A Heritage of Kentucky Storytelling Inspires Success of Laguna Poet

Kate Buckley A ninth-generation Kentuckian who comes from a family of storytellers, Laguna Beach poet Kate Buckley has been telling stories through poetry since she was a child. Her mother recently sent her the carefully preserved page on which she wrote her first poem at the age of three and a half - a fitting memento for a daughter who has just won the North American Review's 2008 James Hearst Poetry Prize for her poem "The Life Cycle of Moths," and whose first book of poetry, "A Wild Region," is being released this month by Moon Tide Press.

"I always had that love affair and fascination with language," explains Buckley, who will be giving a poetry reading at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 16, at Latitude 33 Bookshop.

Since her precocious first poem about dancing in the moonlight with her sister, Buckley has been adding to her collection and refiningher craft. In high school she was the go-to poet among friends during the melodramatic moments of adolescence. Now, her works appear in such wellrespected literary publications as "The Heartland Review," "New Southerner," "The North American Review," "Slipstream," and "Spillway." And her poetry is included in the book, "Tide Pools, an Anthology of Orange County Poetry" (Moon Tide Press, 2006).

Buckley does have a day job as executive vice president for Castello Cities Internet Network, Inc., but she lives and breathes poetry. Having grown up in a family that nurtured her creativity and encouraged her to read, write and explore her surroundings, she was especially inspired by her great grandmother, to whom "A Wild Region" is dedicated.

"Gran was absolutely instrumental in who I am today and the fact that I am a poet," says Buckley. "If anyone had a fairy godmother come to life, it was my gran."

The genesis for "A Wild Region" came about eight years ago when Buckley started looking into her family's genealogy and talking to her relatives about the history and lore of past generations. "I got to hear about 1905, and 1920 and 1950 like I was there," she says. She is fascinated by the way people lived - what they endured, what made them tick, what they did to survive.

Buckley is a firmbeliever in the value of the myths and legends that have been handed down through time and that reveal essential truths about who we are, providing a common thread of humanity that links past, present and future generations. She tries to give a sense of that in her poetry. So that while the poems in her book are set in her native Kentucky and are evocative of the hard and often desperate lives of Appalachian people to whom black lung and hunger were all too familiar, she emphasizes that they are indicative of a collective experience - stories of love and loss that everyone can relate to.

Indeed, in her forward to the book, poet Cecilia Woloch refers to Buckley's poems as "dark prayers and lyrical ballads, infused with mystery and awe, respectful of the hard lives lived in the wild region the poet has left behind but still carries within her." But she goes on to say that they "are stories that speak to all of us, accessible and clear for all their complicated depth, 'universal' precisely because they're so deeply personal, and so deeply felt."

There is a visual element to the book as well, since Buckley is also an artist and the pages of poetry are interspersed with the images of some of her paintings, which are primarily done in acrylics and mixed media collage, and which capture her fascination with mythology and the timeless struggles of humanity including the quandaries of the modern age.

Here in Laguna, Buckley continues to nurture her creativity, thanks particularly to her longtime membership in Laguna Poets Workshop, a group of local poets that meets twice a month at the Laguna Beach Library. "It's been so helpful to me in my growth as a poet," says Buckley of the group. "These estimable friends and colleagues are an invaluable asset to my work."

Buckley also founded Women Poets of Laguna as an offshoot of Laguna Poets Workshop. She thought that womenonly gatherings would have a "different feel" and offer them other creative avenues to explore. The group recently had their first reading at Gypsy Den Grand Central in Santa Ana's Artist's Village where Buckley was joined by poets Ricki Mandeville (who is the editor of her book) and Joan Bauer.

Looking beyond her own creativity, and taking after her beloved Gran in sharing her joy of language and the creative process with younger generations, Buckley teaches a weekly reading and literacy class at the TLC branch of the Boys and Girls Club, assisted by her dog Murphy, a Delta Society certified Pet Partner. She says that the fact that the kids love Murphy, a cute Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, helps to make the learning process more of a recreation than a chore and helps her show them that reading can be fun.

In this high-tech world where the lives of so many children revolve around the twodimensional world of television and computer screens, Buckley's goal is to get them to take a closer look at the three-dimensional world around them. Sometimes they read poetry together and then write their own poems. Sometimes a craft element is added. Her idea is to encourage them to trust their instincts in interpreting the world around them and to learn to use language and art as tools for personal expression.

Buckley is all about the circle of life and the importance of understanding our common heritage. Asked what she'd like people to take away from her new book, she replied, "I hope readers will enter into the poems and remember perhaps some snippet from their own interior region: memory, song, story, legend, dream; some link to the myth and deep humanity that unites us all." As realistic as she is romantic, she adds, "And if that's too tall an order, I'd like for them to come away feeling that they've spent an enjoyable 20 minutes or so."

"A Wild Region" is available for purchase at www.katebuckley. com, www.MoonTidePress.com, and www.Amazon.com, as well as at Buckley's April 16 reading at Latitude 33. "Follow Me Down," a full-length poetry book by Buckley, will be released in the latter part of 2008 by Tebot Bach.