High desert poet Ellen Waterston chosen as Oregon Poet Laureate

Central Oregon poet, teacher and author Ellen Waterston began her role this month as the state’s official Poet Laureate. Waterston has won many literary awards, including two WILLA awards and the Obsidian prize for poetry. This year, she received both the Holbrook and Soapstone awards in recognition of her contributions to Oregon’s literary landscape.

She began her own Writing Ranch in 2000 in Central Oregon to support and nurture writers, and she was instrumental in the genesis of the low residency MFA program at Oregon State University, Cascades, where she now also teaches. She often writes about the landscape where she makes her home and is currently working on a new collection of poetry that will feature a series of commissioned pieces that celebrate remote locations all over the West.

We last talked with Waterston in 2020 when her nonfiction book “Walking in the High Desert” was published. She joins us to discuss her poetry, her teaching and how she plans to meet her self-appointed goal of “kindling creativity and community” around poetry throughout Oregon over the next two years.

Note: The following transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.

Geoff Norcross: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Geoff Norcross. Oregon Governor Tina Kotek announced this month that Ellen Waterston will serve as the state’s 11th Poet Laureate. In the announcement, the governor noted Waterston stands out for her focus on bringing different ways of living in different parts of the state together, and her notable ability to describe the moments, places and people that make Oregon, Oregon. She lives in the high desert of Central Oregon, which is a landscape that inspires so much of her writing. She joins us now from her home in Bend. Ellen Waterston, welcome to Think Out Loud, and congratulations.

Ellen Waterston: Thank you. Hello.

Norcross: Hello. When you learned that you were going to be the state’s next Poet Laureate, what was your reaction?

Waterston: I was astounded, frankly. Delighted, astounded, and now realizing what a great, great honor and responsibility this position is.

Norcross: Are there previous Poets Laureate that are particularly inspiring to you?

Waterston: Well, there are many, and I have reached out to a number of them. I have spoken to previous Poets Laureate Paulann Petersen and Kim Stafford; soon I will be speaking with outgoing Poet Laureate Anis Mojgani and with Elizabeth Woody. I admire all of them, and I’m very lucky that they’re available to share their advice and thoughts as to how best to proceed with this wonderful opportunity.

Norcross: What’s your basic description of what the Poet Laureate does?

Waterston: I can only speak from what my perspective now is on it, and going in, my ambition. The Poet Laureate builds bridges across the state, using poetry to do it. Weaving words, really, using that aspect of creative expression to introduce ourselves to one another.

Norcross: Let’s hear one of your new poems. And I think it’s a good one to help us understand how you’re able to describe the unique beauty of your home state. It’s called “Harney Lake” and it’s from your collection “Between Desert Seasons.” Can you read that for me now?

Waterston: Happy to.

[Reading “Harney Lake”]

When the land said stop talking, I stopped

moving, as though words were needed to keep going,

to soften the blow of lava smashed across this scape,

to deflect the unrelenting gaze of land meeting sky halfway,

to guide my deaf hand across rock bound whispers,

to mourn the lupine’s colorful daring, now squelched by heat,

and warn the streams giddy off the Steens,

that from this alkaline basin there is no escape.

Norcross: Yeah, that’s a very spare poem, very much like the landscape that it’s inspired by. When you are in a space, at what point do you think “there’s a poem here”?

Waterston: Well, I think the desert is, for me, particularly inspiring, despite the fact that it is certainly not the landscape I grew up in. But I find that spareness puts everything in relief, whether it’s its own sort of geographic and sort of flora, fauna, subtle beauty, or our own questions. They march right along with us, and they loom large as one moves through the desert.

Norcross: As you mentioned, you’re originally from the Northeastern United States. You’re from New England, you went to Harvard. When did you first encounter the West?

Waterston: Oh gosh, I first encountered the West before going to college. Got a summer job in the cook shack of a dude ranch that was a working ranch, but took dudes in the summer. This was in a part of Montana that is close to Sheridan, Wyoming. And the experience of driving from the airport in Sheridan, Wyoming to this ranch, it just settled the question I didn’t even know I was asking. The dust boiling up behind the vehicles, horses scattering over the horizon, beautiful red rim rock all over the place. And I just had never seen or experienced anything like it.

