Tracing a state map in lines of poetry

Washington State Poet Laureate Claudia Castro Luna speaks with Bill Radke about her latest project, Washington Poetic Routes.

Claudia Castro Luna was an urban planner before she was a poet, and sometimes you glimpse that in her work.

First as the city’s Civic Poet with the Seattle Poetic Grid, and then as the state Poet Laureate with her Washington Poetic Routes project, she asks residents to write the stories of their own places - in their own words.

That’s taken her far and wide across the state, including to small, conservative towns. Before she accepted the job, that worried her a bit; Castro Luna is a small, Latinx woman with a slight accent.

But, she says, she trusted herself to the people who invited her for courses and readings and so far has had almost entirely positive experiences. And, she gets to see the places where poems are set come alive, as in the poem “The Drowning of Waitsburg.”

"In the dark they wade across the road—

a woman lit by the white bundle

in her arms, the man visible

by the tip of his cigarette.

Behind them, their house is turning

unrecognizable. The back porch tips

into the flood, stairs go soft and surrender,

and a slurry of mud whispers across

their blue floor and says, Take your baby

and your habits and get out.

So it has said, house by house,

each high ground temporary and futile.

Leave because the flood has work to do.

There are floor boards to be buckled

and mud to be driven into every seam,

light sockets silted full. By the time you return,

there will be fish under your bed and you see

that the water has pressed itself against your walls,

the way you measured your son every birthday

to see how he’d grown. In two days the flood grew

six years. How long does it take to scrub the silt

from the skin of a family? Your daughter

will never stop saying that her room

smelled like mushrooms and

her doll buggy must have floated away.

Still now, the streets have forgotten

where they came from, and point neither

east nor west, but simply downstream."

“’I'm hoping that that will happen more and more with the poems that come in. The Seattle grid also has poems that talk about the history of the city.

And it's a great way to discover all the layers of meaning inside a place. All the memories, the new things that are changing, you know: what was, and what is becoming. All in this flat, two-dimensional space of a map.”