Lessons from Tacoma’s poet laureate
ROSEMARY PONNEKANTI; Staff writer
Hearing about Tammy Robacker growing up on the seedy side of Puyallup makes you think of a number of different outcomes, none of them pretty. But instead of following bad experiences with bad choices, the local writer has woven them into poetry that won her the title of Tacoma’s Poet Laureate for 2010 – and she aims to use that position to help others write through their own emotions.
“I had a tough childhood – a single mom, poor, exposed to elements that kids shouldn’t be exposed to,” says Robacker quietly.
Solid, with long black hair and a disarming frankness, the 40-year-old was born in Germany, and after a few years in Pennsylvania moved to Puyallup with her newly-divorced immigrant mother. “I would go to the mall and wait for the bus along Pacific Avenue – it was full of prostitutes, really seedy, nothing like it is now.”
When Robacker was 18, her mother died of ovarian cancer; her father also died of cancer six years ago. Her grandparents are dead. Asked about siblings, she says they don’t talk to each other.
“I’m solo,” Robacker smiles wryly. “It’s all part of life’s journey.”
It’s a journey that plays out in her poetry. Recently nominated the third Poet Laureate of Tacoma – a position sponsored by Urban Grace Church and the City of Tacoma, and judged by fellow poets – Robacker has also recently published a book of poems called “The Vicissitudes,” a reference to what she describes as the roller coaster ride of her life.
“Tammy’s poems are very personal; they talk about some difficult family issues,” says William Kupinse, professor of English at University of Puget Sound and the 2008 Poet Laureate. Kupinse works closely with Robacker on Exquisite Disarray, a publishing press he founded to promote Northwest poetry. “Confessional poetry is one of the dominant genres in American poetry today: Tammy handles it with grace, sensitivity and honesty.”
Many of the poems are place-specific: either Tacoma, the greater Northwest (Robacker did her degree in creative writing at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, and now works in Olympia in communications) or California, where she worked in copywriting after college. They’re infused with a mixture of Tacoma loyalty (“...the Seymour greenhouse steams/the dome sweats wet...”), Northwest depression (“... a mushroom’s view to the gun metal landscape ...”) and longing for somewhere else (“... a shiver ... of eucalyptus leaves in a warm breeze ...”)
“After I moved out of Tacoma, I felt like I was never home,” says Robacker, who moved back to the Stadium district in 2002. “When I came back, Tacoma had changed so much. Now it’s all arts and cafes, and it’s neat to see that, but the other side is all the condos replacing things. Everything seems beige.”
Overwhelmingly, though, Robacker’s poems speak of people in her past and present. Her grandmother is paid angelic homage in “Ida Pearle.” Her father is thoroughly but reluctantly trashed in “Your ass is grass” and “On the bureau, bullets.”
Other poems deal with the frustration of having a sick, immigrant mother, of a little sister once close and now gone, of strict Catholic nuns, doomed schoolfriends, love, aging and death.
“Writing poems really helped me look at my grief,” Robacker says. “And my childhood. A lot of my poems are me processing that, and coming out strong.”
Which is just what Robacker intends to help other folks do during her term as laureate. The position lasts for one year beginning in April; previous laureates have been Kupinse and Antonio Edwards, local spoken word artist. And while each laureate has met the Urban Grace obligations of workshops and regular readings at the church, each has also put his own stamp on the role, with Kupinse launching a local poetry anthology and Edwards creating many performance opportunities.
For her part, Robacker wants to teach.
“I really want to help people tap into those rich emotional places where people write from: into memories, secrets, traumas, even,” says the poet, who spent two years teaching communications and public speaking at the University of Wyoming before moving back to the Northwest. “I’m a positive person – I want to encourage people to discover their personal voice, to let them know that they can write. They can do that.”
Rosemary Ponnekanti: 253-597-8568
rosemary.ponnekanti@thenewstribune.com
WESTPORT DOLOR
Your quiet breaks me apart like whitecaps
collapse before coursing a shore. The water
that eddies you floats a shapeless gray
around this bay, over this day; ebbing
grief in the horizon’s haze. Here,
where your timber boom went bust,
now you just rust craggy stumps
along an emptied dock and austere pier.
You hang an ash-splashed canvas for miles
at this beach. A comber cannot read
where stone cold sky meets gun metal sea,
as they bumble down your one dead,
bone-jumbled jetty finger anchored
by blanched boulders and uprooted trees.
The rotund tourists straggle in and wag
tongues stuck full of green salt water
taffy and old fashion donuts. Their throats
close shut around pulpy oyster shooters
quaffed starboard off spitting bottomfish
charters rented out on the cheap.
The world ends here. Where longitude crosses itself
with latitude to no absolution. Where waves genuflect
then crumble rather than crash. The sand
dollars you’ve strewn townside are cracked
to halves. Their lost flock of peace doves,
once housed in a holy shell hollow, now worthless
debris to those who divine the beachhead.
