by RUTH MARCUS

for the Sequim Gazette

If you write a poem and no one reads it, are you still a poet — just an unknown poet?

We have many poets on the Olympic Peninsula, poets who write and never share their

poems, and other poets who are known only by family and friends. Some will remain unknown for a lifetime while others will become well-known – published, winning awards and receiving accolades.

Some poets have written for years like Gail Elliott while others are more recent like father-daughter Scott and Mia Underwood or mother-daughter Gwuinifer and Ti’anna Carradine.

Their ages range from 13-90. They tell us who they are as poets and show us they willing to be more known than unknown.

Gail Elliott

Ninety-year-old Gail Elliott wrote his first poem at the age of 14 in Ulysses, Kan. He and his best friend Archie Oliver wrote silly rhyming poems that often got them in trouble with their English teacher. He wrote one poem that she confiscated and stuck in her desk. After school, Gail and Charlie snuck back in and got the poem. She couldn’t prove that they were the thieves.

“I grew up where there were no trees,” Elliott says. “That’s why I became a forester. I have a degree in forestry and fought fires for the last 12 years of my career.”

Elliott and his wife, Lillian, an Oklahoma gal, have been married for 66 years. He reports that they have moved 20 times, traveling through the West and up to Alaska. They lived through the Dust Bowl years. “My younger brother and I nearly died from dust pneumonia,” Elliott says.

Elliott was an unknown poet until he showed up at the Fourth Friday Readings in Sequim where each poem captures a period in time — Elliott’s life experiences and his emotional response to life. He has no problem capturing the audience’s attention.

One night he apologized for his poems rhyming as if it’s a bad thing. Elliott told the audience that he never knew there was any other kind of poetry than rhyming poetry.

To stay organized, Elliott keeps his poems in separate books.

“There’s a book about my mother, another about my father and one about me,” he said. “I never knew much about my grandmother and always wanted to know more about my family, so I decided to write poems to leave to my family.”

Scott Underwood

Forty-one-year-old Scott Underwood started writing poetry at Peninsula College in the winter quarter of 2011. His English teacher Kate Goschen gave an assignment to respond and write about a photograph.

“I had a visceral reaction to the photo and the words just poured out of me,” he said. “For some reason, that made something click with me and poetry.”

Underwood said he was drawn to the poems of William Carlos Williams, mostly because his poems “are relatively short and I tend to write shorter poems. He’s also heavy on imagery evoking emotion.” Underwood gives credit to his wife, family, Goschen and Kate Reavey (another Peninsula College writing teacher) for encouraging and inspiring him.

While Elliott has been writing poems for over 70 years, Underwood feels he’s just beginning. He finds himself writing on anything close at hand – receipts, paper cups, whatever. Sometimes every day, then several months will pass before he gets back in the groove.

Underwood, also a family man, recently finished the nursing program at Peninsula College and is working on his bachelor’s degree in nursing while working at Olympic Medical Center.

“I haven’t really figured out a way to write poetry on a regular basis,” he said. “I typically don’t edit much if at all. When I get the urge to write, it just kind of pours out.”

He’s published three poems in a chapbook to benefit the 18th Annual Reading for Hunger Relief in 2013. His advice to beginning poets is to “Read a lot of good poetry, pay attention to experiences, sights, sounds and smells that evoke an emotional response, capture it in words and don’t worry about rhyming or rules. Let it come from your heart and your gut.”

Mia Underwood

Thirteen-year-old Mia Underwood is in the eighth grade but started writing poetry in second grade.

“The funny thing is that I started writing poetry before my father did!” she says.

She recalls that her fifth-grade language arts teacher Timothy Wilkinson gave her special assignments that challenged her to learn and grow as a writer. Today, she does most of her writing at the kitchen table or outdoors. She confesses to writing during math class, but don’t pass this on to her teacher!

Nature is an overriding theme in her poems, including images that describe what she sees and feels in her mind. When she was 8, her poem “Wolf” was published in “Tidepools” at Peninsula College.

On writing poetry, she says, “Don’t stress and don’t try to make it happen. Poetry should come from your heart … come naturally. Feel free to express yourself without thinking that you have to rhyme.”

Gwuinifer Carradine

Thirty-three-year-old Gwuinifer Carradine’s first memory of finding pleasure in poetry was in a huge Mother Goose book of poems.

“I spent many hours poring over the poems and pictures before I was 6,” she said. “Grandmother knew tunes that went along with some of them and I loved to learn them by heart.”

She remembers writing poetry in the third grade, but didn’t initiate more until her adolescence.

“Writing poetry was helpful for me as I learned to identify and process the intense emotions of puberty,” she said.

Inspired by a woman named Jacqui who shuttled the 13-year-old Carradine back and forth to drama classes once a week, Carradine found herself writing poetry in the back seat. Jacqui provided a word or phrase and encouraged Carradine to compose a snippet of freeform poetry, scribble it down and read it back.

“I still have a few of these in old notebooks,” Carradine says. “Jacqui helped me realize that poetry didn’t have to be formal or stilted, but could be a distilled form of writing directly from the heart.”

Carradine says she has periods where she writes every day and then won’t touch a pen for weeks. “Composing a poem feels like taking a very deep breath and letting it out slowly; it stills me, grounds me, oxygenates my brain.”

Carradine’s advice for beginning poets: “Next time you feel something so big that it makes you want to cry or laugh or shake your fists in anger, try putting your feelings down on paper. There are many ways to say something and there’s no one right way to write a poem.

“Poetry can be as easy as a casual stroll on a sunny afternoon or as complex and dangerous as backpacking through granite peaks and glacial valleys – it is entirely up to you!”

Ti’anna Carradine

“I think I was 7 or 8 when I read a poem and thought to myself, ‘I really like that,’” says 14-year-old Ti’anna Carradine. She really likes C.S. Lewis’ poems, and in particular “The Meteorite.” Her first poem was written around the age of 8 or 9, and although she doesn’t write on a regular basis, she enjoys writing about the fantastical and the strange.

Ti’anna is inspired by her mother’s writing because “the things she writes seem to come alive when I read them.”

When asked what she loves about writing poetry, she says she enjoys showing how she feels about things. There are times she can’t explain it properly, but that doesn’t stop her from writing. She’ll curl on the couch, pen and paper in hand, and write a poem.

It’s your turn

It’s time for all peninsula poets to share their words by participating in the Rainshadow Poetry Competition.

The deadline for submissions is 5 p.m. Jan. 23.

Winning poets will have a poem printed in a chapbook and there will be a public reading at Olympic Theatre Arts in April (National Poetry Month).

For more information, visit http://lighterview.net/poetry.