We asked the poets to write a poem for Portland & we reveal what we've been working on.
I am grateful from the inching, cracking, opalescent seeds of me! Under your feet Portland, under your feet, where the artists have rooted in! Our colors start to show just as August is a kiss away from eternity. The reds and browns will reunite w/ dewy infancy at the end of it all!
I sit in my Soul w/ a newspaper in my hands, eyes squinting and fingers inky, leaving fingerprints over our city by the sea. Endings and their radiant circularity! All I want is to be in the world and be changed by it. All I want for my art is the same, w/ the kind of longevity that a body can’t even entertain - reaching through time when I am brown, brown and curled tightly, wrinkled along the spine of the self while the car still speeds down the freeway. Hands touch. Heads bonk onto a lightness that changes everything for the better. I am proud, simply myself in my city…
This Workshop is a little different than the ones before. The Wizard and I have something to show you. Secrets revealed in their own time. Something for the community. Something for the city. A newspaper full of poetry and art and the felt experience of Portland - Issue 0, hot off the presses, hot off the printer, imperfect and only the beginning. We call it The Portland Dirt.1
The night turns me in its palm, in its pocket, like the snapped chain and sentimental metals that I fidget w/ when no one is looking. My city gets its fingerprints all over me, turning me around like a stone in a softer pocket of home, carried and cherished into the free air.
We have been getting our dreams together, folding them w/ our hands, copying and printing and handing out and asking everyone to be a part. The loose ends for the Workshop was this month’s poem - poems for Portland, like we requested of the poets. We’ve been focusing our energy on the center, on what we all have in common, the same streets we walk to get to where we are going, our friends in the red room and all around the city.
The Wizard writes their poem at the bar w/ all the maps. I write mine after work in the G room. All this time spent alive alongside my city, this whole year spent writing in my little books.
My heart leaps like a dog stuck behind its fence yipping, gleefully desperate, full of delicate joy. I rooted into Portland this year, growing where I was replanted. Despite the silt, I reach for the sun. I am not alone in my greening. Everyone is right here, growing by simply looking up. I know because I see them, feel them, hear them - the poets, all who dare and all who refute first, all who let life lead them in the dark.
I re-entered my city w/ a clear fearlessness that I don’t often feel. I won’t call it certainty. Something closer to a fluid alignment, like attunement. I parked in front of the Wizard w/out realizing, along the curved neck of Congress St. The same way M soon parked in front of me. The Jewel Box was just opening. The Wizard’s shorts grew shorter - vintage blue polyester instead of washed black denim, white thighs out. M wore her nameplate necklace, an athletic mini skirt and tall black boots. I dressed in brown, dressed in white, dressed in green cowboy boots w/ the nails now poking through the heels. The sun sat & stared at the navel of our city as we walked down the middle w/ tape and our posters of eggs.
We were posting up around town. The Wizard got caught talking to old friends so M and I took off. Some guy on a bike w/ piercings asked us what it meant. We said, Well, have you seen it?? Later, when we are asked again, we say, We’re not trying to sell anything. It’s an art piece. Easily loved.
In our short absence before the Workshop, Novel filled up. The chairs are set up a little different every time, allowing movement, but the faces are mostly familiar. I’m always curious to see who comes and who comes back, more and more artists to meet. The poets brought offerings to the sea and we brought piles of Dirt - our hard work, the thing putting stars in our eyes these days, the wet birth of beginning, the eggs cracked on Congress St. and beyond.
We spoke to our city last night and I think she really heard us. I think we are the wolves at the door. W/ each poet, I wrote down each landmark namedropped and pulled in, both new and old. Many poets called the city a kind of boomerang, how everyone comes back to stay after they leave for a while. A thing like that could give me hope. A thing like what we are doing keeps my red blood pumping. For GH, it was a sweet sayonara to the city, he leaves Sunday. For the rest of us, we were pulled somehow deeper into it. Together, we celebrated the simplicity of right here. Through continuous change, inside jokes, advocacy, hope and hopelessness, we have the city that holds us in common.
I want to give you endless reasons to create, I kept saying. We will use what we can. We use our hands, w/ ink and papercuts and chipped polish in the summer. I have never felt this impassioned. I have never felt this patient. I am a clear shot flung from elastic. I am all of me, here at once, moving forward or something like it.
It got so tender in the living room of the bar, a shared love of a city w/ all its faults and salts and mud. No room for doubt in that room. W/ all the names on the list crossed off, the mic was handed to gratitude. We spent the next hour sharing secrets and guiding enthusiasm. It felt like standing before a strong gust of wind in amazement, hair blown back, solid as a rock and delirious. It’s always so delicate, in the beginning, but this thing’s got legs, running barefoot from concrete to dirt to sea.