Here your gulls swoon restless and hover
above the sea’s ennui. They dip and drone
mid-air: Scavengers perpetually hung
there—aimless and leering. They swing
back and forth, steering ghost-shaped waves
in the grimy brine sky above your grave. Poetry by Tammy Robacker
OWEN BEACH AUBADE
for Tim Danielson
Much like the greatest sea treasures
we set out to comb, you arrive to me
broken. Like an old green wine bottle
that no longer remembers what filled it before
or how its vintage was spoken, it chooses now
to be repurposed. To be tossed in tide violence.
To be knocked silly by indifference. To be left. Alone.
Then, woken up polished as a trinket. Divined
amidst wet rockweed and foul wrack
and renamed mine and fit to my hand.
It is much like love at our middle age,
how the turned out jellyfish does not amaze us
because it was once beautiful or swam. We recognize it
now because it stings. Because high tide pulled out
hours ago, and there it shines. Quite alive and bubbling
on the pebbled beach, that moony clear bell still continues
to beat, plump and smooth as a young heart
braving this brackish shore.
ONCE AROUND WRIGHT PARK
I am invited to walk here
but seem a true nuisance
instead. In my pricy polar fleece
I puff out sprays of January
air in crystalline streams
as a blue black crow bobs
adjacent–Tolerant of me
and my iced breathing
across the Rustic Bridge.
I zig-zag these trails. Dodge
industrious old orange squirrels
with my own achy knees
as each of us goes about our way
working through this world. Side-step
the gnarled reach of historic birch
tree roots grown so massive
and blanched by their decades
of living here, they are thick
and full as middle aged femurs.
They push up and out of dirt
like bones on reckoning day.
So I pardon them.
Up ahead, the Seymour greenhouse
steams. The dome sweats wet and
breathes heat up the exotic, lush stems
of orchid, fern and bromeliad
housed behind a thousand prismatic
panes of dew-skewed glass.
This park is but one window
to a carefully watched world
where we are all creatures. Young
mothers strollering. The unemployed
glowering. Private picnickers
snickering. The soul sick fixing. A place
where we are all wild and amazing,
walking daily where we live.
EASTER SUNDAY AT THE CAFE
The church families arrive here organized.
Arranged like a line of holy note heads
the Sunday organist pedals for crescendo
at the end of her morning hymn. It’s an assemblage
of car coats and black slacks. A procession
of uniformly postured backs. Pressed so crisp
they are militant cuneiform characters
ordered to formation. Even the children,
shepherded by such perfect, pleated
parents, single file themselves as if enlisted.
Marching onward to the cashier. On path
to the pastry display. Its sanctuary filled
today with the sweetest, most pious
attendants. Row upon row of them bow
and press their communal face to the glass case
to hosanna Easter brioche and angel food cake.
ON THE BUREAU, BULLETS
Who could leave with all that baying
in the backyard? Your old hunting dog
won’t stop barking. The rush
of Monday mornings now hushed
by your audible absence. Here
where the sun once rose and broke
like an egg over that house
spilling light that seemed to shine
on only you, in patrolman badge and
dress blues. Your worn Zippo clicked,
flicked, and hit the hardwood console
after it lit your breakfast Kool. Then came
the cough, always the same
deep, fast way you could expel blue
smoke, a pet, a wife, or me
in one guttural male gesture,
and clear us from the room. Poof!
I caught my breath
when the doctors studied your x-rays
like geological planning prints. They excavated
10 inches of that mottled esophagus
in their clinical digs. Now I’ve uncovered
another object, surrounded by the things
of yours I can hear and see
but never embrace. Your brass belt
buckle glints. It sits unnecessary, aligned
right beside the smooth, cool clip
of bullets on the bureau. Left behind,
like me and the beagle. We are
unleashed from that ruling grip,
but yelping for your return.
I WANT TO MARRY THE SHERIFF OF MAYBERRY
I want to marry the Sheriff of Mayberry
on account of I need to start a family and good, honest,
workin’ men are too hard to find in this city. I’ve plum run out of
ideas. So I want to marry Andy. I want the fantasy. I could be
a step-mother to little Opie. Because I reckon his real ma died
some time ago and I think they might have room for a new wife
character like me in that sleepy R.F.D. I want to help run things
in the kitchen with Aunt Bee. Make biscuits. Or steep sweet tea.
I want her to trust me so much, she’ll share her secret recipes.
She’ll welcome me to put on one of her frock aprons
before I fry my own plates of chicken just like family.
I want to cook dinner for Andy. He can even invite the deputy,
Barney. And Thelma Lou too. But not Helen, Lordy.
I would make him dump Crump and propose to me by Season 3.
I want to neck with the Sheriff of Mayberry. In his ’62 Ford
Galaxy. We could park the patrol car near a deserted field
where the locals sneak to mill moonshine or shoot skeet.
I want to sleep with the Sheriff of Mayberry. I would take
the other twin bed in his room, and reach across the nightstand
for him every evenin’, the way proper married folks do
at the Desilu studios, once they dim the lights on the set.
I want to marry the Sheriff of Mayberry. Have him sing to me.
Love ballads from the porch swing. Strumming his guitar
and crooning all the words acapella to old fashioned songs
about sweethearts or mountains or loneliness. I want to marry
the Sheriff of Mayberry. And when the TV lights up every night,
there we will be, The Mr. and Mrs. Andy Griffith Show,
whistling the opening theme.
