La Conner Weekly News - Your independent hometown award-winning newspaper

Having the WA 129 poetry reading on your schedule is a good idea. It is not every day that a town of 900 and a zip code consisting of all of 4,000 people gets a group of noteworthy poets to visit, much less gather for a reading. Go.

We just celebrated Art’s Alive. Come May, we need to go all out for the Skagit River Poetry Festival. No exaggeration: it is a world class event (full disclosure: I am on the board of the Foundation).

For Saturday, brace yourselves. Be brave. I make attempts at writing poetry and I find listening to poetry difficult. It is an acquired taste. That is what an aesthetic is. This is true: art is hard. It takes lots of practice to get to Carnegie Hall.

Artists – poets – at their best face difficult truths. They purposely challenge their audiences. Tod Marshall, our poet laureate, says what professors know: good art sometimes makes people uncomfortable. Great artists will work to estrange their audiences. You are being pushed out of your comfort zone on purpose, for your own good.

Poetry might be our oldest art. Great. Who wants to go out for a night of truth telling?

Right. There is a reason we run poets out of town and ignore prophets.

It is for that reason you need to go to Maple Hall Saturday night and bring your teenagers. Force them to sit through this evening of poetry. Maybe each of you will hear something that will change your life.

Won’t that be strange? And good, too.

Maybe you will be brave enough to do it. Maybe you are experienced enough that you will enjoy it. Maybe you will have the time of your life.

That is because art, artists, poets bring beauty to us.

La Conner is once again the place to be on November 18.