Ed Skoog is one of Seattle’s masterful poets – in fact, his book Rough Day just won the Washington State Book Award in Poetry. Lucky for the city, Ed, immediately after winning the award, has a show (this Friday!) and the Hugo House along side some other talented writers, Ru Freeman, Elissa Washuta and Dean Young. We had a chance to catch up with Ed and ask him how the city inspires his work, what he makes of his award and what he epects for the Friday show.

 

In light of you recent award (Washington State Book Award in Poetry), how does Seattle – and, perhaps, the state of Washington, itself – affect/inspire your work?

As an outsider, a rube, born in Kansas and educated in Montana, I have found Washington extraordinarily generous and welcoming, especially with such anchors as poetry-only Open Books, Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle Arts and Lectures, Hugo House, Seattle7Writers, and Copper Canyon Press (although I was living in southern California when they took my first book). I also like writing in Seattle because it’s just one big library, wherever you go. Seattle is total institution whose purpose is to produce poems and stories for its own consumption. Unlike in other cities, the writers here are mostly unconnected to universities, either making a living off their writing or other professions, or cobble together bits and pieces, leaving the unhealthy matters of hierarchy, paranoia, and maneuvering largely out of the conversation. We can have a beer down at, say, Vermilion, or the Tin Hat, or Al’s Tavern, or the sainted Blue Moon and laugh and joke and tell lies until closing time.

What is your one goal for 2015?

For 2015: I’m writing songs right now, which is very difficult. I was asked to write some songs for the Literary Series at the Hugo House this Friday, and I’ve spent the last few months working on them. I’m only doing three at the Lit Series, but there are ten or twenty that I’ve started and, having started them, hope to finish, if only to get them out of my head. After I’m done with those, I want to work on a book of short stories. I’m working on these non-poetry projects as a way to teach myself something new before going back to the next round of poems. My third book of poems, Run the Red Lights, will be published sometime in the next couple years by Copper Canyon Press.

How might the latest award change you at all, personally? Or won’t it? 

I’m delighted to have won the Washington State Book Award. I hope it brings Rough Day before some readers who might not otherwise have found it. The other books that were nominated are very fine, and I can’t believe that Rough Day is “better” than them, so I’m not personally persuaded by the award. The ceremony at the downtown library finished about the same time as the Sounders game, so the buses were full and I couldn’t catch a cab. I walked most of the way home up by Roosevelt High School. I thought I’d stop in at the Blue Moon to have a self-congratulatory drink by between the Roethke portrait and the Hugo photo, but a band was playing and the $8 cover charge seemed too steep. The award came with some gold stickers to put on books, but my 2-year-old son put them on his toy farmhouse instead.

What are your expectations for the Hugo House show on Friday?

I’m very nervous about playing music on Friday night. It’s just me and my friend Sam Watts on drums. Sam, of the band Ghosts I’ve Met, was my co-producer on the Triggering Town Review and I like collaborating with him. But we practiced yesterday and I am not very confident in the songwriting. I’ve been listening to a lot of Roger Miller and Tom T. Hall to try to learn how to write a complex song with a very accessible and immediate surface, but… We’ll see how it goes. I’m excited to share the stage with Ru Freeman and my friend Elissa Washuta, and especially the great Dean Young.