The Poetry Express: On the Road with Oregon's Poet Laureate - The Source

—Ellen Waterston’s “The Third Act,” columns ran from 2021 to 2026 in the Source and are now collected in her book, “We Could Die Doing This, Dispatches on Ageing from Oregon’s Outback.” Recently reappointed to a second two-year term as Oregon’s 11th poet laureate, Waterston now turns her attention and pen to her experiences traveling the state in the name of poetry and how they inform her writing and person. Look for “The Poetry Express” quarterly in the Source.

On Aug. 15, 2026, I not only began my second term as Oregon’s poet laureate but also was lucky to be part of the official dedication of Bend’s new Central Library. The day was emblematic of what inspires me as poet laureate and as a writer: gathering in celebration of the richness of language, books and storytelling; acquainting others with their ability to beautifully render their own word paintings on the page and being in the company of poets, sometimes renowned ones.

In design and size, the Central Library is a bold vision. It rises formidably out of the high desert like a giant book standing on end, its fanned pages deflecting the sun. With a metallic gaze that seems to say don’t mess with my mission, its exterior reads like a fortress protecting freedom of expression, of learning, questioning, a place where you might happen on to something you’d imagined for yourself but couldn’t name. Most of all it is a place of unconditional welcome.

Months before the dedication I met with Chantal Stroebel, recently appointed interim director and who, for the last three decades, fundamentally shaped the Deschutes Public Library’s community outreach initiatives. As part of the upcoming festivities I wondered if she’d consider inviting Arthur Sze, the 25th Poet Laureate of the United States. It was a long shot. Even one of the most lauded poets in the country is a long way from becoming a household word. And too, poetry has the undeserved reputation of being complicated, hard to understand. Prose writers are more of a draw. Plus I could only imagine how much else there was to accomplish during the ceremonies for so many different audiences. But she went for it and so did Arthur Sze.

When the big day arrived throngs of people of every age and stripe poured through the library doors. Inside, it was a circus, literally. Acrobats spiraled, dropped and dove from aerial silks suspended from the impossibly high ceiling, a cellist played from a balcony above the main lobby, the youngest eagerly explored the Children’s Discovery Space interwoven with books and punctuated with cozy reading nooks, while other visitors swarmed the up and down of the building stopping to offer their interpretation of John Grade’s massive, suspended cedar sculpture. Ribs of a whale? Skeleton of a dinosaur? A topographical map? A giant spider web? By the way, this is often the effect a poem has on the imagination. And every interpretation is a right one.

“I learn by going where I have to go.” —U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze

After the ribbon was cut and the library officially dedicated, 100 or more traded the jolly mayhem for a seat in an adjacent performance space, there to listen to Arthur Sze read and discuss his poetry over the course of an hour. In preparing my introductory remarks I learned that his odyssey as a poet began at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology, where, when bored in a first-semester calculus class, he started writing random phrases in the back of his notebook. The timely visit of poet Denise Levertov as a visiting professor at MIT provided the instruction and the jolt Sze needed to fully embrace poetry as his life’s passion and work. He transferred to the University of California-Berkeley to study with Levertov and, later, poet Josephine Miles…and the rest is poetry. Sze strikes me as one of the rare individuals who unwaveringly and successfully dared live a life according to intuition, or as he says, “I learn by going where I have to go.” That turned out to include New Mexico, where he has lived for over 50 years and is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe.

As critic R.W. French says, Sze’s poems, “have the cool clarity of porcelain. The surface is calm while the depths are resonant.” When I listen to him, I experience language immaculately harnessed to the poem’s purpose. His poetry’s combination of imagination, perception and rigor is thrilling. He told me, working every day, it takes him a month to complete a single poem. He is at his desk well before dawn to write the day into existence. The semi-dream state of those early hours when darkness gives way to light is, for him, a magical space to write from.

As part of the activities associated with the grand opening, I was invited to lead a poetry workshop I titled, “At a Loss for Words.” What do I mean by that? It strikes me when we’re confronted with the best and worst of things, we often find ourselves at a loss for words. As I see it, the task of poets, and writers in general, is to find the words to translate those moments, to witness them on the page on behalf of those at a loss to express what they’re feeling. And too, language, like any muscle, needs to be flexed and nourished. If we lazily rely on the same handful of words to articulate the complexities of being alive in the world, our capacity for new ideas, never mind understanding one another, diminishes in direct proportion to the variety of words we use. What would that be like? I don’t know. Maybe eating Twinkies for every meal?

Or only seeing one color in a rainbow?

As social media and AI colonize and tyrannize language, notice the words that are being jettisoned, that you don’t hear anymore. Not just those associated with, well, everything… civility, history, scholarship, flora, fauna, waterways and dark skies…but also the rich languages associated with the cultures within our culture that make the United States distinctive and vibrant. Notice what mind-, heart- and value-numbing words are replacing those we’re losing as we become linguistically monochromatic, or worse…desensitized.

In the Central Library workshop that day everyone unearthed words that best served their poems. For one participant a writing prompt reignited decades-old memories of the old saloon his parents bought in Salinas, California, converting it to a home for their family. He described the large herds of sheep that mobbed the tiny town in the fall and spring when he was a boy, the tackety-tack of hundreds of hooves scrambling across the wooden porch that fronted the dirt street. Another wrote of the rampant destruction of natural habitat to make way for housing, using sharp-edged, apocalyptic language. Still another, in phrasing that felt like gasps for air, mourned the death of her sister. And that’s only three examples of 10 … each beautiful, essential.

What a gift all this is! How fortunate in poetry and purpose. Here’s to the Central Library as it begins to write its rich history, to Athur Sze and his opulent poetry and to the Poetry Express as it heads back out across the state. It will be a wild ride. I hope you’ll join me.