Scissortail Creative Writing Festival, Morning Sessions, April 1

I have a button that dates from the late 1960s & says “Support Your Local Poet.” This seems to be the motto of the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival, not just by providing a platform for dozens & dozens of poets, but they also coordinate the selling of each writer’s books with a volunteer-run book table. When I last read here in 2019 I published a chapbook of the poems I read, Baseball Poems (A.P.D.). My traveling companion Sally Rhoades was on the program this year & wanted a book of poems to sell so I produced for her Greeted by Wildflowers (A.P.D., 2022). What a thrill to see them on them on the book table.

XII. Regents Room

Markham Johnson is from Tulsa, OK & most of the poems he read reflected the grim racist history of that city & the burning of the black community in Greenwood, OK. But even his first two poems contained that same theme of retelling the past, “Running a Morning of Death at Pig Time” (including an ending in “pig Latin”), & “Father with Railroad Trestle, 1947.” His poem “Booker T. Washington High School Graduation” was about the burning of Greenwood & that he was the first white graduate of the rebuilt school. He also read from what he described as "postcard sonnets" about the massacre, each done as a letter from a different persona, including one in the voice of a member of the KKK. His book Dear Dreamland will be published by Lamar University Press in May.

Sally Rhoades has been involved in the Albany poetry scene since 1990, & she is a regular attendee at Scissortail. We coordinate our travel plans so that we only have to rent one car when we arrive in Oklahoma. She began her reading with “48 Hours in Oklahoma” about her first visit to the State ten years ago for the Woody Guthrie Festival, then a poem from Rumi, & a nod to the passing of poet Elizabeth Raby, a Scissortail reader who died since we were last here. Sally read a bouquet of poems from Greeted by Wildflowers, “The Red Fender,” “Letting Go a Little Bit of My Youth,” “She Was the Port in My Storm” (about her beloved Aunt Polly), “I Have Danced with Druids,” & “The House that Never Got Built” (that contains a reference to an Acadian poet who read at Scissortail in 2015). Not surprisingly it was an emotional reading, & the folks attending the Scissortail Festival certainly know there are poets in Albany, NY.

XVII. Regents Room

This was another of those impossible choices, my first choice was to go to the reading in the North Lounge, but Sally said she was going to that one, so I decided to attend this session (more on that in a bit).

The first of three readers was Sarah Webb with whom I read here back in 2019. Her poems mixed themes of magic & the natural world, such as her poem for Robert Bly “A 4-year Old Talks of Ancient Languages,” & “Drawing the Lioness” in which she is so captivated by a statue outside a museum in Scotland that she never went in. One poem was titled “Mergirl” another “How to Catch a God” which was a humorous take on magic spells. She wrote her own creation story in “Before There Was Anywhere” & “In the Left Hand” tells of writing a poem with her left hand.

The trajectory of the reading by Walter Bargen was from humorous country stories to the topical & tragic. His “Migratory Birds Count,” “Transcendent Goat Philosophy” (the goat trashes a house), & “Bucket Music” (catching a rattlesnake with a sponge mop) disarmed us for the intensity of his poems on the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, which caused him to breakdown a couple times, such as his poem about the destruction of a theater in Mariupol; others had titles like “Cost of a Flower” (on the blue & yellow colors everywhere), “The Crushing Darkness,” & “Calculations.” (Poet Alan Berecka who is a perennial presence here, whose reading I missed this year because I was at someone else’s, gave me a homemade button in Ukrainian that he translated as “Putin is a Dickhead.” Protest & poetry takes many forms.)

At sometime in this Festival already I had met Daniel Marroquin, a young writer now in Killeen, TX. Perhaps it was his shared background in journalism with Sally Rhoades, or simply the ease with which one can, at an intimate festival such as Scissortail, strike up a conversation with strangers. It was his first time here & he said how thrilled he was after he submitted his writing sample to be selected to be one of the readers. I’m not so old I couldn’t remember the same thrill. The three of us ended up sharing a table at the author’s reception on the first night, Thursday, at Polo’s Mexican Restaurant on Main St. in Ada. We talked writing, how his journalism, in fact all good writing, was the same as writing fiction, or reporting the news, or writing instructional material for government employees (even for writing Blogs). So I attended his reading to show my support.

Daniel read an excerpt titled “Coach and Camilla” from his novel-in-progress 2003. He said the novel consists of sections narrated by each of the main characters. Again, good writing by young writers feeling their way.

[Biographies of each of the readers can be found at https://ecuscissortail.blogspot.com/2022/01/2022-scissortail-biographies.html]