On Friday, Sept. 22, from 7 to 8:30 p.m., the Grace Hudson Museum will present “Reading the Waves,” a poetry event in which six local poets read work directly from or related to the Museum’s current exhibit, California’s Wild Edge: The Coast in Poetry, Prints, and History, a display of woodblock prints of the California coast by noted Marin County artist Tom Killion alongside the poetry of Gary Snyder and others. The poets reading on Sept. 22–Dan Barth, Armand Brint, Christopher Douthit, Mary Norbert Körte, Linda Noel, and Theresa Whitehill–represent an impressive cross-section of inland Mendocino County literary talent and include four former Ukiah Poets Laureate. The event is free with Museum admission.

With its splendid scenery, innovative spirit, and proximity to the San Francisco Bay Area, which was instrumental in spawning the poetry of the Beat Generation beginning in the 1950s, Mendocino County boasts a rich poetic culture. In addition to the coast, Ukiah and Willits both have close-knit and flourishing poetry communities. That is an important element for poets, who often find their work being marginalized. Instead, poetry can be a vital resource in times of crisis when people are searching for beauty and a meaning deeper than the latest Twitter feed. As Ukiah native Chris Douthit, who currently serves as Ukiah High’s librarian, puts it: “In times like these, we need the truth-telling of poetry more than ever–to call out injustice and to help us focus on the beauty of the moment.”

That beauty is everywhere evident for these poets, some of whom live right in town while Mary Norbert Körte, a Beat Generation poet who’s been producing superb nature-centered poetry for five decades now, lives in a remote homestead deep in the redwoods outside Willits. Armand Brint, a Ukiah resident for nearly 30 years and its first Poet Laureate, comments, “You can hardly write poetry here without being influenced by the natural environment. It’s such an immediate and strong presence in the county.” Letterpress printer and another former Laureate, Theresa Whitehill, agrees. “We’ve grown our poetics up with the landscape,” she says. “To live in a rural county, you interact more with the land than you do with people.”

“A big part of the poet’s job is to speak for the natural world,” agrees Dan Barth. Also a former Laureate, Barth made his way here from Louisville, Kentucky over 30 years ago, influenced by the writing of fellow Kentuckian Wendell Berry (author of The Unsettling of America, among other classic books) as well as Californian Gary Snyder. Snyder’s writings of the 1970s, including the Pulitzer-winning Turtle Island, helped spawn an ecology movement that added depth and credence to the back-to-the-land movement that spurred many young people to settle in the area. (Snyder, who still lives and works in the Sierra Foothills, coauthored with Tom Killion a book called California’s Wild Edge which spawned the Museum’s current exhibit.) Körte, a former nun who left her religious order to write poetry and pursue political activism, then relocated from the Bay Area to live in and protect the redwoods, describes life in the woods this way:
she was secretly pleased water ran so high
it made her gasp & wow
pleased to walk into closed arms of trees
pleased to watch slow gathering of roots
pleased to think she might understand
speech of rain never-ending suss inside her soul

Brint, author of three books of poetry and a just-published manual on writing poetry, Bringing Poems to Life, sees the poetry of nature as including the everyday lives of human beings. In “Watershed Defined,” he describes, in simple yet luminous lines, how “deer peruse rose gardens/inside the white noise/of Saturday night stock car races” amid “the communal sound of rain.”

Douthit, who feels lucky to walk to work while he observes the daily activities of humans and animals, comments, “The rural character of Ukiah and Mendocino County generally is a gift to poets or anyone else who is in love with observation and reflection.” Linda Noel, former Ukiah Poet Laureate and a member of the Koyungkowi tribe, the Konkow (northern Sierra/Sacramento Valley area) echoes that. While preparing for the reading, she says, “the two words that come to mind over and over are beauty and bounty. The majestical scenes presented by nature and the grand vastness contrasted by the intricate and tiny details that make up the whole… can offer perspective beyond the mundane.” She explains that, for Native peoples, nature is a source of bounty both literal and metaphysical. Natives on the coast harvested (and, under more limited circumstances, still harvest) fish, seaweed and abalone, using the latter as jewelry. Noel also appreciates how the natural world provides bounty in the form of “a wealth of topics, subjects, and observations in which to draw from to enhance creativity.” Of a salmon going upstream to spawn she writes: “This acorn-time/names his journey/calls him back/to beginnings.”

California’s Wild Edge: The Coast in Poetry, Prints, and History is on exhibit until October 8. The Grace Hudson Museum is at 431 S. Main St. in Ukiah. The Museum is open Wednesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and Sunday from noon to 4:30 p.m. General admission is $4; $10 per family; $3 for students and seniors; free to all on the first Friday of the month; and always free to members. For more information please go to www.gracehudsonmuseum.org or call (707) 467-2836.