“There is a word for this
but I can’t remember it, a word
for the sky in balance . . .”
“As Light As Dark”, Megan Snyder-Camp
Did you realize there is a secret conclave of poets in Wallingford? The fact that we have one of only two all-poetry bookstores in the nation ought to clue you in, but I actually met one the other night in the Tangletown Pub who revealed they meet there occasionally to talk about their work over beers.
What else did this poet tell me? Her name is Megan Snyder-Camp and she just got back from a tour promoting her book The Forest of Sure Things from which she will read at Open Books on October 26th at 7:30.
If you haven’t cracked a book of poetry since high school English, The Forest of Sure Things is an unsettling, bracing encounter with language so precise it won’t quite fall into place the first time around. The first section is set in a tiny oystering community on the tip of the Long Beach peninsula where Snyder-Camp lived during a writing residency for her MFA at U.W. Her landscape of engulfing sand and sea, creatures and tides is a “love letter to the Northwest, the land that I fell in love with. . . . . I can’t stop writing about it.”
The human story at the heart of the poems is a family to whom the first child in 100 years in the town was born, whose next child was a stillbirth. This tragedy flashes through the poems like a steel thread, weaving through them, sometimes hidden, sometimes visible. Part Two then connects to Snyder-Camp’s own personal childhood and memories. The volume is on the Contemporary Poetry bestseller list and in its second printing.
If you want to challenge yourself to listen to and think about poetic language deeply and with concentration, come to the reading. Megan would be thrilled: “It’s the responsibility of poets to make poetry interesting to people and it means so much to me when someone takes a chance and comes out.” It’s great when readers “question parts they find dense and impenetrable, I appreciate the opportunity to talk elements through with them”. How else are you going to get the chance to ask a real-life poet to explain her work?
Then, if you’re lucky you’ll get to go out for a beer and shoot the breeze with her afterward like I did.