Photo by Phil Rose
Even Poets Laureate need to get a haircut once in a while.
Rena Priest is erasing notes off her whiteboard. Since being confirmed as Washington State’s Poet Laureate in April, she has been remarkably busy. It’s impossible for a latecomer to say exactly what with, however, because the tasks have mostly been erased. The only item remaining, halfway up the board, is ‘hair appointment.’
She regards the board wearily, her black hair tied back, as if sensing the appointment is not going to be made let alone kept.
Her office in the spare room of the house she shares with her husband in Bellingham is tidy and colorful with a view of the garden. A drum made by her late brother hangs on the wall along with a wool headband worn in ceremony by both her mother and daughter. There’s also a disco ball spinning from the ceiling. The office includes a Zoom station and another writing station, but Priest admits that when she’s writing an actual poem she’s likely on the couch in the living room and it’s usually the middle of the night—keeping what she refers to as poet hours.
It is conceivable she’d prefer to be spending more time on her couch office and less at her business station, functioning as what she jokes as ‘the Poet Laureate’s assistant.’ But if Rena Priest is bothered by the recent spike in her popularity, she’s not letting on. All the same, there are lots of emails to answer and official engagements to schedule. As of mid-May, the restrictions of plague are starting to peel away and she’s even just given her first live reading in more than a year. There are others being madly scheduled, and Priest is looking forward to reading the eyes of her audience again. Zoom, for a poet, is a poor surrogate for the real thing.
“I don’t love it,” she admits of the pandemic medium. Her tone is apologetic, as if Zoom feels scorn or even appreciates the poetic beauty of poetry to begin with...
Growing up on the Lummi Nation reservation west of Bellingham, Priest earned a BA at nearby Western Washington University before transferring to Sarah Lawrence College for her MFA. Her first published work, 2017’s Patriarchy Blues won her a prestigious American Book Award the following year. To be fair, this is really when Rena Priest’s popularity began to spike, and it’s been a steady climb since then to where she is now— on a first name basis with Jack Straw and someone named Nat Geo.
An open box of Priest’s second book, 2018’s Sublime Subliminal sits on the floor of the office, blocking access to the closet. The work within its pages represents a departure from Patriarchy Blues— though unless you’re a poet yourself it may be difficult to put your finger on the difference. The poems are longer for one thing, and the paper stock itself is coarser. But the pieces still alternately soar and stumble, and are still filled with abstractions of nature, ancestry and salt— juxtaposed with disarming references to nail polish colors and Canadian Tuxedos. The words still usually don’t rhyme— at least in a conventional sense— and many are not formatted in Mother Goose stanzas.
What makes a poem, anyway?
“Leonard Cohen said,” she says sagely “that poetry is when the lines don’t go to the end of the page.”
Whether or not she gets her hair done first, she’ll be leaving the following morning for a week of performance with six other indigenous musicians and storytellers in a Washington Center for the Performing Arts-partnered show called Welcome to Indian Country. From Olympia, she’ll finally get a little We Time with her husband on an anniversary trip to Big Sur in the couple’s recently-restored VW campervan. One gets the feeling it could be a working holiday. Maybe she’ll actually get to write a poem and not an email.