Washougal poet selected for C-TRAN’s ‘Poetry Moves’

Christopher Corbell started writing poems when he was a teenager. He published a chapbook and worked on a literary journal in the 1990s, but largely drifted away from the medium during the next several decades to focus on his music career, professional responsibilities and other interests.

The Washougal resident said that he has “circled back” to poetry in the last several years, however.

“I’m spending more time on it lately,” said Corbell, a songwriter, composer, musician, and cofounder of the Washougal Songcraft Festival (WSF) nonprofit organization.

“I think the poetic way of seeing the world has always been important to me. Even if I wasn’t writing poetry, if I was writing songs or just reading, I’ve always read poetry, even when I’m not writing it. There’s something about the way that it can bring together our intuition and our longings and other areas of our emotions and our ideas (that) doesn’t really happen in any other art form. It’s really magical to me.”

Corbell’s poem, “A Present from Apollo,” has been selected for the 14th season of Poetry Moves, a program that displays poems by local poets in C-TRAN buses. The program is coordinated by Artstra, a Vancouver-based nonprofit organization that advocates for the arts in Clark County and Southwest Washington.

Corbell’s poem was one of nine selected for the 14th season, which will run from October 2024 to September 2025. Submissions were juried by Bellingham, Washington, poet and author Robert Lashley, a Jack Straw and Artist Trust fellow.

“I was super excited,” Corbell said. “I haven’t had a lot of poems published. I’ve always written poems sporadically here and there, but I’m actually working on my first poetry book, so I have a book-length collection of poems that I wrote in the spring and summer, and this was one of those. It’s kind of natural that when you do a creative endeavor, you want to find more avenues to share it.”

All buses in the C-TRAN fleet will display two different poem cards, according to Artstra.

“Poets’ refinement of language is an art form,” said Poetry Moves Director LaRae Zawodny. “It is their daily work. They, too, should be honored, their work celebrated, their poems heard.”

The program dates back to 2012, when Clark County artist Karen Madsen, inspired by New York City’s “Poetry in Motion” program, proposed the idea at an Artstra meeting. In the spring of 2015, Madsen met with C-TRAN leaders, who liked the idea and helped launch Poetry Moves.

Madsen then suggested the concept to then Clark County Poet Laureate Christopher Luna, who agreed to partner with Artstra to create the program, which debuted in 2016 and has put the works of local poets on C-TRAN buses annually ever since.

“It’s part of the spirit of adding some beauty to our environment,” Corbell said. “Here in Washougal, we have public art; there’s always more murals going up and statues and things like that. But poetry is another art form that’s great to have in the environment when you’re going through your daily life.”

Corbell wrote “A Present from Apollo” in the spring of 2024 in Athens, Greece.

“This book that I wrote, actually, most of the poems I wrote on (that trip),” he said. “I was just writing a lot of poems every day. This was part of a collection of feeling the inspiration of culture, of history, and just really trying to be close to the muses, as they say.”

Corbell said the seven-line poem that will appear inside C-TRAN buses is about “sunlight and how we experience it.”

“There’s a little bit of layered meaning to it because it’s about the experience of sunlight directly, but it also maybe implies something about being in the moment,” he said. “I have a few other short poems in the collection, but they have a mood that maybe isn’t quite as bright. I think any kind of poem can work on a bus, but I really wanted to share this one because I felt like it was positive, and it’s going to maybe brighten someone’s day.”

Corbell isn’t sure where his poem might pop up, but said “it might be fun to go on a little scavenger hunt” to track it down.

“Maybe I’ll ride buses one day and try to find it,” he said. “I used to use public transit a lot when I lived in Portland, but I haven’t used it as much since I moved to Clark County. This might be a good excuse for anyone who likes poetry to try riding the C-TRAN and see where you can go without having to drive and worry about parking and all that stuff.”

Corbell founded Cult of Orpheus, an independent publisher and producer of lyrical vocal music, and previously served as executive director of Classical Revolution PDX, a Portland-based nonprofit dedicated to enriching and educating community members by making classical music accessible to the public.

He is a member of Raven Fables, a folk duo that includes his wife, Stephanie Corbell, and the co-founder of the WSF, which launched in 2023 to promote arts education, to foster, share, and celebrate the craft of songwriting, and to develop the performing arts and creative community of Washougal and the surrounding region.

Corbell said he believes that “there’s a lot of similarity” between poetry and songwriting.

“I think I write songs very similar to the way I write poems,” he said. “It’s interesting because I think of these (outlets) as playgrounds for the soul, and people can explore them in all different ways. Obviously, with poetry, I don’t have to worry about the structure or the unfolding of the music along with it. I am starting to play with a little bit longer poems as well, and that’s something that doesn’t always work in a song. You get (through) a page of lyrics and you’re kind of done unless you’re Bob Dylan.”

Corbell will read his poetry at the Rooftop Yoga and Poetry event, to be held at 9:15 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 28, at Revolution Hall, 1300 S.E. Stark St., Portland; and the Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic event, to be held at 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 10, at Art at the Cave, 108 E. Evergreen Blvd, Vancouver.

For more information about Poetry Moves, visit artstra.org/poetry-moves. To read a selection of Corbell’s written work, visit cacorbell.com.