For 19 years, Red Sky gives voice to its parish of poets

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For 19 years, Red Sky gives voice to its parish of poets

Thursday, April 20, 2000

By JOHN MARSHALL
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER BOOKS REPORTER

The poems are stunning in their variety: Rants. Monologues. Erotic musings. Storytelling laments. Meditations on Northwest skies.

The poets are an amazing assortment of folks: An old man who looks like he might live on the streets. A blast-from-the-past hippie with red beard and ponytail. Black-garbed young women with piercings of various body parts. Retired people who look to be vets of leftist politics. A few high school students.

A look at the foundations of Seattle's poetry scene. Read more.

And all the poems and all the poets, no matter how good or bad or bizarre, are treated with attentive silence and appreciative applause.

It is another Sunday evening at Red Sky Poetry Theater. This is a Seattle poetic institution of amazing durability, meeting almost every Sunday for 19 years and still using the same trusty format of a featured reader plus a microphone open to all.

Before there were readings galore in Seattle area bookstores, before there were poetry series and poetry slams in all kinds of venues, there was Red Sky. And there still is Red Sky, meeting about 42 weeks a year, hosting an average of 12 different readers every Sunday. The Red Sky Poetry Theater has now provided a stage for what is probably more than 9,000 readers, including more than a few repeaters.

Robin Merriman reads some of his poetry to an audience in Red Sky Poetry Theater at the Globe Cafe.Scott Eklund/P-I

"Red Sky may be one of the oldest-running open mike series in the country," says Paul Hunter, a member of its informal board. "And it is clearly the oldest on the West Coast."

Hunter, 57, was one of the earliest featured readers at Red Sky, back when it was started by a collective of writers outside academia who were hoping to hone their work and their performance skills. Hunter has stayed around pretty much ever since, drawn by Red Sky's eclectic crowd, its democratic format, its unpredictable moments of brilliance, mediocrity, hilarity and boredom.

Hunter retired from teaching a while back, but not from writing poetry.

"Most people have a burst of energy when they're in school, but then they get into the real world and nobody is paying any attention to them or their work," relates Hunter. "But at this place you can always rub shoulders with other working writers. And Red Sky is very welcoming."

That was demonstrated during a recent Red Sky evening when a standing-room crowd of more than 40 people packed into the Globe Cafe, a funky eatery on Capitol Hill. Most contributed the suggested $2 donation into an old fruitcake tin, the contents going to the evening's featured reader.

The poets in the first half-hour of open mike did their readings with vastly different approaches. Some were shy, even stage-struck. Others were as assertive as Mike Tyson. But all seemed both appreciative of the chance to read in public and almost reverential toward their listeners.

Even Kimball MacKay, the evening's featured reader, interrupted himself once by saying, "Excuse me, I'm going to start this poem over."

MacKay, who teaches writing and literature at Cornish College of the Arts, proved to be an accomplished reader of his evocative work, mostly focused on Seattle and its natural environs, an owl that had come to roost in the city, the threat of rain on his wedding day.

"Red Sky," remarked MacKay, 47, "is very different from a regular reading. In a certain way, it resembles a church in the best sense, with its steady congregation."