Featured Poet: Jeanne Lohmann

Introduction

I'm a migratory Mid-Westerner - Ohio to Colorado (where our four children were born) to San Francisco (thirty years) to Washington, where I'm an active participant in the Olympia poetry community. I can't imagine my life (eighty years in May) without poetry as vocation and lifeline, a way to re-shape experience into memorable (I hope) music and form.

For me, the creative process begins as a nudge, an insight, something felt, seen, heard, imagined. The initial response is followed by the joyous and difficult work of writing and revision (often, many times!) and then - if I'm lucky - there is a poem that connects to someone's life. Sometimes I'm told about that, a gift. Reading poems aloud, commitment to a writing group, keeping a journal, these contribute to the way I work.

Now, in the "potlatch stage" of my life, I'm sorting and tossing notes and fragments, scraps of paper, working to complete projects, opening to new poems.

My books are: Gathering a Life (prose); Granite Under Water; Flying Horses, and (forthcoming), The Light of Invisible Bodies, all published by John Daniel & Co. A chapbook, Greatest Hits, is part of the Pudding House series. Books are available from the publisher, at amazon.com, or from the author at jlohmann@olywa.net