A Blog of Seattle Arts & Lectures
My Name Yesterday my name was Engineer Selome. Today my name is Dr. Selome. “Hi, Engineer Selome,” they say as I keep on building as an artist who can’t get distracted. I love being called Dr. Selome. I love helping people. Tomorrow I will be an adventurist, love going different places. No one knows where […]
Breaking Rules Do not litter unless you are in the middle of the desert and a giant army of camels with hammers is chasing you and the speed limit is at 5 percent. In this case you should go over the speed limit to at least 50 percent and you will drive away empty-handed. Do […]
By Kathleen Flenniken, WITS Writer-in-Residence This fall, I’ve been teaching poetry to fourth graders at View Ridge Elementary in Seattle. Each week before I share the poem that will be our mentor text, I show my students a photograph of the poet and offer a few words about the poet’s concerns, life, and times. In […]
By Gabrielle Bates Anastacia Renée: “Do you feel free on the page?” Tyehimba Jess: “I feel opportunity.” * Seeing and hearing Tyehimba Jess read from his Pulitzer-Prize winning collection Olio at SAL two weeks ago has me rethinking every parameter and practice I’ve ever accepted as fixed. The expansive, acrobatic, mechanical wonder of Jess’s syncopated […]
By Evelin Garcia, WITS Writer-in-Residence The following poem made me reflect on the fact that if I did not take the challenge of teaching poetry with WITS, someone else would do it, and that although the challenge was great, I still did it. Enough with maimed dreams On the road of life, transiting among others […]
From my mind to my heart: a message to me One of those late night conversations and I found me The real me Age eighteen I understand now Took the time to look back And I thought Wow Childhood It was a lock down Locked between the people who gave birth to me Defined as […]
Fear When I was little, I was scared of fire. When it lit up, my face looked like a ghost, and my heart sounded like waves crashing on a beach. But now, I when I get scared, I become the thunderstorm. When I become the thunderstorm, my heart will look like courage ready to strike […]
Many of us awoke to the sad news this morning that beloved poet Lucie Brock-Broido has passed away. Brock-Broido, the Director of Poetry and a professor in the School of the Arts at Columbia, once said during her 2014/15 SAL Poetry Series reading: “A poem goes driving, then hunting. I’m willing to go anywhere to […]
Pierre We realize perhaps we’ve been playing the waltz too slowly. We continue rapping our knuckles against the walls. Half of us learn how to dance, the rest of us learn how to cuff our jeans. Pierre has a bad day. He climbs the stairs and says No, Really too many times and then he […]
By Laura Gamache, WITS Writer-in-Residence The book said everything perishes The book said that’s why we sing -Gregory Orr Every WITS teaching residency has a beginning, middle and end, like the stories humans are wired to crave. As a primarily lyric poet, I tend to work with kids as if we’re outside the narrative arc […]