Oregon Public Broadcasting

Friday a committee will meet to narrow the field of candidates for the job of Oregon Poet Laureate.  The requirements? The candidates must be Oregon residents with at least one published book of poetry.

Amelia Templeton reports on how the job has evolved.

In 1899 a middle-aged teacher published a poem in the San Francisco Examiner. The poem was called “The Man with a Hoe” after a famous French painting. The poet was Edwin Markham.

Oregon Governor Tom McCall appointed William Stafford as Oregon's Poet Laureate. Photo courtesy Lewis and Clark College

Jeremy Skinner of the Lewis and Clark College library tells what happened next.

Jeremy Skinner: “Immediately it caught fire and was published in newspapers all over the U.S. and all over the world because of its implications about the labor movement. Doubleday and Maclure picked him up. I mean, he was an instant celebrity.”

Markham was born on the banks of the Willamette River. He moved to California at age nine and lived there, and in New York, for the rest of his life. That didn’t stop Oregon from crowning him its first poet laureate.

Fast-forward about ninety years. Lawson Inada has been the state’s poet since 2006. Now his term is ending.

Cara Ungar-Guttierez directs the Oregon Council for the Humanities. She’s on the poet laureate selection committee.

Cara Ungar-Guttierez: “ Equally important as that person being recognized and recognizable is the work that person actually does to inspire folks and to spread a message about the importance of literacy, language, connection to community.”

The committee is considering 17 applications.  Gutierrez says Oregonians nominated a diverse group.

Cara Ungar-Guttierez: “They came from all over the state. There were urban poets, rural poets, native poets, Anglo poets, Latino poets.”

But there’s one thing everyone wrote about.

Cara Ungar-Guttierez: “I think that the strand that pulled all the applications together was that they all spoke of their relationship to landscape.”

Landscape has inspired past laureates as well. Ben Hur Lampman and Ethel Romig Fuller were state poet laureates in the 1950s. They documented life in the northwest.

They wrote about mountains, and deer, even spiders. The challenge of keeping a home.

Here’s English major Casey Newbegin reading Fuller’s poem “Doing Dishes.”

Casey Newbegin: “Little daughter, doing dishes,think of water.It is so gleaming white, so green,Child, remember it has seenMeadows, and has run betweenferns and roots of trees:It has ministered to these.”

Fuller spent 25 years as a poetry editor at the Oregonian newspaper.

Poet Laureate Lampman was also an editor and columnist for the paper. They knew that for their audience, poetry was part of every day life.

William Stafford. Photo appearing on the dust jacket of "An Oregon Message".

Doug Ericson is head of special collections at Lewis and Clark College.

Doug Ericson: "Their poetry is something that Oregonians are seeing on a regular basis, rather than having to go to a bookstore.”

For William Stafford, writing poetry was a daily practice. He was the state’s longest serving poet laureate. Paul Merchant is Stafford’s Archivist.

Paul Merchant:  “One of his great virtues as a poet laureate was that he was visibly writing almost every day. He writes basically twenty thousand poems.”

Stafford said the poet laureate title was “for a monarchy, not a free and liberal state like Oregon.” He argued for a two-year term limit, and eventually resigned in 1989, after 15 years on the job.

The legislature agreed to a four-year term limit for future poet laureates. Now the position comes with $10,000 and a travel budget.

Lawson Inada promised to take poetry to all corners of the state, at his swearing in ceremony in 2006.

Lawson Inada: “I want to be like a WalMart greeter. Except I’ll say welcome to the world of poetry. Affordable poetry. Come on in.”

In his time as laureate Inada has read at hundreds of schools and libraries across the state. He says he finds poets everywhere he goes.

Lawson Inada: “it's wonderful to see other people become authors because they have their own authority about them. You get some little kids who were raised in a rural town in the Willamette Valley in the grass seed growing country. And they can tell you about dusk in the summer, when the grasses are waving. Things that you wouldn’t notice because you whip by on the freeway.”

The selection committee will narrow the field down to three finalists. But its still up to the governor to decide who the next poet laureate will be.