Christopher Lane in action at a workshop at the Well Red Coyote.

I caught up with Christopher at one of his workshops at The Well Red Coyote bookstore.  He impressed me with his enthusiastic, articulate, and friendly teaching style, and his workshop was absolutely lively and enlightening.  If you want to learn about onomatopoeia and alliteration in simple terms, Christopher's workshop is the place to go!

This particular workshop was part of a series for poetry writers that takes place on a regular basis at the Well Red Coyote in Sedona (click here for next workshop).  Each workshop is designed to teach the participants a new piece of poetic phrasing or technique.  The session topics are not only well researched, but Christopher offers many concrete and easy to understand examples and word games to teach his students, and he gets them involved in practical assignments that utilize well known poetry and his own works.  At the end of the workshop I joined, we were all creating verses using onomatopoeia and alliteration.  It was fun, creative, and a real stress reliever.  At the end of the complete workshop series, participants are able to construct a complete poem.

When the workshop ended, I was ready to ask Christopher Lane why is poetry necessary?

C.L.:  First of all let me say that NORAZ is an organization that believes our community's quality of life can be improved by using poetry. If you check our website www.norazpoets.org you will have a better idea of the programs we have created and offer to the community.  In particular, we have developed two programs that are quite successful, in addition to other projects. One of the program's is "Young Voices, Be Heard!" which is designed for teenagers. The other program is the "Alzheimer's Project" which is a very special program. I am directly involved with these two programs and I love it.

Christopher Lane at a workshop at the Well Red Coyote.

When the web site came along, that was when it really got started. It allowed us to put together a calendar and pictures.  You know, the wonders of the internet. Now we are getting ready to do podcasting, so people are going to be able to listen to poetry right on the web site.  Our goal and passion is to implement programs to disseminate poetry.            

In addition to having our own web site, we also try to appear in the news at least once a month, so people are hearing or reading about us all the time, and we remain fresh in their minds.  For instance, we partner with NPR News on the KNAU radio station.  It is important to get into that routine and, if you create a great relationship with a news organization and you send your press releases on time, along with pictures etc., then you are guaranteed to reach the public effectively. We work with these very basic principles that have been successful for us.

That's when the youth program "Young Voices, Be Heard!" came around.

C.L.: "Young Voices, Be Heard!" is a program we developed for our youth, and we offer it to public and private schools. We bring poetry workshops into the schools and we work with the teachers there, with their curriculum and what they have. We bring poetry to them, perform it, recite it, and present it in a way that motivates the students and gets them really engaged.  We want them to realize that poetry is something they can create themselves and use. Like I was saying in the workshop, young people are very, very critical of themselves, and poetry is one of those things that unfortunately is not emphasized in schools and really helps young people express themselves and build confidence.  Luckily we have some great teachers in Sedona who are poets. One of them is Karyl Goldsmith, who is a teacher at the Sedona Red Rock High School in the area of Humanities, and she is a member of the NORAZ Poets Advisory Board.

C.L.: We take poetry to the Alzheimer's unit, the Dementia unit, to the residents there who are Alzheimer patients. Most of these patients have memorized poetry when they were younger. Poets like William Blake, Yeats, Henry Longfellow, etc., they've read all these different classic poems, and we take that to them and we read, we perform the poems for them. In the units themselves we gather the patients into one room and read to them. What happens is very magical.  I will read a line and then inevitably someone else will read and recite the next line. So what you're getting is poetry.  Poetry is in a part of the brain that is not affected by the disease. So all of a sudden you see them come back [to life]. They remember.

I've been doing this since March at the Kachina Point Rehabilitation and Health Care Center. It's been phenomenal. Everybody just loves it. Today I took it out to Prescott for the first time. These are people who can't remember what they had for breakfast and yet they remember a poem. It's something very powerful. And even if they don't remember, they're entertained; they smile, they laugh, they have a good time. Again, we are using poetry to improve the quality of life in our community.

C.L.: That's a really tricky question because in the last 20 years academic funding has been dramatically reduced around the nation.  This has particularly effected Liberal Arts and Humanities so that the teaching of poetry has decreased significantly.  Hence you have had 20 years of a dramatic increase in school violence. I believe that if you take away a person's ability to express themselves creativity, like through poetry, they're going to do it no matter what, but in a violent or negative way. That is, teenagers are going to resort back to their "lizard brain" so to speak. They'll use their fists in order to express themselves. What we are trying to say is, "here is something you can do, you can easily express yourself just using a pen and a pad and your voice." It has gotten great reception and received great reviews. For this we have grants and donations that help NORAZ Poets to exist, to be alive, all of which are on our web site. It's wonderful and I'm very grateful.

C.L.: Honestly, there's nobody doing this kind of work in a rural setting. I can understand in a big city, where it should be expected, but in rural Arizona small towns the success of NORAZ has been phenomenal. We've just received our fifth grant from the Arizona Commission for the Arts this year. It's been wonderful. And that's all because we got organized three years ago and we implemented all these wonderful programs and we've been working our tails off mostly as volunteer work.  It's all been kind service and donations; people who have come out of the wood work to do what we do. Everybody tells me, "well Christopher, it's your passion"… OK, it's my passion, but I couldn't have done it without so many hundreds of people in this community who have helped, all over: Flagstaff, Prescott, and here in the Verde Valley.

M.S-B: What does it mean to write poetry to you? What is poetry?

Noraz Poetry Salon at The Well Red Coyote every Wednesday at 7pm. Readings and writing exercises are open to the public.  In the picture are Rebekah Crisp reading "Coasting Up Hill" surrounded by young poet Danielle Silver, Gary Every, David Mills, Jen Valencia, and Chris Pool.

C.L.: To write poetry takes many skills. You have to study your craft.  I always ask people, "What are you reading? Who are you reading?" A writer or a poet should be reading as much if not more than they write. How else are you going to feed yourself creatively? You feed yourself with words. "Read, read, read."

I realized years ago that I don't have to live the tortured life of an artist. There are so many artists out there who live this cliché of "I have to be this tortured soul: poor, drunk, messed up and dysfunctional."  That's not true. It's a lie. Who said we have to live like that? How does this connect us with our Muse? Living that cliché just because it's fashionable is so not real, not what an artist is supposed to do. Number one, let's put this whole thing about rich and poor aside.  It's all about living abundantly… an abundant life. Because you can be rich and be miserable or you can be a spiritual person and be poor.  You can be broken and healthy. You've got to find a balance and learn to live abundantly.