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| Linden Ontjes oversaw the last poetry festival in 2007, a labor of love that her all-volunteer group couldn’t sustain. “It wasn’t a matter of a burnout as much as a matter of loving closure,” she says. Photo by Brooke Kempner |
It was a warm April day in Seattle. All the same, August Wilson stood in a suit on the stage at Richard Hugo House, reading lines not from the plays that won him two Pulitzer Prizes, but from the poetry that made his stage drama sing.
Lyric images rolled off Wilson’s page with power and precision. On the same stage, at the same event, the words of Edwin Torres – a pencil-thin favorite of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York – rocketed off the stage in a wild-tongued mix of Spanish, English, and mayhem.
Two very different styles and generations of writers. One Seattle Poetry Festival, the very first one put on in 1998.
That’s the reason founders Noel Franklin and Bob Redmond say they started the event: to bring together poets, rockers, and performance artists to share, cross-pollinate and draw in new audiences who could pony up some cash to actually pay the writers.
Last fall, however, the remaining organizers of Eleventh Hour Productions, the nonprofit behind the event, decided to fold, ending not only the festival but a Real to Reel performance series and Emerging Voices, a program of workshops that Eleventh Hour poets conducted in schools.
The Seattle Poetry Slam, which had merged with Eleventh Hour in 2001, has found another nonprofit to affiliate with, says organizer Daemond Arrindell, who has an event planned April 27 at Chop Suey — the annual Grand Slam finals — which served in 2005 and 2007 as the grand finale of the April poetry festival.
The festival was important, he says, because it built bridges in Seattle.
“You can find an open mike every single day of the week, but very few of these organizations and programs are connected to each other,” Arrindell says. “The poetry festival was one of the places where groups would come together and share work and connect and build off each other. It’s really sad it’s gone” — something he thinks people may not pick up on for a while.
Eleventh Hour had produced the festival once a year, then took a hiatus in 2003 and 2004 after Franklin and Redmond moved on. In 2005, the group started producing the event every other year, but, because of the two-year gap, Arrindell says, “there is a very big hole in the poetry community that not a lot of people recognize yet.”
It’s a hole that co-founder Bob Redmond, now senior programming manager for One Reel, the producer of Seattle’s Bumbershoot festival, also finds sad. Because Eleventh Hour had no deficit and a good track record, “I feel like it’s premature,” he says. “It’s kind of like your good old uncle suddenly died, and he didn’t even have liver spots.”
From the first humble three-day event in 1998 at Hugo House, the festival grew in 2001 to a mammoth two weeks at eight venues, from the Broadway Performance Hall to Seattle Center. Headliners over the years included Sherman Alexie, Exene Cervenka, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Ishmael Reed, and the Kamilche Guerrilla Girls.
The final 2007 festival, held over three days at Hugo House and two other venues, presented nearly 200 writers and drew an audience of 1,500, says Eleventh Hour’s last administrative director, Linden Ontjes. But it was a labor of love that the all-volunteer group just couldn’t sustain. Ontjes wanted to finish a book. Another board member got a job at Microsoft and another moved away.
“We were all hands-on and all unpaid, and we were all serious, committed artists,” Ontjes says. “It wasn’t a matter of a burnout as much as a matter of loving closure,” with the group deciding to call it quits after running a month of Theodore Roethke readings at ACT theater last August.
After doubling the group’s revenue, expanding programming, and putting on two successful festivals, “We ended at the top of our game,” Ontjes says. Franklin sees it a bit differently.
“They just decided not to create a transition strategy and chose to close the agency,” she says. But, “I have mixed feelings because the festival had moved away from its original spirit.”
The last poetry festivals had a more homogenous literary lineup, Franklin says, which tends to draw less audience and make less money. “Something as simple as bringing a playwright like August Wilson and having him read his poetry or a rock ‘n’ roller like Exene Cervenka — you get their audiences and their attention and honor the diversity of their voices.”
But, says Redmond, “The whole thing was never about legacy or permanence or immortality. It was a way to do something fun and give a chance for people to be heard — and they did.” n
Cydney Gillis was the volunteer coordinator for the first Seattle Poetry Festival in 1998.
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