'This is what you shall do...'

Visiting the “Occupy Portland” encampment in the waning hours of the crisp evening of Wednesday, Oct. 19, I wandered among hummocks of tents and lulling conversations on park benches and under trees. A communal dinner was sheltered under a drapery of tarp canopies. The camp’s denizens, a mix of young, poor, educated, idealistic, committed, and, frankly, deranged, have built an utterly eclectic community intent on serving its needs. Food, shelter, clothing, sanitation...first aid, mental health counseling, legal advice, a child-car, prayer, external and internal communication.

After my amble through the passages of this nearly instant village, I sat in the small amphitheater in nearby Terry Schrunk Plaza with 150 or so others. City Hall was across the street to the west, the Federal Justice building was shouting distance to the northeast.

We had gathered in the evening “general assembly.” The discussion was civil and focused. The facilitator, who introduced himself as “Justin,” was respectful and inviting of all comment. Leadership was vested in the assembly. Justin reminded that the goal was consensus. Majorities did NOT rule. Business included a Latino community vow to remain despite harassment and theft, a proposal to march to the affluent Pearl, a resolve to create more community gardens in the City, a proposal to end “Corporate personhood.”

A speaker raised a concern, perhaps an omen: ”Camp is dying for direct action, and we are being way too wonky. Are we policy wonks, or are we about direct action?”

For now, the mere existence of the encampment speaks to what it stands for: equality, a fair and just political system, the power of people over money. Soon, one feels, the community will find ways beyond existence to assert itself.

The day after visiting the site, I came across the following passage. It spoke to my condition and, I thought, to that of those camped out for social justice in Lownsdale and Chapman squares.

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”
― Walt Whitman, from the introduction to the Leaves of Grass.

Where poetry and journalism meet

Poet and journalist Don Colburn clearly enjoys talking about the two sides of his writing, which he maintains, often become one.

Warming to the topic, he told my PCC reporting class recently that his poetry and his journalism inform and support each other.

Colburn, who reports on health for The Oregonian, noted that he’s not the first writer to draw the connection between the seemingly disparate genres.

Consider Walt Whitman’s words: “The true poem is the daily newspaper.”

And William Carlos Williams’:

It is difficult

to get the news from poems

yet men die miserably every day

for lack

of what is found there.

And Ezra Pound’s: “Poetry is news that stays news.”

At 59, Colburn has been around—“out in the street” as he puts it. He worked at the Everett Herald before going east to its parent paper, the famed Washington Post. While at the Herald, he won a Knight Fellowship to Stanford University, where poetry kindled interest that flamed to passion.

He quickly discovered that, like journalists, poets also need to be “out in the street”—to immerse themselves in humanity.

He found that humanity—and poetry—in the tragic story of young Garrett Smith.

When, after a year of mourning, Sen. Gordon Smith and his wife, Sharon, were ready to talk about the suicide of their son, Garrett, Colburn reported on and wrote their story. He heard poetic strains in their reflections. His job, he said, was to get out of the way and let them speak their truth.

Like a great poem, the Garrett Smith story “had something at stake,” Colburn said, adding that journalism and poetry always have something at stake.

Colburn said that writing poetry has made him a better prose writer. “I can’t prove it,” he said, “but I know it.”

“Each has things to teach the other,” he said.

Like journalism, the best poetry starts in the real world. And, like poetry, journalism at its best must “pay attention to the nuances of words—the sounds of the language.” That’s why Colburn reads his newspaper prose out loud in the newsroom before submitting it. “The words just have to sound right; there’s music in the language,” he said.

Colburn believes in what he calls the “commonality of journalism and poetry,” so much that he considers himself to be a “cross-training writer.” He has even compiled a list of pithy rules for cross-training writers. They include: “Play it by ear,” “Go with the Heat,” “Don’t try too hard,” and, its corollary “Try hard enough.”

Here’s a poem by Don Colburn from “As if Gravity were a Theory,” one of his two published books of poetry. The poem was inspired by a story Colburn wrote about a boy battling leukemia:

Local News

Ten years after,

I remember two things:

It was a mild, cloudless afternoon

and the sick boy wore a wool cap

indoors, down to his eyes

which were not scared.

No. Three things. I was scared.

For more about Colburn and more samples of his poetry, visit his web site.