Anthology Book Company

Award-winning local poet Veronica Patterson is not a Colorado native, but her husband is. After meeting at the University of Michigan and living in Chicago for ten years, they decided they wanted their children to grow up here in the Front Range. “We loved Chicago, too,” she says, “but Colorado is a beautiful state; it’s easy to live here. I just went outside and it was snowing, and now it’s sunny again – how can you get better than that?”

Her first poem was published in the newspaper while she was living in Chicago, back when that was a normal thing for newspapers to do . “It was very exciting to have people pay attention. Poetry is a way of talking outside the normal parameters of your life, and it’s kind of surprising in its own way to have people listening.”

Her first book came out soon after she moved to Loveland, in 1987. The manuscript was assembled over time, sent to different places over the course of years, and constantly revised. Like any publication process, she experienced a lot of rejection.”But,” she says, “you also have to participate in the process. I tell my writing students this all the time. You have to get your poems and stories out into the world and say, ‘I’m part of this.’ There is a little bit of pleasure in just knowing it’s out there, even if it’s just the two days or six months or however long it takes for the publisher to send it back.”

Since then, Veronica has published three full-length poetry collections. She says that a poetry collection is like a painting exhibition; an artist paints all the time, but an exhibition contains only “part of a certain increment of their vision.” Veronica’s files contain hundreds and hundreds of unpublished poems, and many that have been published individually. She writes, and revises, and then suddenly something in a past poem becomes part of something she’s working on now. “Some inner part of you says, ‘maybe there’s a collection here; maybe there’s a book.’”

Revision has been essential to all of Veronica’s work. Some of her most successful poems emerged nearly whole in the first draft, with the shape already present, but it still took 20 or more revisions to get to the final form. “A lot of that is just fine-tuning,” she says, “but it’s still part of writing. If you can stay excited about the language and just nudge it further; if you can get back inside the story or poem; if it’s still exciting, you can revise with pleasure. You’re looking for the place where you say, ‘this is what I was looking for, this is as far as I can take it.’”

She finds herself returning to themes from the natural world, especially while out walking. Recurring images include anything from trees to migrating birds, snow falling, ice on the lake all winter. Other writers are also a source of inspiration. Fiction, nonfiction, and other poetry all give off sparks that can become new poems. Veronica quotes Marvin Bell’s 32 Statements About Poetry; “2. Learning to write is a simple process: read something, then write something; read something else, then write something else. And show in your writing what you have read.” Accordingly, her taste in poets varies wildly, and even goes in cycles. She just heard a poem at the UNC writer’s conference by Arda Collins, from her first book, It is Daylight. “She has an unusual way of seeing the world,” Veronica says, “and right now I’m full of her way of seeing.” Jane Hirschfield has sort of a Buddhist approach, “quiet and attentive.” Other times, Veronica returns to the classics; Dickinson, maybe, or the wild and unpredictable Blake

At her reading on Friday, Veronica plans to begin with a memorized poem (a bit of a relaxing place to start), then a few from her newest collection, Thresh and Hold, and last some new, unpublished poems. Reading to an audience is a new way to come to know her own poetry. Sometimes there’s someone in the audience who makes her think of something new or return to something old.

As a final thought, Veronica offers, “[The world] needs our attention right now, every aspect of it. Poetry is my way of conversing with the world. And the world talks back.”