Victoria Wyttenberg
Victoria Wyttenberg likes to quote Richard Hugo from his book, The Triggering Town, that “The poem is always in your hometown, but you have a better chance of finding it in another.” Wyttenberg’s hometown is Grants Pass, in Southern Oregon, and her obsessions go back to her growing up there, often to family issues and to feeling solace from nature, the Rogue and Applegate Rivers, the hot summer sun, the smell of rain.
She taught English at the High School level for thirty years, four years at Grants Pass High School and twenty six years at Sunset High School, Beaverton, Oregon. She continued taking classes at Portland State University and Reed College, took a developmental leave and attended the University of Washington as a graduate student, then returned to full time teaching and completed the work for her Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, Poetry. Wyttenberg won the Richard Hugo Prize from Poetry Northwest and the Academy of American Poets Prize at the University of Washington.
When she retired from full-time teaching, she taught parttime for several years, and has continued taking classes in writing and art. Since her husband and both of her children have died, many of her poems deal with grief and the effort to find comfort in the natural world. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her dog.
Read a review of A Bird Watching by the Bookmonger, Barbara Lloyd McMichael in Coast Weekend
Mother In Heaven from A Bird Watching was featured on Verse Daily
|
|
|
Poem from A Bird Watching
BLUE HERON
She is the blue distance of everything we kiss, the guttural cry of departure. How can any of us protect ourselves? My husband turns from me, and the dead slip in. The heron is bent like an old woman. She is a solitary feeder and I am afraid my very presence drives her away, but I return often when she isn’t there, my black dog by my side, watching changes of light on water. I look for blue on the edge, the promise of plumage. When I least expect it, the heron appears, still as wood pilings. She knows how to avoid storms and how to be alone, staying in shallow margins, waiting. The air is cold as earth. My body kisses the blue.
