There’s a wikipedia page that makes the claim that the first poem written in Seattle was “Chief Seattle’s Speech of 1854″ (actually published in 1887, two years before Washington became a state), a translation of a translation written almost thirty years after the event, reminiscent of scripture. This set me thinking about Seattle poetry during the pioneer period. Who was writing here before Richard Hugo and Theodore Roethke?
Lonnie Nelson, a wonderful woman who attends every Jobs with Justice meeting or action held in the city, has been documenting the city’s labor movement through poems since the 1950s. One of her poems in her collection Hidden Monuments describes the act of clipping and saving poems from the local newspaper in the early 1970s. If I make it to the main branch of the library this week, I’ll try to tease out a few poems from the microfilm collection, see what else was happening in poetry in Seattle in 1887 (also the year the Seattle P.I. was established).
Until then, I’m chewing over this well-worn phrase of Richard Hugo’s: eat stone and go on.