Norcross: When and how did you find yourself in Oregon?

Waterston: My then-husband and I moved to Oregon having begun ranching in Montana, that was a sort of migration from one ranch to another. And that was in the seventies that we both moved here and started ranching north of Brothers, which is off Highway 20 between Bend and Burns.

Norcross: What happened to the ranch?

Waterston: We sold it and moved closer to town – that town being Prineville – and operated another ranch there. And then a lot of life happened, which we don’t have time for right now. But it resulted in selling that ranch on the lower Crooked River, pulling up stakes, and moving to “town” – real town, being Bend.

Norcross. Moving to town, I bet that was a shock. We’ll talk more about the places that you inhabited, but I also understand that you’re working on a new collection. And we’re getting a bit of a sneak peek here because you provided it to us in advance. It’s a poem called “Rupture,” and I’d like you to read it. But before you do, can you tell us what we need to know about it?

Waterston: Well, what you need to know about it is that it’s generally something one doesn’t do, which is reading a very, very fresh piece, certainly not on Think Out Loud. But I also want to invite writers and poets, and any form of the arts, to dare, to kind of go for it. Put it out there. In writing particularly, it’s exactly how to learn what does or doesn’t work in a piece.

[Reading “Rupture”]

Show the mirror, the mirror. Taste the word

see the color of letters, tell the desert, the sky’s its ocean

and don’t tell it what you know won’t last

Camp Creek’s first noisy celebration after seasons of bone dry doubt

the 40 miles of dirt before you hit pavement to town flooded out

the body will never forget the color, sound, and feel

reeling through the washouts,

thwarting the depressions, her water breaking

his off again on again fear and loving.

He guns it while she cradles the gourd of her swollen belly

up and over the quake and shudder of the rutted grade.

Beginnings, meanings, and endings conflate.

She names their baby girl decide, definitely

Middle initial, the answer is in the question

Last name, there’s space and awareness for beauty

Sometimes she calls her forgiveness for short

Norcross: Ellen, I can see the high desert as you’re reading that. It doesn’t sound like you’re describing a place exactly, but kind of a feeling that arises from a patch of earth. What is it about the high desert of Central Oregon that inspires you?

Waterston: Well as I mentioned a moment ago, it’s the subtlety of the landscape. I don’t know if it’s possible to truly deeply know it, which would actually be true of four square inches of any backyard. But it keeps revealing itself. I’ve had the opportunity to work on some archaeological digs in this part of the state where evidence of human existence has been established 17,000 years ago in a recent dig. Lots has been going on here forever. And yes, this is true of many places, if not all. But for me, the way the story unfolds here is of particular interest to me. It’s not only the landscape, I have to say, it’s the people who inhabit the landscape. And I find them teachers in many, many ways.

I also want to show that this sort of urban, rural divide is nonsense. We’re hearing a lot lately about the fact that really, when we sit down at a table, we’re all kind of thinking the same things are important to us. And that’s something that I like to bring forward in my work.

Norcross: In fact, you have a history of this kind of reaching across through your work, because you have a book of nonfiction called “Walking The High Desert,” where you walk the Oregon Desert Trail, and wrote about the lands and the people that you encountered along the way. How did that experience inform the poetry that came after?

Waterston: Well, they go hand in hand really. Poems emerge from moments within a larger prose piece like that, whether it’s an intersection with person, place or thing. I also think that the way I manifest through prose, I just hope, and the goal is, that I bring the best aspects of poetry to it, which is close attention to detail, compression of emotion. The juxtaposition of words that bring the words more alive than they might be if they were sort of normally spread across sentences that we can generally predict the ending of. It’s really all of a piece, actually. I’m very interested in the intersection of poetry and prose, of fiction and nonfiction. It’s something that I address a lot when I teach. Yes, this suggested itself as a much longer effort trying to expose issues, history, and my own personal experience in each section of the book as I moved across the desert.

Norcross: One of your novels was adapted into an opera. I want to play a clip from that now. The novel is called Vía Lactéa: A Woman of a Certain Age Walks the Camino. Before we play it, what do we need to know about it?

