TAMMY ROBACKER: OLD TOWN’S PAGE TURNER >>>

Kevin Miller just put Old Town Tacoma on America’s literary map. A local poet and dedicated educator, Miller recently published his third poetry book: Home & Away: The Old Town Poems. Released last fall through generous funding from the 2007/2008 TAIP award grant and the City of Tacoma, the poems in Miller’s latest collection cover a decade of his work since moving to Old Town Tacoma. The poems are not a collection speaking to the history of Old Town, rather they are works inspired by and rooted in his personal sense of home, family, and place here in Tacoma and beyond.

The works in the section “Home,” focus on the people and places near home for him. The “Away” poems are written to address the distances in our lives. “(The) poems address places and friends in other parts of the state, the country, the world; for example, Denmark where we lived for a year or Wenatchee where my wife’s people live,” says Miller.

A high school English teacher for 30 years turned assistant principal for four years, Miller returned to the classroom to teach special education at Olympia High School. Currently, he teaches special education to sixth graders at Washington Middle School in Olympia. To encourage the creative spirit in his students, Miller gets them to say it with words. “I have my students write every day, some days it’s poetry. They never cease to astound me.”

Home & Away: The Old Town Poems is available locally at King’s Books in Tacoma. It is also available online and through the publisher here. One of the published poets collected in the anthology In Tahoma’s Shadow, Miller will be reading his Tacoma-inspired poetry at one of the upcoming ITS readings scheduled for May. You won’t want to miss him.

Three Bridges Building
By Kevin Miller

Give me a building
with the right name,
a wooden store front
with an apartment upstairs,
gold leaf letters on glass
over the entry door
understated, like a scarf
perfectly tied.
I leave you a note:
Meet at Three Bridges Building. 
The single concrete bridge
will keep us counting ways
over the gully where stolen bicycles
and city deer lie in silence.

We will rendezvous
like pals after paper routes,
measure time by daylight,
by what we do and when it’s done.
No one will be late,
first to arrive waits at the rail
to watch the gully trail twist
through black berry and alder
descending three miles north
to Old Town and sea level.

I'll bring you more poetry ditties Monday. Check out the Poem-A-Tacoma archives.

Poem-A-Tacoma is sponsored by Embellish Multispace Salon in downtown Tacoma.

TAMMY ROBACKER is a poet and writer living, breathing, typing and spitting words in Tacoma. She owns a freelance writing and marketing communications company called Pearle Publications. Her poetry has appeared in Plazm, Women's Work, The Wild Goose Poetry Review, and the Allegheny Review. A recent recipient of the 2009/10 TAIP grant, she will be publishing her first book of poetry, The Vicissitudes, through the generous support of this funding made possible by the City of Tacoma and the Tacoma Arts Commission.