July 14, 2005

A poet grows in Ashland

By Cindy Blankenship
For the Tidings

Angela Howe-Decker

Dragonfly A dragonfly hovers overhead and my half-year old son lifts his arm to the sky reaches for the bug. It’s a gesture of pure intent, energy forced upward. Think sunflowers, the arched rise of a bottlerocket. The sun gleams his fingertips glows his mass of penny-brown hair. I think I must have wanted this all my life: A small green yard, this solid little boy, a coppery light touching everything he’s near.

When Angela Howe-Decker wrote “Dragonfly,” she was doing something she never imagined she would. “I figured I wouldn’t have time to write when the baby came, but this was so far from the truth. And I wasn’t going to write mushy mommy poems.”

Mason Decker, now 2 years old, was 6 months old when Howe-Decker wrote “Dragonfly,” which proved to be only the first of many poems she wrote about Mason and will likely write about her now eight-month-old, Leo Decker. This particular “mushy mommy” poem earned her first place in the 2004 Ina Coolbrith Circle poetry contest.

It’s only natural the contemporary free verse poet would write poems about her children, considering almost all of her poetry is draws from her own life.

“It’s easy to draw from personal experience and find that one universal core,” she notes.

While she’s expressing her personal feelings, she says she’s also aware the poem will be shared. “It’s using the right language … making it solid and strong and something that someone can walk away with. I want to capture the feeling I’m feeling, like this a really joyful moment. It’s hard, but it’s fun.”

Howe-Decker’s poetry has been published in The Comstock Review, the Wisconsin Review, the Red Rock Review, Hip Mama Magazine, The Sand Hill Review, and online at SF Station and Convergence, and it will soon appear in the 2005 Tebot Bach anthology of California poets.

She’s also been a featured reader at poetry events such as the MindGrind reading series in Petaluma and the Marin Poetry Center’s Summer Traveling Show. Preparing for a drive to the Bay Area where she’ll be a featured poet at a Saturday Poets event, she says, “I enjoy hearing other people’s poems; I enjoy sharing my poems.”

A founding member of Saturday Poets, Howe-Decker helped incorporate it into a nonprofit and hopes new members will join her and another San Mateo transplant, Susan Aaronsen, in an Ashland chapter.

Saturday Poets is a writing circle focusing on contemporary free verse and promoting poetry in San Mateo, Ashland and elsewhere. The group sponsors monthly readings and is planning a literary magazine.

Before moving to Ashland last October with her husband, a design architect, Angela taught literature at Notre Dame de Namur University and English at the College of San Mateo. The couple moved here to raise their children and work in a quieter, slower-paced environment.

“I love it,” she says with a big smile in her voice. “Everybody here has been so nice. It’s a lovely town.”

When her babies are a bit older, Howe-Decker hopes to teach poetry again. She especially enjoys teaching teens.

“I’m a big fan of everybody writing poetry,” she says. “Once you condense something into that small poetry capsule, you’re going to get the kernel of what you’re talking about, the emotions of what you are celebrating or bemoaning. Try it. You never know what you’re going to discover.”

One of the greatest joys she says she finds in creating a poem is “to preserve one little moment, celebrating that one little piece in time. If there is any recurring theme to my poetry is how special these simple moments in time are.”

She can be reached at angela.howe@saturdaypoets.org Learn more about Saturday Poets and read another poem by Angela Howe-Decker at www.saturdaypoets.org.