Patrice Vecchione will read at Bookshop Santa Cruz on April 2.
Poetry has been a lifelong obsession for Patrice Vecchione. Back in the ’70s, while still in high school, she desperately wanted to buy the poetry anthology “Reflections On a Gift of a Watermelon Pickle” that she saw at Bookshop Santa Cruz. Fearing someone else would get it, she hid it in the Economics section until she earned enough money from babysitting to buy it.
“The poems spoke to the place where I lived, which was beyond things like what I was going to wear to school that day, or whether I was going to pass my history final,” says Vecchione. “They spoke about deep matters of life. For fiction, you have to get at least a good ten pages in. In poetry, so much can happen in such a short space.”
Her first connection to poetry goes all the way back to her mother reading poems to her when she was an infant, so perhaps it makes sense Vecchione, who lived in Santa Cruz for 30 years before moving to Monterey, would grow up to one day be a poet herself. Her first collection, Territory of Wind, was released in 1998. In between editing nine anthologies, she has completed her second, The Knot Untied, which came out in March. On Tuesday, April 2, Vecchoine will go back to the place where she once stashed poetry books to kick off Bookshop Santa Cruz’s celebration of April as National Poetry Month.
Through the years, Vecchione’s poetry has utilized a very simple, concise selection of words that draw the reader in by accessing the five senses, which she uses to express abstract emotions and complex ideas.
“For me, writing a poem is about taking something that is not primarily located in language and locating that thing in language,” Vecchione says.
As she got more serious about writing poems in high school, she found that the process of putting pen to paper provided an emotional outlet.
“It was the way that I could get the world to hold still for a few minute. My home life was quite turbulent as a girl, so writing served me emotionally, and I found that you could take something lousy that happened and you could turn it into something that was positive,” Vecchione says.
As she’s gotten older, she writes less about her own stories, and focuses on more broad stories, and also writing about nature. Her love affair with nature began only in recent years, after an accident left her unable to do the long-distance bike trips she enjoyed. She took up walks in nature for her exercise. Now she finds herself inspired by these walks, and often writes while in nature.
“What I love about the natural world is it takes us as we are. The trees don’t say, ‘you can’t be here. If you want to walk quickly, it will accept your step. If you want to walk slowly, it does the same.’ I like how nature is not judgmental, it’s just nature. It just is itself,” Vecchione says.
Besides writing her own poems and editing anthologies, she also runs poetry workshops and teaches poetry to children and public schools as a guest poet. She wrote and starred in the one-woman play titled A Woman’s Life in Pieces, and has been working for the last decade-and-a-half on the non-fiction book Writing and the Spiritual Life.
“Writing allows us to access not only what we know, but also the collective unconscious,” she says. “When one writes, one is able, through the non-linear process of writing poetry to access the greater knowing that exists inside us. I tell my writing students, ‘you know more than you know you know.’”
Patrice Vecchione will read at Bookshop Santa Cruz on April 2 at 7:30pm.