Waterston: Well, it’s a novel written in verse. So I suppose verse novel would be the moniker. It resulted from my walking of the Camino in Spain. I felt inspired to write a more profane than sacred collection of poetry about the experience. And oddly while I was writing, the verse, the poems wanted to be sung, they just did. And so some years later, I turned it into a libretto. I partnered with the wonderful composer in Portland, Rebecca Oswald, the Central Oregon Symphony, seven principal singers, chorus – the whole nine yards. And it premiered as a fully orchestrated, full length opera in Bend in 2016.

[Audio clip from “Vía Lactéa” playing]

Norcross: You mentioned that this work just sort of screamed out for musical treatment. But how does it feel to have your words sung like that?

Waterston: It’s just so exciting. And I just want to say that was Emily Pulley singing. She will be appearing in a gala for the Eugene Opera coming up in October.

It’s an extraordinary experience. I wonder what lyricists feel when their work is turned to song. But the whole thing came together, and I think the intuition that those lines of verse wanted to be sung turned out to be true.

Norcross: Your words and somebody else’s music have come together before, you have collaborated with the pianist Hunter Noack on a project called “In Landscape.” Can you describe that?

Waterston: Well, I’m so lucky that every so often Hunter Noack invites me to write a poem to where he’s landing his piano. And literally, it feels like that, this grand piano shows up in Fort Rock, or on the edge of the playa.

Norcross: I always wonder how they get it out there.

Waterston: It’s a grand piano that loves bubble wrap and a flatbed. It’s got a home on a mattress.

I have a number of poems written to these locations, in tribute to them, in honor of them. Coming up in September on the 22nd, Hunter will be seeing the poem before I read it, and he will be composing to the poem. Often, he’ll play as I go, we sort of improvise that way. But this time he’s hoping to actually compose to the poem itself.

Norcross: You’ve been through this experience before. But what does it feel like to be out in a beautiful place and have his music in your poetry come together?

Waterston: Well, generally, at least out in the high desert when he offers these wonderful concerts of classical piano, the place is so big and vast. And for me, it feels as though the poem, combined with the piano, become like a part of the landscape itself, part of the air, part of the earth, part of the little cluster of desert lilies or sagebrush that has been crushed in the process of trying to set up the piano, just throwing its beautiful scent into the air. The desert is very, very happy to hear that music, and to have words celebrating it in combination. It does respond, at the risk of sounding a bit woo-woo. But it’s true.

Norcross: It’s been a heck of a year for you, Ellen. In addition to being named Poet Laureate, you won the Holbrook Literary Award, the Soapstone Bread and Roses Award for your writing. You’re on a streak here. How will you leverage this new visibility to further the arts in Oregon?

Waterston: Well, any suggestions are welcome. I hope to do my level best. And frankly, this news is so new that I’m really getting my bearings with the poet laureate scheduling, and beginning to move across the state over the next two years.

I will say that one of the groups, in addition to students and the appearances that I’ll make officially and opportunities to read my poetry, I’m interested in meeting with elders as well. I am one, and I very much look forward to putting into relief, to bringing forward, their interest in poetry, if not their poetry as I go.

Norcross: I get that you’re just sort of learning it as you go. But you did say as the Poet Laureate, you wanted to kindle creativity and community. What might that look like?

Waterston: Well, I think working through poetry, what I hope it can look like is – Kim Stafford warned me don’t marry your project idea too perfectly, he suggested staying open to the organic invitation of the process of moving about the state, which I will do.

But having said, one of the ways I picture it is sort of a growing digital anthology of work as I go, so that those whose poems do rise in the process of moving across the state can gradually build into this larger collection that I hope describes this very big conversation. This very big conversation that will be, I’m quite certain, bringing up themes, issues, questions that we all share.

Norcross: Well, I enjoyed this conversation very much. Ellen Waterston, congratulations on being named Poet Laureate and thank you for taking the time to talk to us.

Waterston: Thank you ever so much, Geoff.

Norcross: Ellen Waterston is a poet, author, teacher and recently announced as Oregon’s new state Poet Laureate.

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