Poetry Reading & Book Signing: Local Mystic Poet Chelan Harkin Talks Redefining God; Drawing Inspiration from Hafiz
Pictured: Mystic Poet Chelan Harkin
Chelan Harkin is a mystic poet.
Chelan, now 33, grew up in the Columbia River Gorge and it was here that she first fell in love with creative writing. She has been writing poetry for over a decade and in 2020 she published her first book of poetry “Susceptible to Light'' a collection of her best poems from her early teens and twenties.
Let Us Dance! is Chelan’s Second Book of Poetry. The book is available for purchase here and at Moon Mountain Highway in Bingen and Waucoma Bookstore in Hood River.
Her work is highly influenced by other mystical poets including Hafiz and Rumi and has reached an international audience on a scale she called 'beyond her wildest dreams'. Her work has even been highly regarded by American poetry and interpreter of mystical poetry Daniel Ladinsky, who has published several widely beloved works which are based on the poetry of 14th century Persian Sufi Poet Hafiz.
Now just seven months after the release of her first book she will have her first-ever in-person poetry reading and book signing event for her recently released second poetry book “Let Us Dance! The Stumble and Whirl With the Beloved”.
The event will take place at Moon Mountain Highway in Bingen, WA on October 23rd from 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Ginger tea will be served at the event and all are invited to attend.
“This will be a cozy, inspiring, and uplifting event and we hope you'll be part of it,” said Sara Mains, owner of Moon Mountain Highway.
Interview with Chelan Harkin
Pictured: Mystic Poet Chelan Harkin
This is your first poetry reading and book signing. How does it feel to undertake this new experience?
I’m excited. It’s been such a wild year. All kinds of things have happened in my life this year with my poetry. This is my first book signing event that I’ve offered and it’s really sweet. It will be interesting. It’s a different experience sharing my poetry with a wide group of people that I don’t know intimately compared to sharing with my hometown folks that have seen me and known me my whole life. And in some ways feels more vulnerable but also really meaningful to share this with my hometown.
Where are you from in the Gorge?
I grew up in Lyle and I went to school in White Salmon. I left when I was 18 and was very much in this attitude of like get me the hell out of the gorge and I couldn't wait to leave. And I went to the southern part of Chile for six months. I just had this need for a faraway place to have an adventure. And I spent the first year after high school in South America which I needed- I needed to just get far away for some reason. And then just even one year of doing that softened me. And I ended up going to college at Evergreen in Olympia. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, I guess. And I’ve been pretty northwest-based since then. Then we moved to Portland. And then my husband and I moved back here 5 years ago which was kind of surprising. It was something that I never thought I would do and I couldn't be more grateful to be back here now. And then two weeks after we moved back, we somewhat surprisingly got pregnant. And the gorge just feels like the sweetest nest for raising kids and I have parents that still live in Lisle and my husband's dad lives in white salmon. So, we're just, super grateful to be here, like super, super. And now and now I can't imagine living anywhere else.
What has been your writing journey?
So something I’m really excited about is that my creative writing teacher from high school is going to be at this poetry reading on Saturday. Her name is Shirley Jellum. She is such an amazing woman. When I took her creative writing class at age 17 and I was a junior in high school, I was just so disillusioned and mad at school. I had a very hard time connecting with a sense of purpose and I felt like my creativity had really been corked and I felt just academically unmotivated because I just had a really hard time connecting what I was learning to kind of wider meanings. And then I took this class and it was just an immediate and powerful click and just realization that ‘oh this is a this is a gift of mine.’ And so I got excited about poetry. And she was just such an amazing teacher. So she presented things in such an enlightening way. And so that's what I kind of discovered poetry and really started writing.
And around age 20 I had a time of really profound despair in my life and really acute loneliness. I felt that I had no kind of authentic expression or connection with the world or with anyone else or with myself and poetry was by one attempt at cultivating that connection. So I set an experiment up for myself where I said I was going to write a bad poem every day for 30 days and share it. And I just gave myself permission to step out of this total perfectionist paralysis thing and just loosen things up. Then on the second day of that experiment, my poetic process really profoundly changed. So rather than a stressful process of taking months to graph the poem, it just started pouring through me and my main work was to try and write fast to ‘catch’ the poem. And it would just pour out of me in about two minutes with no editing. And so that was a really profound experience for me and it was like this channel where even though I still had all of this trauma and all this stuff that kept me from satisfying relationships and literally every other area of my life I had found this beautiful relationship with poetry. I’m turning 33 tomorrow and I'm 33 tomorrow and since then I have been writing poetry in this way.
And so I had this huge collection of hundreds of poems but back then I had really sort of dismissed my dream. This dream of publishing my poetry for all kinds of reasons. I just buried it deep down, and I almost wasn't even connected with it because it was so precious to me and I had so many fears about bringing it forth. Like it might not be received the way I wanted it to be received. Or if I pursued my dream and then I didn't work out then my mundane life would be unbearable. All kinds of really deep fears and things holding me back.
Then in 2020, it changed. I don't know if it was a series of factors. I just had a baby and it was a pandemic time. I was just at home all the time and getting cabin fever. My soul just needed something else. It just sort of activated this desire to start experimenting with bringing my truth forward and listening to myself and making some changes.
Susceptible to Light is Chelan Harkin’s first published book of poetry. It is available for purchase here.
You call yourself a mystic poet. What does being a mystic poet mean to you?
