Enjoy an Afternoon Commemorating Renowned Northwest Poet Theodore Roethke at Bloedel Reserve and Check out a Play Inspired by his Life

The Bainbridge Island Poet Laureate Program and Bloedel Reserve invite the community to an afternoon of poetry featuring Tess Gallagher, Linda Bierds, Pimone Triplett, and Michele Bombardier in commemoration of renowned northwest poet Theodore Roethke and his connection to the Bloedel Reserve.

To the uninitiated, Roethke is recognized as one of the greatest American poets of the 20th century. That Roethke died while swimming in the pool (now the rock garden) at the Bloedel Reserve during a 1963 visit with Prentice and Virginia Bloedel is a tantalizing bit of Pacific Northwest history. Similar on some level to Rock and Roll pilgrims who trek to Kurt Coban’s boyhood home in Aberdeen, in Grays Harbor County, the site is visited by poets and writers from all over the world.

Roethke, who won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, produced a body of work and a teaching legacy that continues to influence poets today. His students include David Wagoner, Richard Hugo, Carolyn Kizer, Jack Gilbert, Tess Gallagher, and other luminary poets.

Tickets for Theodore Roethke and Bloedel Reserve: A Poet’s Place – to be held in the Japanese Guest House – are $14 for Bloedel members and $40 for non-members. The program takes place from 3 – 4:30 p.m. on Saturday Sept. 28th. The admission fee includes entrance to the Bloedel for a chance to tour the gardens before the event and post-event. Refreshments will be served in the Japanese Guest House following the reading. Tickets are available at Bloedel Reserve | A Wonder of Nature .

The Theodore Roethke commemoration continues that evening at 7 p.m. and on Sunday Sept. 29 at 3 p.m. at the Bainbridge Public Library where Island Theatre presents a play reading of First Class, by the late poet and Roethke student David Wagoner, that recreates one of Roethke’s legendary U.W. poetry workshops. Both readings are free, with donations welcome. Set in one of Roethke’s legendary poetry workshops, the 75-minute production features Island Theatre founder Steve Stolee as Theodore Roethke

Featured poets at the Bloedel event are:

Tess Gallagher, possibly Roethke’s only still-living student, is a widely published and esteemed poet with numerous awards for her work, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Maxine Cushing Gray Foundation Award.

Bainbridge Island poet Linda Bierds is a recently retired U.W. Creative Writing professor whose honors and awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Poetry Society of America, and the MacArthur Foundation. She has received the PEN/West Poetry Prize, the Washington State Governor’s Writers Award, the Consuelo Ford Award from the Poetry Society of America, and four Pushcart Prizes.

Pimone Triplett, a finalist in Narrative journal’s Fifteenth Annual Poetry Contest, is the author of four poetry collections and a professor of creative writing at the University of Washington’s MFA program.

Bainbridge Island’s inaugural Poet Laureate Michele Bombardier is the winner of the 2024 New Ohio Review Prize. Her poetry and reviews can be found in over a hundred literary journals and her poetry collection, What We Do, was a finalist for the Washington Book Award. She holds an MFA in poetry from Pacific University and has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, Mineral School, and The Tyrone Guthrie Centre.

Meantime, in his introduction to the play, David Wagoner wrote: “Most of the teaching methods of artists in all categories have gone unrecorded. We know very little about what great painters and great composers, for instance, said to their pupils. In First Class I’ve tried to re-create the atmosphere of one of Roethke’s poetry workshops, working mostly from my memories of him and a number of examples of the kinds of poems and opinions he admired, some of the near rituals he used both on students and himself, some of his unique spirit, and some of the hectic ways Time and Place would leap over each other for him as if he were in charge of both.”

In the process, the audience is swept into not only the exhilarating milieu of Roethke’s classroom, but also the terrible landscape of the mental illness that clouded most of his life.

“Theodore Roethke and Bloedel Reserve: A Poet’s Place” is made possible through a grant from the Bainbridge Community Foundation and funding from the City of Bainbridge Island. Other Bainbridge Island Poet Laureate Program support comes from the Bainbridge Public Library and Bainbridge Artisan Resource Network (BARN).

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