For years, Clemens Starck and Charles Goodrich have made a winter journey from their homes in the Willamette Valley to Stevenson, Washington, to give a poetry reading to a packed house. And, I mean an actual house. Darcy Carter, a resident of the small town perched on the Columbia River in the middle of the Columbia Gorge, empties her living room of furniture, lines up borrowed chairs and a music stand, cracks open a few bottles of wine, and welcomes dozens of local poetry lovers for an evening of recitation and discussion. It is a DIY model of presentation that bears consideration.
People start to trickle in around 7:15. Some carry pasta salads or pies to share; others more wine. Greetings are exchanged; in a small town, everyone knows everyone. There are farmers, biologists, teachers and even some children who, as they tire of the grown-up droning and doze off, are carried to a back room to nap out the evening. During the breaks, conversations are struck between neighbors and with the poets; books are inscribed; cigarettes are shared on the front porch.
Starck, who has been reading in Stevenson since the program was held at a resort that was called "The Timbers" in the mid-1990s, has become something of a Poet Laureate of Stevenson. He began to invite Goodrich along because the work of the two friends is closely connected; Goodrich has also become a favorite of the Stevenson crowd. The men are both poet-laborers: Starck is a journeyman carpenter who dropped out of Yale and spent his wild years as a merchant seaman and train-hopper in the 1960s; Goodrich is a landscaper and gardener who now teaches in Corvallis and runs the Spring Creek Project.
The poems (and a bit of prose in Goodrich's case) reflect this history. Starck reads the title poem from his book, China Basin, which chronicles the construction of falsework for a stretch of elevated highway in San Francisco. Goodrich laments the leaking windows he built, in the house he built, in an essay from The Practice of Home. The idea of "men building things" resonates in a small town; this is poetry with its feet on the ground.
No admission is charged, though book sales are encouraged. Other than the "podium," there is no division between artist and audience. Even though the writers have celebrated Oregon Book and Pacific Northwest Booksellers awards and appearances on The Writer's Almanac, there is no posturing here. Like a barn dance or a knitting circle, the reading is simply a community coming together to celebrate friends and their creative work. —Kristy Athens
