Photo courtesy of David Irwin Indian poet Sherman Alexie comes from Wellpinit, Wash., to read his works. The Tucson Poetry Festival will feature work from many different artists around the country.

Event expands audience for contemporary poetry

The Tucson Poetry Festival, an annual weeklong series of poetry readings, workshops and seminars, celebrates its 20th anniversary this week. The festival features readings by renowned poets Gary Snyder and Gary Mex Glazner, as well as local scribes Charles Alexander and the University of Arizona's Jane Miller.

Begun in 1981, the festival was a "spontaneous creation," developed out of a conversation among four of its founders over a pitcher of beer, said Jami Macarty, the festival's director. She said the Bisbee Poetry Festival inspired the founders.

By creating the festival, the founders wanted to celebrate the presence of a strong literary community in Tucson, said founder John Hudak, although what it has become has far exceeded their expectations.

"The funny thing is, we didn't know if it would last past the first year or the second year," Hudak said. "Over the 20 years, there have been a lot of times where we didn't know it could or would continue."

Throughout its history, the Tucson Poetry Festival has brought together a mix of the biggest names in poetry, including a number of Nobel Prize- and Pulitzer Prize-winning poets, and emerging voices, some of which have gone on to national recognition, although the balance between the two has varied, depending on the director and selection committee.

"(When I was director), I had a strong attachment to emerging voices, and there was a little more of a cutting edge to the festival," said local poet Charles Alexander, who directed the festival from '87 to '91.

Alexander, whose reading this year marks his first for the festival, said that in recent years, the trend has been to bring more established poets to Tucson.

"I wouldn't want to say that one of those visions is better than another," he said. "The festival historically has been devoted to diversity, which extends not only to its selection of poets, but also to the types of poetry it features as well as the audience it seeks to attract."

In 1986, the festival featured performance artist Dark Bob, who combined poetry, oral performance and dramatic performance, Alexander said.

"That was a time when performance art was hot around the country," he said.

Hudak remembers how poet W.S. Merwyn, also reading at the '86 festival, walked out of the Dark Bob performance.

"It definitely grated on some people's sense of what is contemporary poetry," Hudak said. "But we've always considered the festival a fair forum for debate on these issues."

Recently, the festival has held a slam poetry event, which Macarty said will now be an "integral part" of the festival in coming years.

The diversity of poets and styles is intended to serve the festival mission, established in the early '80s - expand the audience for contemporary poetry.

Ironically, while the festival has grown, expanding from three days to six, it drew its single largest audience on its opening night 20 years ago.

As Hudak tells it, he, some of the other founders and the featured poets of that first year - Gary Snyder, Leslie Marmon Silko and then-graduate student Tony Hoegland - were eating dinner prior to the first reading, a tradition in the festival for the first 17 years.

"We looked outside and it was raining," Hudak said. "We thought, 'Oh shit, now nobody's going to show up.'"

No one wanted to walk in the rain, Hudak said, so they were late getting to the reading, held in the Temple of Music and Art, before its renovation.

"We got there 10 minutes before (the reading was) supposed to start," he said. "There were people lined up for blocks, waiting to get in the door, standing in the rain."

It was nearly a full house, as attendees filled 900 of the 920 seats in the venue.

"We would not have been surprised had it been only a few friends and family that showed up," Hudak said.

Since then, the Tucson Poetry Festival has seen many changes - fluctuations in audience attendances, a diverse range of poets and for the first time this year, thanks to a grant, the director position is funded. Yet through these changes, the intentions have remained true to the one set forth by the festival's founders.

"We wanted to put poetry out there, more in the public consciousness, to show that it wasn't just a precious, isolated art form practiced by a few for only a few to enjoy," Hudak said. "Our premise was that if we put it in a format where a broader audience could experience it, the raw power of poetry could stand on its own merits, that people could add poetry in some way to their lives in one way or another."