When the city council
appointed David Holper Eureka’s first poet laureate in 2019, it was supposed to
last a year. Then again, a lot of things turned out differently than planned in
2020 and the term was extended. You can watch Holper’s live reading via Zoom
and on Public Access Channel 8 on Tuesday, April 6 at 2 p.m.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic
hit Humboldt, Holper has responded by helping create outlets and community
spaces through poetry. The stated mission of the Poetry on the Edge Facebook
group he started describes itself as being “about living on the
edge of the continent, on the edge because of the crazy pandemic we’re living
in, and because words give us a way to explore both the shadows and the light.”
Taking that exploration to other mediums, he’s also helped bring about a show
of poetry and art at the Brenda Tuxford Gallery and is working on the upcoming
David Josiah Lawson Oration Festival.
Holper also worked with Anne Frick to assemble
and publish Behind the Mask, an
anthology of local poets’ work created about and during the pandemic, which you
can download here. As for what he’s been working on himself, his subject matter
has shifted over the events of the last year.
Watching other poets,
particularly Fricke, address the pandemic in the Poetry on the Edge group
inspired Holper to take it on as well. “It’s sort of the confluence of the
pandemic as disease and some of the political issues that arose,” including the
Black Lives Matter movement. Holper maintains the global view that previously
yielded poems about non-English words for emotions and experiences, now turning
his eye to the pandemic’s impact around the world. One poem was born of reading
about a Swedish restaurant for one, where food comes to a single table in a
field via a basket on a cable; another came after reading about a pan flute
orchestra left stranded by flight restrictions at a castle in Berlin surrounded
by wolves.
Like many, Holper’s had more
time at home and he’s spent it writing. So far, a whole chapbook has grown out
of his pandemic experience. You can hear much of it on April 6 and there are
plans for re-broadcast on Public Access TV later on.
This article appears in The Foilies 2021.
