CHS grad:Mark Hart writes poetry of the Palouse

Mark Hart was born and raised on a farm along the Pullman highway, and although he left the farm many years ago, it never left his heart.

“Boy Singing to Cattle,” Hart’s first book of poems, will be available for sale March 1. It will be at the Colfax Library and will be for sale at Tick Klock Drug. He hopes the book also will be for sale at Main Street Books.

A 1974 graduate of Colfax High School and the son of the late Don and Betty Hart, he holds a masters degree in counseling from Seattle University where he also taught religious studies. He earned a doctorate in theology from Boston College, and also has taught religious studies at Smith College.

Hart said he began writing poetry in 2003 after the death of his father.

“It’s a bit of a mystery,” Hart said in a telephone interview on Sunday.

“Six weeks after my father’s death, I heard this voice inside me who wanted to speak. His death triggered a lot in me. I was deeply touched by his death and I needed to process his death, everything he meant to me, my relationship to him, to farming, to the Earth.”

Friends who read the poems encouraged Hart to take the poems seriously.

“The poems weren’t just for me, they were gifts coming to me, to write them down, to put them out in the world,” he said.

“They are my own voice, but something inspired,” he said. “I’m moved that other people felt the emotion of them.”

“There are indeed some painful aspects of my past with which I come to terms in my poetry,” Hart said.

It wasn’t easy for Hart to find a publisher.

“I had almost given up and was looking into self-publishing when I won the award,” he said.

The book won the 23rd Annual Pearl Poetry Prize.

“I am thrilled,” he said. “It has been very affirming of my writing to get this award and it moved me out of a writing slump. It gives me the credibility to apply for writing residencies and, if it sells well, help me find a publisher for my second book,” he said.

Hart said the book is a book about everyone’s future.

“But I think it is truer to say the book is a reconciliation with the future - death, which is everyone’s future.

“In the process I went through after my father’s death, I was unable to use a belief system of heaven or future lives to step around death. I needed to go through something in my gut and heart, and what I came to see, or what was given to me to see, was how life lives from death.

“A farmer is well positioned to see that truth, and agriculture is the central metaphor of this collection of poems. In the way we literally eat dead things to survive, the poetry in this book spiritually eats and digests death, and human vulnerability, to come to a different place in life,” he said.

“In making literature out of my life and the life of my father, I aim to speak to what is our universal human experience. It is a memoir in poetry, but it is more than that,” he said.

Hart’s work also has appeared in several publications including the Atlanta Review.

Hart now lives in western Massachusetts where he is a licensed mental health counselor in private practice. He also is the guiding teacher for the Bodhisara Dharma Community, on the teaching staff of Insight Meditation Center of the Pioneer Valley and a religious advisor at Amherst College.

Hart said he will continue to write.

“I hope to be able to publish a second collection at some point,” he said. “It will be at least a few years. I will probably do this into old age.”