Poet laureate to visit Tri-Cities on mission to hear poetic voices

When Washington state’s poet laureate visits the Tri-Cities this week, it’s your poetry he wants to hear.

Tod Marshall and at least one other Washington poet will read some of their work at the 6 p.m. event April 27 in celebration of National Poetry Month at Barnes & Noble Booksellers at Columbia Center mall with the Tri-Cities’ own Urban Poets Society.

But the Gonzaga University professor emphasized that there will also be an open mic for anyone to step up to.

“It’s about hearing other voices,” Marshall said.

Hearing those voices has become Marshall’s mission for his two-year tenure as the state’s lyrical ambassador.

Along with numerous readings, workshops and other appearances that he is expected to make across the state until 2018, he’s also challenged himself to assemble an anthology of poetry from all walks of life — Washington schoolchildren and retirees, polished and novice writers, the incarcerated and the affluent.

Part of the project is inspired by Marshall’s view that people can better appreciate poetry when they experience it by their own hand.

But it’s also a reaction to what he sees as the weakening of society’s ability to feel empathy for others, possibly making it easier for people to do terrible things to others, be it through domestic violence or terrorism.

“When we read a poem, it can help us understand a life we don’t otherwise have access to,” Marshall said.

Born in Buffalo, N.Y., and raised in southcentral Kansas, Marshall said he was a “ne’er-do-well youth” who started studying philosophy before a teacher encouraged him to write.

He holds degrees from Siena Heights University in Michigan, Eastern Washington University and the University of Kansas. His poetry ranges from an optimistic outlook to the more brooding reminisces seen in his latest collection, Bugle, released in 2009.

Marshall pitched his anthology project as part of his bid to be poet laureate, and it will be called Washington 129. The “129” refers to how many years old the state will be in 2018 and the number of submissions to be included in the print version of the book.

“Art gets squeezed out of us,” Marshall said, noting that many people don’t write, paint or do much creative work outside of their youth or school days. That can make it harder to appreciate those who create art as their way to talk about the world. Encouraging people to write poetry can reawaken that ability.

“Art is most alive for people when they see the challenges and joys of it,” he said.

Appreciating art also leads to better understanding, and that’s why Marshall wants so many types of submissions and plans to visit various places in the Tri-Cities in the coming months.

Along with expected visits to Columbia Basin College and Mid-Columbia schools in the fall, he said he also wants to visit inmates at Coyote Ridge Correctional Center in Connell to encourage them to write too.

Don’t let the limit of 129 poems for the anthology discourage you. Marshall said there also will be an e-book of the anthology where he plans to include as many submissions as possible.

The anthology is tentatively set to publish in a year, and afterward, he plans to go around the state again, inviting those in its digital and paper pages to read their work publicly.

“It’s really a democratic project,” he said.

Send up to three unpublished poems in one submission to submissions@humanities.org or by mail to Tod Marshall at English Department, Gonzaga University, 502 E. Boone Ave., Spokane, WA 99258. Deadline to submit is Jan. 31, 2017.

This story was originally published April 24, 2016 at 8:51 PM with the headline "Poet laureate to visit Tri-Cities on mission to hear poetic voices."