Reflections on Poets and Poetry
My earliest memories are of me reading the newspaper to my father at age 5. This was our nightly ritual. In the precious hours before that, we'd settle in front of the television and watch the "CBS Evening News with Dan Rather." Rather never knew that in a quiet city in South Carolina a little girl and her father thought that he was the next best thing to salmon and grits on Sunday morning. But, I grew up. In the place of Dan and my father, I began to have an insatiable desire to write my own stories. My mother took to reading me Shel Silverstein and Robert Frost at night. I was hooked. I wrote my first poem in the second grade and I have not put my pen down since.
As a newly arrived poet from a large city transplanted to a small desert town to take the position of Director of the Arizona Western College Creative Writing School, my initial instinct was to listen for the sound of voices. Involved voices. Emotional voices. Voices that wailed in agony at the human experience. Voices that spoke of love and of pain and of eating pretzels and popsicles at 3 am. Short of walking around Yuma Palms Mall and citing Shakespeare or Mark Doty searching for a kindred spirit, I started snooping around inquiring about poetry readings, coffee houses, local poets, even. I wanted to know: where was the writing community in Yuma? Where were the poets? Five months later I contacted Amy at the Yuma Sun. I had this idea for a poetry contest. I wanted to shake the grass a bit, sound the alarm and see what we would discover.
What Amy, Rachel and I discovered was that this community is filled with poets. Women, men, and children. All ages and thnicities - with something real, relevant, entertaining and downright funny to say. Our first annual AWC Writing School and Yuma Sun Poetry Contest was a big success. It was amazing to read the over 70 entries from over 44 poets. There was genuine quality work in our big stacks of poems. We fought for our favorites. We agonized over choosing the Top 10. In the end, we all loved each and every line from each and every poem. We thought about who those poets were, those people who allowed us a glimpse into their realities and who were brave enough to share their work at our Open Mic at the Yuma Arts Center.
Next year, we will take the contest to even greater heights. We will wait until then with the anticipation of small children waiting for cookies to bake until next year when we have the great fortune of reading more poems, glimpsing into more lives. I wish to thank all of the entrants of this year's contest. I encourage all of you to keep writing. Keep searching for your voice. When you find it, hold on to and keep finding the courage to share your work, in truth, part of yourselves, with us again. Finally, keep reading. Language is, perhaps, the greatest gift that we have as human beings. I am not certain who wrote these famous lines but before I begin to write I also meditate on this: "Ring the bells that still can ring/There is a crack in everything/That's how the light gets through."