A Poetry Renaissance at Watsonville Public LIbrary

In the quiet meeting room of the Watsonville Public Library, which looks out over the tree tops above Main Street, a semi circle of poets and poetry-lovers gathers.

The Poet's Circle is relatively new, meeting for the second time last Thursday. It was put together by local poet and writing instructor, Magdalena Montagne, and features a guest poet each month.

Last week's featured poet was , the Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County. 

Admittedly, the idea of attending the poetry circle last Thursday evening did not ring bells of excitement, and I entered the library bracing myself for a dry and boring evening. I was pleasantly proven wrong.

Swanger has a slightly husky voice, and the remnants of a New York accent, which only enriches the words coming out of his mouth, in the same way Christopher Walken's voice makes him even more interesting. 

Swanger’s poems (and his running commentary between) were highly entertaining, and touched upon the more risqué corners of his mind (a fetish for womens's shoes, the alcoholic stupor he once knew, and the blue bird tattoo his ex-wife hated and which he got removed only to replace with a scar.) 

He read the title-poem for his book, Wayne’s College of Beauty, about a beauty school he used to walk by every day in downtown Santa Cruz. After years observing the young cigarette-smoking women who worked there and the elderly women who came week after week to get their hair set, Swanger's initial judgements of the women softened. Below his perception that the women are all drop outs or using beauty school as their last resort, Swanger's poem finds the tender connection between the elderly women and these young lost souls.

“I became a loving person just writing that... and I really love it for that,” Swanger said. 

Swanger also read a more recent poem about a basil-colored women's shoe (this is where the shoe fetish comes in.) In his time spent walking or biking through the streets, Swanger always notices lost shoes, whether it be a pair slung over a telephone line by some unknown person, or the more mysterious lone shoe:

“I find shoes in the street and sometimes I find one shoe. How’d it get there? what happened?" said Swanger.

"Not knowing doesn’t break my heart the way that one shoe does. A woman’s. Dressy. On it’s side, in the middle of the street,” he read.

About a dozen people formed the audience, and several writers asked questions about Swanger’s writing process.

"I used to write because I was in misery or briefly ecstatic," said Swanger of the less-logical way he used to go about writing. Now, he writes more regularly, even when he's bored—especially when he's bored.

"You sit down and there’s nothing there and then something happens... a lot of my poems are like that, they come later, and surprisingly,” said Swanger. 

Swanger also thinks that boredom and idleness are important to writing poetry because they force you to be quiet and see what comes out of your imagination.

"One should not write just what one knows, it’s what you can imagine and things you can conjure up," said Swanger.

After the reading, Swanger told Patch why Poet's Circles are so valuable to the poet, especially in Santa Cruz which he calls a "Poet's Mecca."

“It clearly establishes communication in the best sense because people accept and support each other. And there’s this unconditional support that I see here that encourages people to open themselves up,” said Swanger of the idea of a poetry circle where all are encouraged to share their poems.

The Poet's Circle is funded by the Cultural Council of Santa Cruz County, and meets every second Thursday of the month, upstairs at the Watsonville Public Library from 6 p.m. - 8 p.m.