To be updated soon...

Poet Populist: Pesha Joyce Gertler thanks everyone for the honor of serving as Seattle’s Poet Populist, a role she has experienced as the most fulfilling one of her professional life. The position has not only validated her vision of taking the poem where it is not usually heard but has also opened doors, all the way from housing for homeless women and children to swearing-in ceremonies for officials at City Hall.


Recent and Forthcoming Publications: "Mother and Daughter Storm" appeared in WeMoon 2008. "Miriam: not an American Success Story," and "Women at the Well.com" appeared in the Spring 2007 issue of Bridges (an issue that will focus on the theme of Miriam). In 2007, Calyx published "Homage." 

From a student: Why Pesha should be Seattle's Populist Poet  Seattle has the good fortune to be home to Pesha Joyce Gertler, a wonderful poet and an incredibly gifted teacher. Her life’s work has been encouraging students, young, middle-aged, and truly old, to find their own voice. In classrooms, living rooms, libraries, and parks she has guided hundreds, perhaps thousands of people in finding the healing and inspiring properties of poetry. In so doing she has created a true community, seeded with as little as three hours a week, but destined to exist forever. Pesha Joyce Gertler should be Seattle’s populist poet not only because of the anti-elitist values expressed in her poetry, but also because of this commitment to generating poetry in the community. She is a fierce advocate of creative expression with an understanding of how society’s prejudices and discrimination can silence our truthtelling. Pesha has a particular commitment to helping women express themselves in poetry. She teaches popular courses for women in the North Seattle Community College extension program, at the U.W. Women’s Center, and at Cancer Lifeline.  Many Seattleites are now writing and sharing their poetry because of Pesha’s support and influence; many of them didn’t even realize they had a writer inside of them until working with Pesha. Ten years ago I walked into a continuing education class, Self-Discovery for Women through Creative Writing. It was held in a middle school, three hours per week. Within an hour I felt closer to the other students than I had become to anyone in my first three years in Seattle. It felt like I had found my home, and now ten years later, at the market, on the bus, there will be someone else from one of Pesha’s classes. She has created a community. Each week we might just write for 45 minutes, but Pesha always writes too and every poem written in our midst has been a wonder in itself.  Peggy Sturdivant, Seattle   From a student: Solace found For Pesha There is solace in this room. I am lost and can rest here. I am angry and can incubate here. I am full of love and can dispense it here. I am unsteady and confused and can be comforted here. I am in pain and can forget it here–it becomes as the passing air currents, the candle light on the altar, the inside of me. It becomes what my body is, the pain that settles into each atom; held by acute tension, fed by fear and habit. Here, in this room, it grows and will speak; will become honored in its own right because it calls me to myself, it asks for care and honoring, it asks for respect and love. Just for once. Just now. Thank you, Pesha rucy

Mission Statement:

The silence of women’s voices through the centuries led me to create a stimulating yet safe space where women’s voices can be respected and nurtured. My commitment is to maintain this space so that women writers always have a circle, a home, a temple to which they can return. It is my belief that through hearing the voices of all of humanity, instead of only half, the balance that is gained will heal the entire human family.
                                                                    Pesha Joyce Gertler

In this long emptiness
                                 to Malke Lee. a Yiddish poet, whose pious father
                                 burned all her work because he believed it was
                                 against God's will for a girl to write.
                                      --from the dedication in the book,
                                          The Hole in The Sheet,  Evelyn Kaye.
 

What did you feel Malke
when your lifework, your poems blackened in the flames,
what did you feel as you stood in the evening air,
smoke stinging your eyes while you witnessed your burning words

                    hamen     tash  en

                                                                             Vash               ti
                                                    Ju   dith

T    H      I   NK

An end
to such nonsense, such perversity,
as a woman who thinks, your Papa,
a man of the Book, stormed
while what could have been  your book burned and burned.

Did the yods and alephs intertwine
like braided challah, like amulets of fire?
Did you weep or faint or scream and kick
or stand frozen while your lifework died?

Did you then become
a dutiful wife, mother,
write no more?
Or did you find more successful ways to hide
so that no one could find your words
including us, your daughters, Malke, who come
decades later, and wander, hungry, bereft
in this long emptiness filled with rubble and ash.

© Pesha Joyce Gertler
Published in Jewish Women's Literary Annual

More poems.

To contact Pesha
send email to namastepeace-at-juno-dot-com
(replace "-at-" with "@" and "-dot-" with ".")