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Poetry is not dead, just hidden

Pique explores the lives of poets living in Sea to Sky
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Poetry. Once considered the highest of art forms, it is now tucked under a large stack of post-modernist literature and rock and roll record sleeves. It has been relegated to university classrooms and literary journals that the public at large has little taste for. People say they respect poetry — we would seem uncultured if we said otherwise — but who of us can name three living poets? How many reading these words have even read a poem in the last two months?

On the heels of World Poetry Day this Wednesday, Pique is exploring what it means to be a poet living in Sea to Sky in 2012. Finding multiple poets was no easy task. They either don't exist in any great numbers in Whistler, or they're simply just hiding.

"It's a quite a lonely place to be a poet, to be honest with you," says Mary MacDonald, a psychologist by trade who primarily considers herself instead as, you guessed it, a poet.

She might just be the Whistler poet, having won the past two Poet's Pause Poetry Competitions, an annual contest spearheaded by the RMOW. She says she began writing poetry as a youth, as so many do.

And, as so many do, she gave it up for a time as she focused on her professional career. Then, following a series of personal tragedies, she was offered two writing gigs, one to write a ballet and another to write the words for an opera — both poetic forms in their own way.

MacDonald says it opened up a world of possibility and opportunity in her writing.

"There's a whole possibility of poetry that can be in the world now," she says. "It's not just something you have to write and publish in your school newspaper when you're in Grade 11. There's a way to do it as an adult where it has a voice."

In the past four years, several venues for poetry readings have sprouted up throughout Whistler. There's Poet's Pause, which has offered emerging voices the opportunity to share their work in a public forum.

Now this year, the RMOW is taking part in the Mayor's Poetry Challenge, a national campaign spearheaded by Regina Mayor Pat Fiacco to recognize homegrown talent. The challenge will be rolled into this year's Poet's Pause, where writers will submit pieces for installation on sculptures, designed by Joan Baron, at Alta Lake Park.

And there's Creative 5 Eclectic, Stephen Vogler's monthly art event, originally conceived as an open mic night for writers, musicians and artists of all varieties to perform. Each month, Vogler performs new pieces written specifically for the occasion. He says C5E has helped to pull people "out of the woodwork" to share their own poetry, and a lot of them are residents that Vogler, a long-time local who's deeply engrained in the arts culture in Whistler, has never met before.

"I think in any town there's people out there who are writing poetry but it's often underground or hidden in the woodwork," he says. "Whistler generally is hard to be any kind of creative artist and poetry is probably at the very bottom of the barrel in terms of the arts."

In larger urban centres, poets (and writers in general) have more opportunity to support their lifestyle through working for literary magazines, moonlighting as journalists and so on. But even there, poetry-enthusiasts exist in literary and academic circles. In Whistler, the opportunities are still quite limited.

But Jude Goodwin, a Squamish-based poet who has been published in The Guardian and numerous literary journals, won awards and been nominated in several poetry competitions, says there's an emerging world of poetry available through the Internet. Online forums, social media, literary blogs and e-Readers are expanding the opportunity for poets to reach new and larger audiences.

"As a poet interested in the business of poetry, I'm very heartened by it," she says. "I think it's really going to really gain in popularity over the next decade."

Goodwin's now working on a series of short poetry books that she'll self-publish specifically for Kindle as an experiment. Already, she's seen impressive responses to poems that she's published on her Facebook page. She says it's heartening to see such a small selection of individuals responding in a big way.

"It's amazing. People go, 'Whoa, I knew poetry but I didn't realize that poetry could be what you're writing,'" she says. "It's starting to reach people that maybe wouldn't have read poetry prior to this."

She admits there has been a considerable decline in the popularity of poetry, coinciding with the decline of poetry in music. The late '60s and early '70s was a golden age for poetic lyricists, when Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen were considered superstars and Gil Scott-Heron could help spur the hip hop movement that would emerge a decade later.

"They went hand-in-hand," she says. "When you look at music nowadays, there's no poetry there at all. With DJ and house music, there are no words. I think there's a bit of a... schism or rift where they started going separate ways. And where music is always easier for people to listen to and enjoy on all devices, poetry kind of fell off."

So, then why write poetry?

Well, why paint pictures? Why play bluegrass? Why run, or pierce your nostrils, or play the saxophone. Poetry is the most comfortable form of self-expression for those who write it. It's a compulsion for most. MacDonald says it's a way to make sense or articulate some problem that's been nagging at her subconscious.

"I think as a poet, when something's there rolling around in my brain, some minor thing, I don't know what other people do with that but it usually comes out as a poem for me," MacDonald says. "What I'm trying to do is explain in language something that isn't really about language, that's deeper — an emotion, a feeling, an experience. It's something for which language often falls short."

For more information on Poet's Pause and Mayor's Poetry Challenge, visit http://www.whistler.ca/poetspause.