Event Description

The first official special event celebrating Evergreen Arboretum and Garden’s 60th anniversary is “Out on a Limb: Poetry in the Trees.” Please join us for an opening reception & poetry reading on April 1st at 2:00 p.m. in the Arboretum classroom with Washington State Poet Laureate Rena Priest and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Rae Armantrout.

This project began last fall with a call for short poems with a nature theme to be used in the Arboretum during April, National Poetry Month. Sixty people entered a poem or two in our contest. Poets Rae Armantrout, a Pulitzer Prize winning poet, and Kevin Craft, English instructor at Everett Community College and editor of Poetry Northwest, generously agreed to act as judges.

Volunteers have been working for about six weeks to stamp the winning poems into clay tablets which will be glazed and fired, and then hung in the Arboretum for the month of April.

We hope you will join us for the opening day reception, featuring Washington State’s Poet Laureate Rena Priest, and Rae Armantrout, one of our esteemed judges. We’ll begin in the classroom building at 2:00 p.m. Out on a Limb poems are available to view in the Arboretum from April 1st to the 30th, dawn to dusk. As always, the Arboretum is free to visit.

Rena Priest is the current Washington State Poet Laureate. A member of the Lhaq’temish (Lummi) Nation, she is the author of Patriarchy Blues, which was honored with the 2018 American Book Award, and the recent Sublime Subliminal.

The Poet Laureate program is sponsored by Humanities Washington and The Washington State Arts Commission/ArtsWA, with the support of Governor Jay Inslee. See the full website of the Poet Laureate here.

Poet Laureate events are produced by the hosting organization.