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P&PC has just returned to drizzly Salem from a brief Spring Break trip to L.A, where, among other things, we visited for three days with P&PC Consultant Drew Duncan . One of those days, hoping to get away from it all, we hightailed it out of town to Joshua Tree National Park , home to the famous Dr. Seussian forest of Yucca brevifolia . We drove around. We hiked the Lost Horse Mine trail in the miserably high winds that put Duncan's rock climbing plans on hold. And we figured that out there in the high Mojave we could put our poetry radar on hold. That's when we ran into longtime California resident Robinson Jeffers near the end of the small, one-mile Hidden Valley trail near the park's West entrance, who reminded us—in the last of a series of informational placards—that Integrity is wholeness... The wholeness of life and things, The divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man apart from that. It's always a strange and beautiful thing to come back to on...

This year, the Oregon state championship for Poetry Out Loud —the national poetry recitation contest sponsored by the Poetry Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts in conjunction with state and local art agencies—was held in the Hatfield Room of Willamette University's Hatfield Library. There, surrounded by the rather austere looking, glass-enclosed private library of former U.S. Senator and Bearcat alum Mark Hatfield , nine high school students from around the state recited their hearts out in hopes of heading on to the national competition being held in Washington, D.C., at the end of April. As was the case in 2013, P&PC spent two weekends working with Poetry Out Loud this year. Alongside poet Stephanie Lenox and actor/professor Susan Coromel , we helped to judge the regional contest one weekend ago in Salem, and then yesterday at Bearcat central we served on a panel of judges that included current Oregon poet laureate Paulann Petersen , Eleanor Berry, and We...

Editor's Note: Seventy-three years ago today, on March 7, 1940, poet Edwin Markham —author of " The Man with the Hoe ," one of the most popular and widely distributed poems in American history—died at the age of eighty eight. To help mark the anniversary of Markham 's death, P&PC is pleased to bring you the following remembrance in which New Jersey writer Joel Lewis (pictured here) reminds us of Markham's once-broad appeal and incredible career that included reading at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial at the bequest of Chief Supreme Court Justice William Howard Taft and spending his 80th birthday at Carnegie Hall being acclaimed by President Herbert Hoover and delegates from 35 nations. (I know, right???) Lewis, a social worker living in Hoboken, has written or edited eight books including Surrender When Leaving Coach and Learning from New Jersey . "For better or worse," he explains, he also initiated the New Jersey Poet Laureate position ...