Locally writ: Dennis Held hopes to bring back ‘the joy of poetry’

Local poet Dennis Held recently released “Not Me, Exactly,” his third book of poetry, a collection he hopes will start to bring a spark of joy back into the art form.

By the time Held was 6 years old, his dreams of becoming a writer had already started coming into focus. His path to writing, however, was no fairy tale.

“It took a while to get there,” Held said. Low expectations from authority figures led him to drop out of high school his senior year. “There just wasn’t much available to the person I was. I didn’t have anybody in my family that graduated from college.”

Several years of factory work later, Held decided to move in with his grandparents; his grandfather was just beginning to show signs of Alzheimer’s and would soon need extra help. Gradually, he explained, working around the clock and keeping a regimented schedule was reshaping the “hard-drinking, hard-partying 25-year-old” he had been.

“That’s really what made a man out of me,” Held said. “That’s what got me into college.”

Through it all, that childhood dream of becoming a writer never quite left him, and he’d finally built up the strength to go after it. He was quickly rewarded.

The first essay he wrote for his first “bonehead English” college course – a self-deprecating short story about the best way to watch an eclipse – was published in the Milwaukee Journal’s “green sheet” or funny pages.

“I think it was probably 10 more years before I ever got paid that much for a piece of writing again or had anything accepted that quickly,” Held said. “But that sealed the deal for me.”

He completed three years at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee at Waukesha, another three at Evergreen State College and then went on to graduate school at the University of Montana, where he would receive an MFA. After graduate school, he found a job teaching in the English department at Lewis-Clark State College, where he stayed for 10 years.

“I was a college English teacher having dropped out of high school – I worked pretty hard to get there,” Held said.

During a year’s leave of absence from the college, Held traveled around the West.

“I went to Boise and Boulder, all the hip towns, but I kept coming back to Spokane,” he said. It was big enough that he could go see an opera or a jazz club but small enough to navigate, which suited him.

“And I was arrogant enough to think that maybe if I came to Spokane, I could help influence its cultural life,” he said. Since moving to Spokane, Held has seen the poetry community come to life.

After meeting several local poets, Held quickly organized a poetry reading series. The community response was encouraging.

“Every reading we had, every time I went to meet somebody, there was a lot of excitement around poetry and fiction writing, as well,” Held said. Part of that environment, he explained, came from the MFA program at EWU and its reputation for feeding writers back into the Spokane community. “Writers – like me – who maybe came from elsewhere felt like Spokane was a good fit.”

He explained the promising “street-level activity” he had started to pick up on, especially during poetry nights at Mootsy’s Tavern. “They had poetry done there on Sunday nights for 12 years running,” Held said.

More recently, before quarantine, Held has been involved with Spokane poet laureate Mark Anderson’s poetry reading series at Neato Burrito.

“I love going there. It’s a younger community, and there’re a lot more writers who are LGBTQ+,” he said. “It’s a way for me to see some of the challenges in their lives. There’s some remarkable poetry coming out of that.”

Some trends in poetry, however, are less praiseworthy, he explained.

“I feel like many writers of poetry have moved into a kind of obscure abstract expressionism where … much of the writing … frankly doesn’t make sense to an average reader,” he said. “Poetry has evolved into a kind of professional state where I think a lot of the life has been strangled out of it. Poetry should have depth to it, but there’s a reason why it’s hard to get 20,000 people to read a book of poems, and it’s not because the American people are stupid. It’s because we have left the public behind.”

In his own work, Held hopes to bring back the “joy of poetry.”

“Part of what I wanted to do with (“Not Me, Exactly”) is to reinvest my life and the life of my readers in a kind of poetry that’s a lot more accessible,” he said. “There’s a lot of dark poems in the book, but there’s also a lot of life in there.”

To aspiring writers, Held advises that the best writing guidance comes from reading widely and outside your genre.

“A lot of people read within their own little genre, their own way of writing, and people who do that are missing out on being introduced to really fantastic ways of addressing the language,” he said.

“I have 300 poetry books on my shelves that I’ve picked up at secondhand shops and Goodwills, and I’m amazed at how often I’ll grab a book out of there, start reading it, and there will be the answer to some problem I’ve been having in writing. You’ve gotta write a lot, you’ve gotta talk to writers, but reading more widely is something everybody can do.”