PORT TOWNSEND — Bookshop owner, publisher and writer Conner Bouchard-Roberts is halfway through his appointment as Port Townsend’s first poet laureate.
“I’ve had a year now,” Bouchard-Roberts said Tuesday. “We’ve hosted some readings at the library where we brought in four different poets of all different ages from, I think it was 17 to 90, and had them sit on a panel.”
Poets spoke on topics relating to the notion of time. The hope was to relate the conversations to ideas in the civic space, Bouchard-Roberts said.
Bouchard-Roberts used the public comments portion of city council meetings to read poetry five or six times in 2024, something he plans to do more often this year, he said.
“The overarching goal of this role for me is to try to find the civic role of poetry and how poetry can function in a more civic setting,” Bouchard-Roberts said. “There’s legislation and there’s complicated animosities and there’s complicated identity, all of these sorts of things. It’s also learning how to work with very bureaucratic structures that move at their own pace and along their own lines, and poetry doesn’t always lend itself to that style of being in the world, necessarily.”
In general, poetry doesn’t fit well within the form of legislative documents, Bouchard-Roberts said.
“It’s been fun inserting it in those various ways,” he said. “A couple of years ago, I worked on some legislation for housing issues in Port Townsend and I was able to incorporate poetry into that, in the preamble of it.”
Bouchard-Roberts referred to civic documents as a genre, one he has found interesting with which to engage.
Interest in the overlap between poetry and civic paces preceded the poet laureate position for Bouchard-Roberts, he said.
“Rhetoric in itself contains elements of poetry,” Bouchard-Roberts said. “The proper use of language has always fascinated me in those settings. I’ve definitely, from a sort of procedural sense, been a part of many meetings where the language is so stilted because there are certain formal elements, but there’s also a time constraint.”
Some topics have been shared between city council members for years, but in meeting settings, they do not have the ability to engage the topics as they might, barring formal constraints, Bouchard-Roberts said.
“How can poetry, when inserted into that space, shake up the established genres, the established forms of speaking in those environments?” Bouchard-Roberts asked. “That’s fascinated me for a while.”
The poet laureate role, as Bouchard-Roberts sees it, is a service-based role which engages the civic structures through poetry. He and his collaborators at the library and the arts commission are working to establish what the role may look like moving forward, he said.
“The poet laureate is someone who is trained in poetry, has spent a little time with it and can use poetry in service of the greater community,” Bouchard-Roberts said. “Rather than seeing the poet laureateship as a career opportunity sort of thing.”
The role should be an opportunity, and it should provide room for choice in approach, but it should also be specific enough that it serves a function that cannot be served by city council members or staff directors, Bouchard-Roberts said.
“It is somebody that is inserting into the civic space and civic conversation things that can only be said because it’s being said in poetry,” Bouchard-Roberts said. “Which is, you know, that people’s lives are the line or that the housing issues aren’t just housing capacity and development costs, but also about what it’s like to not be able to maintain a job because you don’t have a home. It’s also about what homes mean to everybody during the holidays. There’s layers of meaning that everybody on the city council knows, they know in their gut, but it’s hard to summarize that in three minutes.”
Initially, it was open ended whether the position would be one or two years.
Bouchard-Roberts was able to hit the ground running because of the resources he had as a publisher and bookstore owner.
“It’s definitely a year of making connections and a year of acting on those connections,” he said.
An annual honorarium of $1,200 is funded by the Port Townsend Arts Commission. Friends of the Library also contributed $1,000 for programs and $1,000 for honorariums for other artists involved in programs; they will give the same funding in 2025.
The arts commission will put out a request for proposals for a 2026-2027 poet laureate, to be selected later this year.
“Conner Bouchard-Roberts has been able to foster excitement around the creation and enjoyment of poetry and literary arts to a wider audience while raising awareness of the power of the written and spoken word,” Port Townsend Community Services Director Melody Sky Weaver wrote in an email. “The library has been honored to host Bouchard-Roberts as a poet in residence, having him offer programs, and showcasing his poetry at the library in April for National Poetry month and so much more.”
Bouchard-Roberts said he has been writing since he was a child, growing up in Port Townsend.
“Mostly essays probably, essays and stories,” Bouchard-Roberts said. “I started writing poetry in college after I took some courses with poets like Claudia Rankine and my professors Darryl Smith, who kind of was an avenue in it via religious studies and philosophy.”
His publication, Winter Press, shares a name with his bookshop, located in a small room on the second floor of Aldrich’s Market, 940 Lawrence St.
Bouchard-Roberts started Winter Texts in 2017 after finishing his studies at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif. Also following graduation, Bouchard-Roberts traveled around, he said.
Bouchard-Roberts said his book, “A Field Companion for Wandering,” is an exploration of translation and travel. He uses new editions of the book to experiment with design and editing.
“I tried to pack in poetry, essays, fiction and a lot of research from other people to add more voices, a kind of polyphonic element, and then just cram it down into a small book,” Bouchard-Roberts said.
Bouchard-Roberts returned to Port Townsend in 2019, and he has been firmly grounded since, he said. The bookshop has been in its Aldrich’s Market location since late 2023.
“The Library is looking forward to a couple more poetry readings this year, a possible workshop, and a black out poetry program again,” Weaver said. “We might even start to have poetry displayed in more public places. Stay tuned for exciting details.”
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Reporter Elijah Sussman can be reached by email at elijah.sussman@sequimgazette.com.
