What would you want to do for your community for poetry?

If you had the opportunity to do whatever you wanted to make your community a better place for poetry, a more artistic place, a place where people would actually want to read and talk about poetry…what would you do?

I’ve lived intermittently on the East side of Seattle for thirteen years, ever since I was recruited here by Microsoft in late 1999. Back then, I wandered through libraries and coffee shops looking for posters or notes about poetry readings or workshops, not finding anything. I remember complaining, I am ashamed to say, with other East siders, about the lack of culture on the East side, how we had to go downtown to do anything literary – even though the East side is and has been crawling with artistic types, writers and visual artists. Redmond and Bellevue actually have some of the best libraries I’ve ever used. Yes, the lack of bookstores (since Borders closed recently) is a little offputting (I have to drive 20 minutes to Woodinville or Overlake to find a literary magazine…)

So over the last ten years, I got the opportunity to know some people with RASP (Redmond Association of Spoken Word) and volunteered briefly with the poetry reading series at Soul Food Books. So there are poetry communities here. But if I wanted to do more…to create more opportunities for people to hear poetry, to write their own work, to create a useful space for poetry…Instead of complaining, to actively go out and create what we’re looking for…

What would you do?