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ABOUT THE POET

& THE WORK

Poet of earth, nature, and the deep inhabitation of place, a writer of the Pacific Northwest deeply influenced by the work of Gary Snyder, Taoist in his withdrawal to follow "the watercourse way", Jeremy Pratt's body of work amounts to more than 1000 poems over the past 50 years. A student of Tai Chi and Zen for most of his life, his writing is grounded in the discipline of listening and obedience to the poem that comes of itself. His poetry often was allowed to ferment through many dozens of drafts, for years or decades. For him, a poem was not a performance or an object, nor was it merely subject but rather the interplay in the cocreative arising of all, leaving nothing standing alone. For him in a poem time did not crawl nor space geometricize being, but deeply listening, all came alive. Other influences in this vein included Galway Kinnell, Neruda, Rilke, Rumi, and Jimenez.  

A few poems appeared in the 1970s and 1980s in The Rock, Sonoma Review, The Men's Journal, Desert Call, Forefront, Americas Review, and Wingspan. He served as poetry editor for The Men's Journal, wrote a poetry column “A Way In” for Wingspan, and led the Sonoma Creative Expression Workshop, 1983-84, bringing together poets, writers and artists. Since then, he has chosen not to submit his work for publication, to clear the interfering noise of the editorial voice. Thus most of his work appears here for the first time. Other works include The Lucid Hallucinatorium, a fresh translation of the Tao Te Ching, essays on the work of Gary Snyder and other meditations, a study of the Book of Job, and two plays (Ezra in Pisa and Ezra Agon). 

Jeremy Pratt grew up on Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound; he lives and writes on Vashon Island. A 1977 graduate of The Evergreen State College, he took his M.S. in Environmental Science  from Washington State University in1979, specializing in human ecology. He founded and led the Institute for Human Ecology from 1982 to 2012 and spent a career in ecology, energy and water, serving as a project manager and facilitator, to lead projects in high conflict settings to navigate complex regulatory networks.

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Listen - poetry gives itself to the one who is there.

Poetry is an obedience (from the Latin, obedire, "to listen, attend"). 

Poetry takes wing like the flight of many birds.

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