Award-Winning Oregon Poet to Speak at Willamette

Walt Whitman Award-winning poet Geri Doran speaks at Willamette University on April 14. Doran is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Oregon, the recipient of many poetry awards, and is the author of the collection, "Resin." Her work has appeared in Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, and Virginia Quarterly Review.

Doran plans to read selections from her book, as well as from her new manuscript, "Sanderlings."

“I tend to select poems only a night or two ahead of a reading, but I’ll almost certainly include one inspired by fifteenth-century artworks that cast Mary (mother of Jesus) as the “The Good Field” and perhaps another in the voice of Mary Magdalene," she said.

Many of Doran’s poems have a religious bent.

"Many of my poems involve questions of faith - small prayers and whatever constitutes their opposite, poems of doubt," Doran says. When I saw those fifteenth-century paintings figuring a sublime Mary, it was the dissonance that captivated me: imagining the hardship of a life that included giving birth to (and presiding over the death of) a martyred son, against the placid, beatific images of Mary I was looking at.”

Doran also uses landscape, local and otherwise, as an inspiration. “Landscape is one, a very provocative muse for me. I’ll likely also read a number of poems that foreground landscape - the landscapes of this region, an oceanside town where I lived in California, and villages and cities in Europe where I traveled a few years ago.”

Doran believes success as a poet comes from the ability to fight the pull of distraction and disappointment.

“A long time ago I read an essay - I’ve forgotten the author - about the 'talent of the room.' Plenty of people have a gift for word or line, the essayist argued, but can you sit for hours struggling over a passage while boisterous, compelling life goes on around you? Can you close the door, be alone, and write? So there’s that - a preference for the solitary trouble of making poems over all the other things I might be doing.”

Geri Doran speaks at 7 p.m. at the Hatfield Room at Willamette University. Admission is free. For more information contact Mike Chasar at mchasar@willamette.edu.

The Poet’s Progress

The Oregon State Library hosts the lecture, "Reading in the Rain: 150 Years of Oregon Poetry," on April 7. The event is guided by University of Oregon instructor and editor of Northwest Review, John Witte.

As the author of three poetry collections, Witte is passionate about the progression of Oregon poetry. His teaching focus centers around Northwest and ecopoetry, a niche he describes as, “The place where nature and poetry converge.”

The lecture covers the evolution of Oregon poetry, starting with the unintentional poetry of settlers and pioneers in their journals and letters. Asked about the difference between regular journaling and poetry, Witte says the difference is intuitive. “Poetry exists more or less everywhere in language. You know it when you hear it.”

An arrangement of words becomes poetry if it speaks from truth and distills meaning. Says Witte, “Poetry (all art, in fact) is motivated by strong feelings that are universally shared. We go to art for an understanding of who we are.” Bad poetry or non-poetry, Witte believes, occurs when words do not come from this motivation.

Witte’s purpose in his lecture is not just to convey Oregon’s poetical history, but how our unique environment has shaped out the words of our poets.

“Oregon was barely settled when Walt Whitman published his great Leaves of Grass in Brooklyn. But we still have a strong poetic tradition of our own, characterized by our recent settlement experience, and our closeness to nature," Witte says.

Witte reads from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. at the Oregon State Library, 250 Winter Street in Salem. Admission is free and you may bring a lunch. For more information contact Angela Jannelli at 503-378-2814.