Poet and performer Judith Adams.
Starting at a young age, Judith Adams would write poetry to help her better understand the world around her.
When she was young and had trouble learning to read, her mother gave her poems to read in hopes that they would be less intimidating than a chapter book, and Adams’ love for poetry began. She moved to the United States from England in 1976 and now lives on Whidbey Island. It wasn’t until her 30s that she began writing seriously, but now she has been performing poetry on the West Coast for nearly 30 years.
“When I read a poem, the poem comes alive,” Adams said. “It’s an incredible experience to actually read poetry ... There’s something about the live sound of the voice which brings out the music of the poem.”
One of the unique aspects of Adams’ poetry performances is that they often incorporate music such as cellos, choirs, drums or guitars. She likes to do performances with music because it adds to the poetry. Adams said she is thankful for the opportunity to travel around and share poetry with people through Humanities Washington.
“What Humanities Washington has enabled me to do it to go around the state, meet so many different people and it gives me the opportunity to talk about the one thing I really love, and that’s poetry,” Adams said.
Poetry offers essential questions about what it means to be human, Adams said, quoting poet Mary Oliver’s line: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Adams wants to share with people that poetry can be a way to interpret the world because it covers every part of life one experiences: grief, love, depression, aging. She writes about pretty much anything, because poetry can be about all of these different aspects, she said.
When Adams performs, she always picks a theme, which helps her decide what poems she wants to read to the audience. Using a mix of poets’ work including her own, she takes time organizing a stream of poems to talk about and read so that one will lead into the next. Most poetry can be spoken, but rhythm is important in reading and writing because one word in the wrong place can ruin it, Adams said.
“Poetry has a way of distilling getting to the essence of the world around us,” Adams said. “I think that sometimes the way we speak or the way we’d read prose, it doesn’t really have the same affect poetry does.”
Whenever there is enough time during a performance, Adams said she likes to involve her audience with different exercises. Sometimes that means having the audience share stories about poetry or something they have experienced. Every performance requires her to adapt to her audience, but she said she always enjoys hearing about people’s relationships to poetry, Adams said.
On top of her performances through Humanities Washington, Adams brings poetry to other venues including Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, the Frye Art Museum and prisons around the Pacific Northwest including Airway Heights Correction Center, the Washington State Penitentiary and the Washington Corrections Center for Women.
“I find that (inmates) are so receptive, and many of them write,” Adams said. “I think there’s something about being in prison where you’re left to yourself and your thoughts and you have very few distractions and so you’re really in that place. It’s a wonderful place to do poetry.”
With Adams’ “Poetic Apothecary” performance, she hopes the audience will see that there is a poetic remedy for everything. She believes that children in school are often forced to wade through poetry they don’t understand, which leads to the large amount of people who dismiss poetry because they don’t think it is made for them.
“We were taught that we have to find the meaning of poetry, and you don’t,” Adams said. “You just have to really enjoy the music of it.”
Adams’ performance is scheduled to begin at 3:30 p.m. on Saturday, April 13 at the Centralia Timberland Library. To learn more about Judith Adams, visit the Humanities Washington website.
