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Raven Chronicles publisher Phoebe Bosché says the shifts in the local poetry scene are in some ways economic: “Real estate is so high, it’s hard to get good space for readings.”
Photo by Lucien Knuteson |
Phoebe Bosché is still a bit miffed about what happened at Richard Hugo House.
Last fall, after 10 years of renting a cheap space at the nonprofit literary center on Seattle’s Capitol Hill, she says she got a call on her cell phone from its director, Lyall Bush, telling her Hugo House was renting out her office and those of a couple other groups to two theater companies.
Bosche, a Seattle poet and co-publisher of the 17-year-old art and literary journal Raven Chronicles, says the eviction was about money: Hugo House advertised for and selected the two theaters to take up residence, she says, at a cost of $10,000 a year — something no literary group could ever afford.
Bush says it was a programming decision. After taking over two years ago from director Frances McCue, who co-founded Hugo House in 1996, Bush says he wanted to expand Hugo House’s own in-house readings and productions to really promote the writers who participate and get away from a confusing community center model of various groups using the space.
Either way, Bosche moved in November, as did the Raven Chronicles quarterly reading series and a monthly reading series put on by Subtext. Bosche now pays a bit more for part of an office in the University District building that houses Jack Straw Productions, and Subtext has taken up residence at Wallingford’s Good Shepherd Center.
The moves reflect changing times in Seattle. With rising real estate prices and fewer and fewer cheap venues, Bosche and others say, the once-vibrant poetry scene of Seattle’s late ’80s and early ’90s has all but gone underground. In addition, Hugo House’s series and events, there are still readings on any given night of the week — with hip-hop a growing draw for those under 30 — but most readings today, the writers say, are generally small, intimate, and more diffuse or infrequent.
“Real estate is so high, it’s hard to get good space for readings,” Bosche says.
The featured readers and weekly open mike of Red Sky Poetry Theater, which started in 1981, is one of many series that are gone now. It lost its space at Capitol Hill’s Globe Cafe two years ago and never found another. Belltown’s Speakeasy Cafe and its backroom theater, which hosted poets, film and music — including Subtext’s New Writing series — burned down in 2001.
In their place, other series and venues have opened, such as Capitol Hill’s Gallery 1412 at 18th Ave. East and E. Union. It has recently started a performance series called Apostrophe that features experimental music, a modern dance piece, and one poet each month. And Shoebox, a new theater at 1404 18th Avenue, is running a monthly literary series called No Comment — readings by famous dead authors, curated by writer Rebecca Brown.
For groups that can’t afford a venue in the hubs of Capitol Hill or the University District, however, drawing an audience can be tough, as Subtext co-organizer Nico Vassilakis has discovered.
The group’s 14-year-old New Writing series, which takes place the first Wednesday of every month, pairs out-of-town and local writers working in experimental or “difficult” styles, Vassilakis says. While the series found a great new home at Good Shepherd — the stained-glass Chapel theater, underwritten by a group called Nonsequitur — fewer people are showing up to the readings since the move from Hugo House, he says.
“We’re having troubles with that of late,” he says. “One reason, of course, is the move to Wallingford. People on Capitol Hill could just walk in. In Wallingford, you’ve got to be set that you’re going to a reading.”
Bush appreciates the difficulty building audience — one reason, he says, that he decided to take all of Hugo House’s curation in-house.
“You can’t just put up posters and expect people to come,” Bush says. “If there’s going to be a major literary center in the city, we have to have strong, clearly delineated programs built to serve writers and help writers find audiences.”
“It would be a bloodless endeavor,” he says, “if everyone showed up and said [the reading] was just OK. |
