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Mayor announces first-ever Tacoma Poet Laureate

UPS Associate Professor of English William Kupinse eager to spread poetry among the people of Tacoma

By Matt Nagle

Tacoma Weekly
mattnagle@tacomaweekly.com
Published on: April 10, 2008

There was a sense of anticipation in the air while the audience waited for former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins to take the stage at Pantages Theater last Friday evening. Mayor Bill Baarsma was there to name the 2008 Urban Grace Poet Laureate of Tacoma, which had been kept under wraps until the official announcement was made. The crowd burst into exuberant applause when William Kupinse was named the top choice among 13 applicants for the title.

Kupinse, in his fifth year as associate professor of English at University of Puget Sound, read two of his poems, “A Curse Upon Leaf Blowers and the Men Who Love Them” (which elicited much laughter when he read the final line, “May you some day learn the meaning of rake.”) and “Mole Plants,” a witty and humorous look at unexpected consequences for well intentioned actions.

“I try to be funny; I don’t know if I succeed,” the affable Kupinse said with just a bit of facetious intent. “I think poems need to welcome readers and not be so off-putting or scholarly that readers resist getting to know them.

“Humor is a good way of engaging people’s attention. I also think humor can lead us to insight as well.”

Kupinse has been teaching poetry for about 10 years in workshops starting when he was a graduate student at Vanderbilt University. “I’ve had a long experience teaching poetry and poetry writing in academic settings, but I haven’t had a chance to share that interest with the community in a more broad setting.”

As Tacoma’s first-ever poet laureate, Kupinse will spend the next year promoting, performing and teaching poetry on behalf of Urban Grace – the Downtown Church, a progressive ecumenical congregation in the heart of downtown Tacoma. Urban Grace sponsored and funded the “Soul of the City” poet laureate competition in partnership with Broadway Center for the Performing Arts.

According to Kali Kucera, creative director at Urban Grace, Tacoma is the first mid-sized municipality north of San Francisco and west of Denver to recognize its own poet laureate, and the only city except San Francisco to base its poet laureate in residence at one of the city’s congregations.

A panel of four Tacoma literary artists served as judges for the competition. Holly Wolfe, Daniel Blue, Rosalind Bell and Lynn Martin spent six weeks with the submitted poems that each addressed the poet’s conception of the theme “soul of the city.” The judges also reviewed the candidates’ responses to questions about why they desired the position and what they planned to do if awarded.

At the end of what Kucera called “a lively session that was a tribute to an excellent array of candidates,” the consensus among the judges was for Kupinse and his poem “Seen Twice,” (see sidebar) which gives a look through new eyes at the everyday things Tacomans see on the streets of their city that Kupinse also sees on his bicycle sojourns around town.

“I’ve written a few Tacoma poems and this [the competition] seemed like a good opportunity to write one tailored to notions of community and connected with my ideas of the epiphanies I experience walking around Tacoma,” Kupinse said. “This is a really rich place to write about.”

“He helped us think about how we go through the world seeing, but not really seeing something worth seeing at all, forcing us to rethink ‘my space’ and not be so quick to judge it,” Kucera said.

He noted the poet’s humor, his ability to move effortlessly between contrasts by tying together opposites in intriguing ways, and his prowess at mixing the scholarly with the mundane.

“It’s about giving the community new language to think about things we may have lost attention to because we talk about or see them the same way over and over again such that in our minds they’ve gotten numb.”

The panelists also liked Kupinse’s ideas for how he’s going to engage the broader community through readings and workshops.

Another contestant impressed the judges as well, and they moved to give Timothy Thomas McNeely a special honorable mention as a runner-up in the competition.

Kupinse said he has lots of ideas for the workshops he will present for the community over the coming year. “One is on thinking about the notion of the epiphany, which is something that has broad tradition in a lot of different spiritual histories and something that literature has a lot to say about. I thought that would be a nice way of bringing people together.”

Another idea centers on cultural sustainability and how communities can fall out like ecosystems do if not tended to properly. “I want to think about that in Tacoma’s interesting urban and natural environment; to ask participants what about their culture and city around them sustains them; what are the things they would like to nurture, cherish and help grow.”

Tacomans can meet their new poet laureate, and all the poets who applied, at a program of readings by all 13 candidates April 24, 7 p.m. at King’s Books. The suggested donation is new or gently used clothing, which will be distributed through Urban Grace.

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