blueprints

xiv | Katharine Coles
For my parents, attending that first reading was their way of supporting
me and my peculiar decisions—also, I guess, of satisfying their curiosity. But
it wasn’t long before they were going to readings for the sheer pleasure and
wonder of being read to, of being spoken to in the intimate and profound
way that is unique to poetry, that helps make visible the liminal territory
between an individual inner life and the world outside and so tells us, even
across vast time and distance, “in so many words,” as Mark Strand says,
“what we are going through.” 1 This is the gift of poetry, the thing those of
us who love it keep coming back for poem after poem, book after book,
reading after reading. Many of us are content to read and listen, to let ourselves
be spoken to by another and so enlarged. Others, my parents among
them, find their own voices called forth by the poems and cannot resist
speaking back. They have both gone on to write and publish—my mother
poems, my father essays. Though they remain amateurs, so they claim, they
have been drawn into that large conversation. They also now volunteer for
organizations that help bring poetry to our local community.
However, as all the essayists gathered here discovered at some point,
training as a poet can move a person only so far toward a life than includes
poetry programming. For one thing, it ties the joy of making strictly to the
writing of poetry; it provides few chances for us to learn that there are
other kinds of making to which we can apply the same imaginative skills.
Perhaps these are lessons we can learn only in the larger world.
While I was working on my PhD at the University of Utah, I supplemented
my meager fellowship as a part-timer at the Waking Owl Bookstore,
an establishment run by Patrick de Freitas, who, I suspect, embarked
on the whole enterprise largely so he could be regularly read aloud to. British,
tall and lanky with a little George Washington ponytail, Patrick is one
of those rare people all writers love, who reads everything, poetry included,
with no ambition to become a writer himself. His store held readings by
poets and writers famous and infamous, widely published and just starting
out. I remember him, when all the folding chairs were taken by customers,
sitting on the floor, his back against a shelf of books, his eyes closed while
he listened, a silly little smile (bliss, I think), on his mouth. The store gave
me my own first exposure to the work of bringing literature to a community,
to the details and arrangements that needed seeing to, from getting
books in to getting flyers out to seeing that writers got enough wine, but
not too much, before they went on. It was my job to know which poets got
so nervous that they routinely threw up before reading, which ones had to