Poetry in the Park -- Juried Reading & Exhibition
       Port Angeles Fine Arts Center
       Port Angeles, Washington

   Public Reading Event: June 17, 2023
   Outdoor Exhibition: June 2023-June 2024

In June of 2023, I had the good fortune to be one of twenty poets to have their work selected for the Port Angeles Fine Arts Center’s annual event and outdoor exhibition, Poetry in the Park.

Each poet was invited to read their work at the art center’s Summertide Solstice Festival and to have their poems printed on metal panels and posted throughout the center’s outdoor sculpture park during the 2023-2024 exhibition year. All of the poems related to a common theme, “Under the Canopy.” Visitors, by accessing a QR code printed on each poetry panel, can listen to the poems being read by the authors.

I’ve included my poem below. But if you’d prefer to listen to me read it, just click here:  Audio Recording (a page will open in a separate browser tab).

Dances with the Forest

I once knew an artist who’d paint from a palette
Made from a tin plate, and oil paints squeezed
From crumpled tubes—just the basic colors.
He’d sit in the forest and gaze at the trees, the hills,
A changing sky, as the forest gazed,
Intently back, inviting.

Sooner or later, the artist would dip his brush
Into the colors, press them together on his palette,
And caress them onto his canvas.
His brush would rise and descend, leap and turn,
Over, around, across his canvas as though it was a stage.
He and his brush danced,
And he and the forest,
And his palette and paints,
And the hills and sky,
Until at last—there was silence.

Then he’d sit, brush in one hand, tin plate in the other,
Gazing at the trees, the hills, the fading sky.
And sooner or later, he’d smile and pack up
His crumpled tubes to begin the drive home—
Happy to have the forest riding along
On the canvas, still wet, in the seat at his side.


            -- Don Haggerty

In Dances with the Forest, the writer of the poem who “once knew an artist,” as well as the subject of the poem—the artist “who’d paint from a palette made from a tin plate”—they both happen to be me. As such, the poem is a reflection on my early and very magical days as a plein air painter. A sampling of my landscape paintings that were very much in my thoughts while writing the poem can be viewed by clicking here (the page will open in a separate browser tab).

And...yes, each one really did ride home, wet, in the seat at my side.

And...I still have the old tin-plate palette happily sitting on a shelf in my studio.


            -- Don Haggerty