Redmond’s First Poet Laureate Gets to Work

Redmond Poet Laureate Rebecca Meredith, a Gulf Coast native, lists her influences: “Jazz, the blues, the long sit-arounds where you hear family stories again and again.”

Rebecca Meredith just finished her first month as Redmond’s first poet laureate. She makes five thousand dollars, ten times the salary of Seattle’s Poet Populist, Mike Hickey, and half the ten thousand dollars Washington State’s poet laureate used to make before the position lost funding this year. Her day job: psychotherapist. Her first job as poet laureate: “Publicizing the fact that it exists.”

Besides her own readings and workshops at literary hot spots like SoulFood Books and the Old Redmond Schoolhouse, Meredith says, “I’ve been working with the Redmond Arts Commission, Redmond TV and the online city magazine, where we plan to set up places where others can have their own poetry in the local media.”

But does the Eastside really have a literary sensibility? “Sure,” she says. “I do think it has its own flavor. I often think of how poignant that smell of tree sap is as another wooded area gives way to something that is becoming a city, how tender the really little kids are on the soccer fields, trying to do the right thing when to them the right thing is to eat a bug, how full the hospital waiting rooms are and how lonely the cemetery looks with so much industry going on all around it. It’s all poetry. And in a place that’s growing so fast, the attempt to build community is still raw and new. Lots of people are far from their families and cultures, and poetry is a way to bring those old things with them and, with luck, make the new from them.”

Did Redmond put skinflint Seattle and Washington State to shame by funding a poet laureate? “I don’t think anyone has a lock on being ‘poetical.’ We’re all doing the best we can within our resources, and there’s a lot I can do in Redmond right now.” •