✺
I N T H E R E C O R D I N G
There is a statue in the West End of Portland of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow sitting prominent, facing the sea. Sometimes, seagulls on his head. Sometimes, a red scarf in the winter. Always, a scroll in his lap. Streets and boutiques and bars all named after him today, a poet in our city. He grew up in the first wholly brick house in the city and wrote at least one thousand poems. The Wizard presented My Lost Youth to the poets, saving the refrain for the first and last stanza for the sake of listenability.
The Wizard grew up in Portland and is intimate w/ the changing landscape but has spent some serious time away. Now, w/ our unifying passion project and the resilience of poetry in this city, they are moving back. It was moving to hear them read of boyhood by the sea.
While the Wizard journeyed into the long forgotten past of Portland’s poetry, I reached back only a few years and introduced Portland’s most recent former poet laureate (2021-2024) Maya Williams. I have met Maya a handful of times, but I’m not sure ey remembers me or recognizes me. It’s been exciting to see Maya’s reach grow locally and beyond, presenting and performing w/ regularity.
For me, poetry has always been an outsider’s art. The role of poet laureate, both locally and beyond, has always kind of puzzled me. If nothing else, it is an honor that recognizes the need for art and, for that, I revere it. I pawed through Maya’s most readily available poetry to present to the Workshop. How energetically right that I found this dirt-centric piece to share and that I found it in a local newspaper. Feels like full circle. Thank you Maya, for your dedication to poetry and our city. I hope we meet again.
As I mentioned before, the Wizard is officially moving to Portland, to a small, psychedelically painted apartment in the West End. At a dark bar that felt like home, they get sentimental w/ it. The Wizard wrote an infinite Hello.
They had a little something to say about it:
‘Dear Portland’ was the result of taking out Workshop prompt out and up and down into the avenues of the city. It took bumping into several old friends and taking a moment from the sudden August heat at a high table at Maps to pinpoint what it is of this wild little metropolis I’ve finally found and always failed to grasp entirely. Moving back to Portland has me desiring the sound of waves & the pain underfoot of cobbled streets. Though much needs to be addressed & changed on a fundamental scale, it is w/ great love & devotion w/ which I intend to return
~ BS
I want to add a secret insider’s perspective, here, for those in our community who are digging in. When the Wizard and I were in the earliest stages of scheming the Dirt, they were against the full title of The Portland Dirt, both for the fact that it nails us in place but also because Portland had been a jumbled mess of symbols for them, symbols and memories and affliction. I understood and asked them to sit w/ it for a while. When we reconvened, there was a new light in the Wizard’s eye.
A few Workshops past, I wrote about Portland and Nic asked me, What is there about Portland that you love so much because I…don’t get it. We talked into the night about timing and energy, about hope and grime and politics and poetry. For this Workshop, they showed up and read about Portland from a place of newfound love. Many poets this month shared poems of both adoration and discontentment, for where the city has been and where the city is going, but we were all able to meet w/ full hearts right here where the city is now. Now, when the Wizard and I walk around aimless, aimless in the dark, we spiral in appreciation for the filthiest of corners, the friends we run into, and the close proximity of the sea.
If you have been a reader of this newsletter for a while, you should recognize many if not all of these passages to a certain degree. Rather than sitting down to reinvent my feelings of the city, I collected moments I already cherished and polished into stone. From walking and wandering and wishing, feeling free as the city flares, taking me by the hand and teaching me.
I don’t believe that Portland has taught me anything entirely unique from what I would learn from any other part of the US or any other small, budding city. I don’t believe Portland is anything close to perfect. What I do believe is that we found each other at similar points in our development. The city, thirsty for art and authenticity. And me, looking for somewhere to root into and grow. I would be a fool not to fall in love w/ the Here and Now in the city that changed it all for me - as I wrote back in June - where I want everyone to come and find me.
Thank you for reading and finding me where you can. xoxo, G
✺ In the spirit of the Internet, if anyone would like to participate virtually in the Workshop to some degree, be sure to follow Portland Poets Society on instagram and please get in touch w/ me somehow and we can develop that together.
More on the Dirt as it develops ~ I’m not sure what roll the rag will take on in this space, or in any digital space currently, but if anyone is interested, I can work on something centered on the thoughts behind it, the intentions, the processes, etc.
The Workshop IX