The Ovitt Family Community Library hosted a poetry workshop this evening with Marsha Schuh, a long time Ontario resident and poet deserving to be the city’s poet laureate.

Schuh discussed the influence of Barbara Crooker and Grant Hier on her writing. She illustrated Crooker’s thirteen ways of looking at a poem through a combination of her poems inspired by the streets of Ontario, California and her Swedish family.

Halfway through the workshop, Schuh served cardamom rolls made from her mother’s recipe and made especially “real” with butter. She graciously shared the recipe with the workshop’s attendees.

Schuh’s longest “street poem, “Geometries of Euclid,” originally appeared in Inlandia: A Literary Journey. Schuh described how she researched material for part of her poem in the Model Colony History Room of the Ovitt Family Community Library.

Schuh also demonstrated through her poem “Paradiddle” how she used “mouth-feel” and “breath architecture,” approaches she heard Grant Hier describe at a Mt. SAC Writers’ Weekend. Enjoy saying the following lines from her poem aloud: “Taradiddle nights, pepper belly moons/ xeroxed kisses in darkened rooms.”

Schuh writes accessible, tonally-rich poetry with deep feeling and meaning. She ennobles Ontario through her work.