State's poet Laureate coming to Odessa

Elizabeth Austen feared letting her poetry loose in public, until she realized she was just its channel.

A stage actor for years before turning wholesale to the written word, the Seattle poet never endured stage fright when speaking lines from other writers. It was only her own work that scared her when she tried to give it voice.

“My mouth would go dry, my knees would shake, and it troubled me,” says the Seattle poet, 48. “I couldn’t figure out why it was so completely different to perform my own work.”

Then, an epiphany – one of a handful that have guided Austen to her nomination this year as Washington’s poet laureate: “It’s not about me,” she says. “I’m not the point. The point is the experience the audience has, and I’m only fifty percent of that.”

Named to the laureateship in January to succeed Kathleen Flenniken, Austen has been familiar to listeners of Seattle’s KUOW-FM as producer/voice of the public station’s poetry segments for 13 years. There she’s shared and analyzed the work of contemporary northwest verse artists like Alice Derry, Christine Deavel, Derek Sheffield and others.

Now an advocate of the poem in several media – on the page, on the stage, on radio – Austen has learned to see herself as just one more of those media. Poetry is an interaction between poet and reader, after all, and poetry aloud entwines the reader with the listener.

“Performance requires you, but it’s not about you,” she says. “And that really liberated me to understand that my job was to be the instrument that introduced the poems into the room, but the audience had a job as well. ... Every audience member experiences a slightly different poem, because of where they are.”

Perhaps the best example from Austen’s own work is “The Girl Who Goes Alone,” from her 2011 collected volume Every Dress A Decision. Read onstage, it becomes a seven-minute travelogue of the risks a woman must take – or is told she must take, by the men and authority figures in her life – when going unaccompanied into the world. And every reading yields some new response from a listener.

“What I’ve been amazed at when I’ve performed that is how often it’s men who come up and talk to me after, and tell me how the poem has helped them understand more what it means to be a woman,” she says.

Austen grew up in southern California, raised in the Catholic Church – an upbringing she now says contributed to her sense of the power of language. Acting summoned her, and she worked onstage and behind the scenes on sojourns living in England, New Jersey and Chicago.

Austen moved to Seattle, sight unseen, in 1989, and immediately felt at home both in the city and its theater scene, working with Book-It Repertory and the Seattle Shakespeare Festival. She soon became managing director for Freehold Theatre, a nonprofit acting studio.

Then came one of those epiphanies. About age 30, Austen dropped everything and bought a one-way ticket to Quito, Ecuador. (Among the things she took with her was Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese,” with its opening admonition, “You do not have to be good.”) It was a walkabout across the South American terrain – like that undertaken in “The Girl Who Goes Alone” – to center herself and figure out how she could become the author of her own life.

“When you’re an actor, unless your generating your own material, you’re always in service of someone else’s vision or expression,” she says. “And that can be an amazing and beautiful thing. But part of the reason why I left theater is I got really tired of not being the one who was generating the material.”

At Freehold, Austen had written a trio of poems that turned into a dance theater piece. “I think that was where the light really came on for me of poetry as something powerful,” she says, and when she returned to Seattle from her walkabout, that was where she invested her energy.

She took up serious academic study of the form in MFA studies at Antioch University in Los Angeles, and while there, netted the KUOW internship that led to her ongoing role at the station.

The poems she went on to create are concerned with freezing moments and turning them over in the hand (“Not Yet,” “Humans”), as well as exploring what place people have in the world.

And more specifically, the place of women. Even the title of Austen’s 2011 collection from Blue Begonia Press, Every Dress a Decision, queries the expectations and conditions placed on a woman. Poems like “Problem Was” are both reflections and warnings against letting a man determine one’s value:

“The more he talked –

his litany of needs, the catalog of my flaws, the chronicle

of his disappointments – it became a kind of lullaby, soporific,

setting me adrift on the tundra ...”

Austen’s poems first arrived in chapbook form in 2010 from Floating Bridge Press with The Girl Who Goes Alone, featuring an earlier version of the title poem, and with the work of other poets in Sightline, from Toadlily Press. Every Dress a Decision went on to become a finalist for the 2012 Washington State Book Award in poetry.

She’s also found ways to weave poetry into her work as online content strategist for Seattle Children’s Hospital, where she hosts workshops for fellow staff. In her two-year term as poet laureate, Austen hopes to bring poetry to adult audiences and participants, hosting such workshops and discussions at local libraries and tribal centers throughout the state.

“Really, the biggest challenge with teaching poetry to adults is that by the time we come to adulthood, we have all been pretty much acculturated to stop doing things we’re not good at,” Austen says. “... My strong belief is that we have lost something by offloading the arts onto people who make it their professions, and to reclaim the making of art as something that is deeply pleasurable, that is social, that is a conduit to a deeper connection not only to the self, but each other – that feels very urgent to me.”

The Friends of the Odessa Public Library is hosting an evening of poetry written and presented by Elizabeth Austen, Washington State’s Poet Laureate for 2014-2016, the evening of October 14, at 7 p.m. in the library at the Odessa Community Center.