends of the Library would be cheerfully accepted, Jackson said.

“Libraries across the country have ‘friends’ groups which work to support their missions,” she added. “We at the EWU Friends of the Library are working to encourage people from the community to come to our facilities to see what a learning and program resource they are for them. We’re not just for students, faculty and staff any more.”