A Week of Sadness, of Returning to Field’s End, and Technological-Poetry Marvels

It has been a dramatic few days. Watching the terrible Boston marathon bombings – I happened to have the news on in the background when it happened – reminded me a few things, besides the heart-stopping sadness that accompanies these disasters. None of my ponderings will be more profound than anyone else’s on the subject, but it did reawaken that awareness that we are not safe as we usually assume ourselves to be, whether going to the movies, to a race, or to school (one of my friends had a stabbing incident – 14 people – at her community college a few days before the Boston bombings, where one of her students helped stop the attacker. I hope he gets an A!)

We are not permanent, we humans. We better ensure that we are doing the important things with our lives that we always meant to, because there may not be those extra years to make up lost ground. It reminded me that the little things we do to build the world up – telling someone you love them, maybe doing some volunteer work in the community – that they do add up, in the end, to more than the destruction some random terrorist might enact.

And with exactly that in mind, yesterday I made the trek over to Bainbridge Island Library to my own former home town to give a talk for Field’s End on building community, which seemed like an appropriate topic given the latest events. I talked about maybe how the most important thing I’ve learned from being Poet Laureate of my little city of Redmond has been – you do not need to be a Poet Laureate to do good in your community, to make a difference, to start a reading series or work with your local library or go into your local schools or work with an art museum or gallery. No – I could always have been doing those things, but I wasn’t brave? empowered? enough to do them. But now I know that I can. And I got to see one of my old friends, Lana Ayers, who was in the audience! (In less glamorous news, we did manage to have our car stall – and needed a jump to get off the Bainbridge ferry and had to drive around a bit to get our battery some more juice. For those of you who have never experiences needing a jump on a a ferry boat, let me tell you, it is both embarrassing and stressful. We blame our new/used car’s keyless on and off button, which it’s possible we haven’t quite mastered.) But Bainbridge is still the favorite of my former-home-towns, still charming as ever, maybe with slightly better restaurants than we had when we live there, and it was an oasis of sunshine on a stormy day.

And then today we used the internet to have a live meeting – across many states – to talk about poetry. I was honored to be part of the group – moderated by Robert Lee Brewer – that included Mary Biddinger, an overachiever for poetry if ever there was one, Nate Pritts and Aaron Belz. There was an interesting discussion of kindness versus the attributes of not-kindness in the poetry world, talk about our top poetry moments – mine were admittedly a little scattered, and of course a few of our poems, which seemed strangely thematically linked, not sure how that happened. Here’s a link to it at Writer’s Market:
http://www.writersdigest.com/whats-new/four-poets-read-poems-and-talk-poetry

The neat thing about the event was that somehow Google was trying to support the literary arts for poetry month and helped us use Google Hangout for our event, and here again I thought – here is a company which often I think of as nameless, faceless, etc – that is trying to do some good out there. I know companies do what they can, but it’s always encouraging to have an actual brush with corporate do-gooding. (You know, Microsoft matches employee charity donations, Capital One sent us out to work with Habitat for Humanity, so it does occasionally happen, you cynics!) And it was wonderful to see some people for the first time – I’ve never met Robert Brewer though I have been corresponding with him for years about Poet’s Market! And see Mary Biddinger, with whom I read on my very first book tour (U of Akron to Fredonia!) many years ago, again! Anyway, it made me think that in the future, maybe more poetry readings and lectures could be virtual – that perhaps we might be able to chat with someone famous that we love “virtually face to face” – and the ability to go to poetry readings would be greater for people who live far away from literary cities, or have disabilities or other things that keep them away from a lot of literary social events. Maybe some events at AWP Seattle will be done with Google Hangout! We’ll see.

Anyway, the week has left me emotionally drained, physically exhausted, but strangely, feeling hopeful about humanity rather than doubtful. There were so many more people doing good at the Boston Marathon than evil. The former army guys who ran to carry injured folks to the hospital, the runners who kept running to donate blood in the aftermath, the first responders who no doubt saved many lives that day. Look at humanity. We keep fighting against death, and pain, and anger, and sadness. We keep at it. We don’t give up.