Spreading poetry in bronze

Bill Vartnaw, incoming Sonoma County poet laureate, will be honored at 3 p.m. Jan. 29 at the county's Santa Rosa Central Library, Third and B streets. (Kent Porter/PD)

If you remember poetry only as a subject you hated in school — and haven’t thought about it since — you might be surprised to discover you have a local poet laureate.

In fact, you’ve had half a dozen of them over the past decade or so.

Next month, Petaluma native Bill Vartnaw, 62, a lifelong writer and one-time San Francisco cab driver, starts his two-year term as Sonoma County’s seventh poet laureate, a position with no pay, no expense account and a pretty low profile.

This is no way to get rich and famous.

“I’ve given poetry readings when there were maybe one or two other people there,” Vartnaw confessed.

So why take a job like that? Well, he was nominated by one of the previous poets laureate, and officially named by a countywide committee.

“I didn’t lobby for it,” he said. “I just felt like it was an experience I hadn’t had before.”

The job description is simple enough: Promote poetry in general and local poets in particular. Each poet laureate sets his or her own specific agenda. In 2000, the county’s first one, Don Emblem, made it his mission to display locally written poems on public-transit buses. Vartnaw hopes to install bronze plaques to display poems in public spots around the county.

And like his predecessors, he’ll drive around the county — buying his own gas, of course — to speak and read poetry at schools, libraries, coffee houses and other likely spots.

A tall, soft-spoken man with lively blue eyes and a white beard, Vartnaw doesn’t come across as a hard-sell huckster, but his passion for poetry is unmistakable.

“There’s this idea that there is a reality out there that we have to jell with, whereas poetry is a reality that comes from within, so we can follow a thought,” Vartnaw said.

Vartnaw has been putting his thoughts into writing since he was in the second grade. In 1967, he graduated from Petaluma High School, where he covered junior varsity sports for the high school paper and the Argus-Courier.

He holds two college degrees — a bachelor’s in philosophy from UC Davis and a master’s in poetics from the New College of California in San Francisco — but he has spent most of his life working temp jobs to support his poetry career.

“My last year of college, I did mostly filmmaking, but I knew I couldn’t afford film,” he recalled. “For one thing, I didn’t have a job, so I decided the purest form of creativity was for me to write poetry.”

From 1973 to 1998, Vartnaw lived in San Francisco and worked such short-term gigs as teaching English as a second language and driving a taxi. After 25 years in the city, he moved back to Petaluma, where he lives with his wife of 12 years, Bridget Reymond.

Vartnaw has no children, but he does have a baby – a poetry publishing company he founded in 1974, which has issued 14 books, including his own “In Concern: For Angels,” in 1984. Vartnaw’s Taurean Horn Press has a very modest company headquarters, “the west wall of my study at home,” he said.

Those who suspect that Vartnaw’s new job as poet laureate will be a wayward waste of time can expect serious disagreement from another Sonoma County poet, Dana Gioia of Santa Rosa.

“This is a part of a trend,” said Gioia, a nationally known author and educator who served as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, based in Washington, D.C., from 2003 to 2009.

“There are state, county and city poets laureate all over the country,” Gioia said. “There is no state painter, or composer laureate.”

In 1991, Gioia wrote an Atlantic Monthly magazine essay headlined “Can Poetry Matter?” — which sparked a national debate over his contention that university English literature departments had drained the life from a once vibrant and popular art form.

Since then, over the past two decades, America has seen a resurgence of poetry as performance art, a public celebration of the spoken word, Gioia said. A new generation of poets competes in public poetry slams.

“There are readings everywhere,” Gioia said. “Poetry is read aloud on public radio. And you see its influence in hip-hop music.”
So, in his small way, Vartnaw is happy to spread that spoken word.

“All poets commune with the audience when they read aloud,” the new county poet laureate said.

You can reach Staff Writer Dan Taylor at 521-5243 or dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com. See his ARTS blog at arts.blogs.pressdemocrat.com.