Poets in schools part of Skagit poetry year round

By Anna Ferdinand

When Rena Priest stood before a crowd at the Lincoln theater Sept. 3, she asked attendees to answer this question: “Where do poems come from?”

A theater took pen to paper, writing to the prompt for five minutes, each person free to travel the pathways down which their brains chose to meander, tracking thoughts on the page.

The Skagit River Poetry Foundation, a co-sponsor of the poetry reading with Priest, Washington state’s poet laureate, helps us answer the question: For students in and around the Skagit Valley who benefit from the Poetry in the Schools program, poetry comes...