Ben Cartwright has a scrunchy face. You can see him thinking when he talks and his earnestness shines in his eyes. Ben lives in Spokane. He teaches at Gonzaga University, though he has lived in many places including Tianjin China, Topeka, KY Lawrence, KY and Moscow, ID. When asked about how he got started, he said,“ I started writing poetry fairly young, around age twelve or thirteen. I was lucky enough to meet a very talented Spokane poet— a friend of my parents named Mary Ann Waters. The first poetry reading I attended was one Mary Ann gave at Auntie’ s when I was about ten. It made an impression on me. I remember that the poet who read with Mary Ann shared a poem in which the speaker walks across a cold floor in winter wearing wool socks, and compares the experience to walking across the backs of sheep. I talked to the poet afterward, and told him how clearly I could picture it, that image. In the years since, I’ ve wished I could remember the poet’ s name, to contact him, and to locate the poem. I have a suspicion it may have been Robert Wrigley. This would have been in about 1987 or 1988.
POET BEN CARTWRIGHT By Karen Mobley
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Night hangs the evening in its moonless lobby, a cherry, when it’ s blooming, it has no stone. Birds shrug into pressing darkness, become the cross-ties on the railroad, or the stars in the sky. I could take a lonesome whistle into an attic with you, wear the night like a coat, nestled under the eaves. Won’ t you think of this valley when you’ re leaving, won’ t you mistake the dream for black dog, crow, and want? What will you think of your new frontier? Oh, pilgrim. Where does this lead? A valley, when it’ s blooming, has no stones to roll away, no bitter pit to stain the tongue, the thorn, it stuck me to the bone, and painted a rusted exit, and oh, I left the flower alone. I took your ornament as bloom, mistook hands as clover, as offering, I docked this tiny boat inside a story that has no end, a story with no river, and no harbor. Lend the night a silver dollar, the change in your pockets, a current’ s loosened tongue, so it can tell us aperture, departure, it’ s time.
from Additional Lyrics by Ben Cartwright and Emily Gwinn
Ben Cartwright has a scrunchy face. You can see him thinking when he talks and his earnestness shines in his eyes. Ben lives in Spokane. He teaches at Gonzaga University, though he has lived in many places including Tianjin China, Topeka, KY Lawrence, KY and Moscow, ID. When asked about how he got started, he said,“ I started writing poetry fairly young, around age twelve or thirteen. I was lucky enough to meet a very talented Spokane poet— a friend of my parents named Mary Ann Waters. The first poetry reading I attended was one Mary Ann gave at Auntie’ s when I was about ten. It made an impression on me. I remember that the poet who read with Mary Ann shared a poem in which the speaker walks across a cold floor in winter wearing wool socks, and compares the experience to walking across the backs of sheep. I talked to the poet afterward, and told him how clearly I could picture it, that image. In the years since, I’ ve wished I could remember the poet’ s name, to contact him, and to locate the poem. I have a suspicion it may have been Robert Wrigley. This would have been in about 1987 or 1988.
A few years after, I asked Mary Ann if she would help me learn how to write poems. We met once a week, all through my adolescence, up until she passed away. We would meet and go bowling first, at the Valley Bowl, and then go back to her house and drink root beer floats, pet her cats, and talk shop. Mary Ann gave me homework each week— a new prompt for a poem to write. She had one cat named Edgar, named after Edgar Allan Poe, who was polydactyl— one of the Hemingway cats. It’ s been about twenty years since the last time I got to speak to Mary Ann, and I often wish I could talk to her about Spokane, and the arts scene here, now. She would be delighted, I think.
When I was seventeen, I was accepted to attend a poetry workshop over in Port Townsend, at Centrum. I was the only student from Eastern Washington for poetry that year. There was a visual art student from Richland, I believe. I didn’ t have the money to make the trip. I asked my high school if it would be possible for me to receive funds, and a vice principal told me, very promptly, that they couldn’ t help me because I wasn’ t a sports team. I scraped together the money somehow for a plane ticket to Seattle, but didn’ t have a way to get to Port Townsend. Sam Hamill actually drove down in his pickup and got me, and the girl from Richland, and drove us to Port Townsend.
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