Wednesday Night Poetry features poet, retired educator
Minnesota poet and retired educator Kathy Oakley will be this week’s featured poet for Wednesday Night Poetry at Kollective Coffee+Tea, 110 Central Ave.
The regular open mic session for all poets begins at 6:30 p.m. and Oakley will perform at 7 p.m., followed by a second open mic. Admission is free and open to all ages.
A native of Minneapolis, Oakley began writing poetry while attending a Catholic girls’ high school with a strong English program. Several of her early poems appeared in the school’s literary magazine. “Those early poems came from a strong sense of the disconnect between ideals and reality in contemplating the adult world,” Oakley said in a news release. “I knew from early in high school that I wanted to become an English teacher.”
She earned a B.A. in English and B.S. in secondary education at the University of Minnesota. After teaching English at the junior and senior high level for several years in California, Oakley found high school teaching not as wonderful as she had imagined. She then got her master’s degree in counselor education at San Jose State University. She said, “I found that working with adults on their career and life adjustment issues was a better fit for me.” For the next 30 years, she worked in adult continuing education, career development and leadership training at three universities in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. Eventually, she earned a Ph.D. in higher education administration. She retired in 2015.
Oakley is also a fan and interpreter of the early 20th century children’s author Laura Ingalls Wilder, whose books in the “Little House On The Prairie” series were set in southern Minnesota. For three years, Oakley was a traveling speaker for Minnesota Chautauqua, crisscrossing the state presenting a program called “Laura Ingalls Wilder and Frontier Values.”
Throughout her career as an educator, Oakley continued to write poetry. “But between work and parenting, I didn’t have a spare moment to do much with the poems. They sat in an increasingly thick folder in the lower drawer of my desk. When I retired I finally said, ‘I need to take those poems out and see what I have.’”
The result was her first volume of verse titled “Incense Drifting to the Horizon” which was published by North Star Press in 2017. It includes over 50 poems written over the course of her adult life. The subjects include football, waterfalls, the death of parents, baseball, divorce, cabin life, the plight of refugees, new love, Chicago and garter snakes. Oakley said she hopes that her poems leave readers feeling, “Oh, yes! I recognize that moment. That’s a fresh, interesting way to describe it.’”
The book can be found at http:// www.amazon.com and Barnes & Noble, and she will have copies available Wednesday anight.
Email budonfoot@yahoo.com for more information about Wednesday Night Poetry.