Yesterday I attended the 20th annual Martin Luther King Jr. Human Rights Conference organized by the Whatcom Human Rights Task Force. A few people that I work with were presenting on different topics important to me, but on a whim I ended up going to a workshop facilitated by two local artists/writers who I had not yet met but I had heard about when I was still kicking around with my MFA grad school crew on the regular. 

I'm pretty glad I did because one of the two presenters was Robert Lashley, an elusive poet who during the workshop called himself a "hermit in Bellingham." Apparently he tends to shy away from Bellingham's poetry scene. While I didn't take the opportunity to really get to know either of them because my writer-self is fairly shy and avoids naming herself as a writer among writers, I was thrilled to have accidentally found two folks who are doing some pretty invigorating work in Bellingham. 

Robert Lashley described his work as partially an effort to place Tacoma, WA as a city from which great art stems. That wasn't his exact phrasing, but you get the gist. I resonated with his experience of growing up in a place that was obviously not considered a cultural center and still cultivating the desire to be an artist, practice your art, and pay homage to home. 

He has two books out, Up South and The Homeboy Songs, and after hearing some of his poetry and getting the chance to flip through his newest book I think a fair way to summarize his poetry would be to say that it captures the despair of growing up Black in this area of the US (an area that often views itself as somehow vastly different from the deep south). I encourage you to buy a copy and educate yourself.  If you need a firm example of what I'm talking about, Lashley's poem "Elders Rage at the Water Spirits After a Shootout” was recently featured in Poetry Northwest. I wish he'd been teaching in my graduate program when I completed my MFA at Western Washington University. 

For those of you who know me, you know that I have a love-hate relationship with poetry. What I hate about poetry is the lackadaisical, anemic nature of the writing that is often present. While those traits are not necessarily specific to poetry, they are often present because writing a poem doesn't have to take a huge amount of time. Writing a novel does. Lots of people fail to write novels, so they often don't share those half-done novels or call themselves novelists. Very few people fail to write "a poem" when they endeavor to do so. They write something that has some internal rhythm and a specific image and voila! You have an anemic poem. 

I don't tolerate anemic poetry unless it has a very specific purpose other than being published in a collection or read to an audience. If you're most interested in form and sound, but not terribly interested in gravity, evocative power, and content, then you and I appreciate very different things about poetry. From my perspective, the best use of poetry is protest. The emotional and imagistic power of poetry can be used to cultivate new understanding of experiences and realities that might be alien to listeners and readers. Poetry has the power to open new worlds of understanding and make people uncomfortable in ways that require them to grow. Lashley's poetry has this power. 

Theresa Williams acted as the facilitator of the workshop, so she did not share much of her own work. From what she said during the workshop and what I've explored on her website, I gather that she works much more in the realms of visual medias and performative art. She calls herself a "community-activated artist and public speaker."