That's such a good question. Well, I think it's really important to demystify the word mystic because it can seem somewhat of an arrogant thing to call oneself, a mystical anything that is not my intention. I'm still actually uncomfortable with not fully comfortable, I should say with that attribution, but I use it here. I'm dabbling with it. I think it just speaks to the style of my poetry more than a self-identification of embodied mysticism. I think of Rumi and Hafez when I think of mystic poetry. It’s also called ecstatic poetry. I guess I need to get clear about my personal definition of this. I would describe it as a mystical path, it’s a path, not an identity. It is a path of being willing to continually open the heart and encounter the truth of what is in our hearts. So, you know, working with the pain that we find there working with the expression that desires to come forth there and holding them in love. It’s a path to holding smaller limiting ideas about myself associated with pain in love and moving through them to connect to the real inner truth. And it’s also about believing that humans have an essential light within us. A beautiful animating expressive inherent light.
Earlier you described your poetry as pouring through you. What is your writing process like? Where does your poetry come from?
Yeah, good questions. So all the poems in both my books have come through and that way every single one. And it's funny like there have been times when a poem's coming through, but I've kind of written it off and said oh I’ll get to it later or something and I just try to remember the theme. Only then when I tried to write it down later when the energy wasn't there and it totally didn't work at all. So there's something about writing it down as it comes through and it sort of feels like words are pouring through me in the specific order that they're meant to come through and I just write them down. That's it. That's that. So I don't sit down. I don't have any writing practice. I don't say, you know sit down from 9 to 11 every day. There's nothing really that structured about my writing practice at all, and I'd actually like to change that a little bit because I'm trying to write a prose book, right now and it's a different process.
Again you’ve described the poetry as pouring through you. What do you think the poetry is pouring from?
That is such a mysterious question. It’s a really good question that I don’t have the answer to but I do have an interesting experience that I can share. Last November when I decided I was going to publish my books and three weeks later it was published. And in those three weeks, I bought two Hafiz books, which have been my primary poetic inspiration. And I bought them because they have beautiful formatting and I wanted some inspiration for formatting my book. So I did this experiment where I would go on a walk every night and I thought I would have a chat with my favorite poet Hafiz, because maybe he’s got so much inspiration lying around that he can share with me. I would make myself a big cup of hot chocolate and I would go on this night walk and it was like a 30-minute loop. And I would just chat with Hafiz and just kind of be very specific about exactly what kind of help I was looking for. And I had the most wild experience of torrential inspiration. It disrupted my life. There were so many poems coming through. It was nuts. It almost felt like a tap that you could like turn on, it was just pouring out. And that's eventually I was like Hafiz turn it down! So that was just a wild experience. And then I started asking how best for promotional help because I was like, oh sweet, okay, maybe this works. I don't know, I'm gonna see. And then three weeks into that experiment Daniel Ladinsky, who’s kind of a superstar in the Western poetry world contacted me. And he was like, hey I found your book. I never do this but I think you and I should collaborate. But I digress. I really don’t know what that source of inspiration is. It does feel like it's kind of something that is from the beyond mingling with my own energy. And in this case with Hafiz it very much felt like there was some support coming from that and the poems that came through were very, very Hafiz-like than usual. So, I don't know. You know, it's still a mystery to me. I'm not claiming any certitude about that.
Your poetry is heavily influenced by Hafiz. There are many similarities in your poetry, references to the beloved, and references to God that feel very much like Hafiz. When did you first encounter Hafiz?
I first encountered Hafiz when I was 17 and I had this great therapist who read me this poem from Hafiz and it just knocked my socks off. And it also just exposed me to this form of expression and it gave me permission as a poet to write in that style which was what I most desired to do, but I hadn't been exposed to it yet so I didn’t know it just yet. And then just, you know, the way Hafiz talks about God with such intimate and sweet and playful and reverent and irreverent terms. I was just like oh my god. It just works for me.
You use the term God a lot in your poetry and you have a background in the Bahá’í faith. What does God mean to you?
Good question. That question has been a journey for me. What my poetry tries to do with God is on one hand use it as a kind of shorthand, because in poetry you need to use shorthand a lot of the time. And it is the kind of word that can encompass everything that’s beautiful and reverent and just enlivening and sacred. So on the one hand that’s what it means to me. And on the other hand, I use it as a tool to unlock and give permission to unlock old stuck ways of thinking and old stuck energy around this concept because so many ideas about God are these locked down associated definitions of God and conditioned ideas of God. And so I kind of use it as a way to try to open that up and offer the possibility, much like Hafiz does this idea of this source being so, so, all-embracing and so joyful. And so, like, intimate and sweet, and close, and all-loving. And yeah, so that's what my poetry tries to do with the word God.
The Worst Thing by Chelan Harkin from her book of poetry Susceptible to Light available on Amazon or locally from Waucoma Bookstore. Source. Click image to enlarge.
Would you say that this kind of unlocking of God is a core focus of your poetry? What do you feel like the core focus of your work has been so far?
My poetry really works to redefine old concepts and in that unlock potential and imaginative capacities in people and be able to re-envision the world and human potential and relationship in a much more beautiful way. And sometimes I think God is sort of the kingpin of that. Like if we can redefine God, then everything else can get shuffled around in a better way.
The Eccentric God by Chelan Harkin. Source. Click Image to enlarge.
“Let Us Dance!” Is your second book. How has your poetry evolved or changed? Does it feel different this time?
Yes, “Susceptible to Light” is the collection of my best of the best from age 20 to age 32. And then “Let Us Dance!” all came through me in seven months. So it was a really different pace with “Let Us Dance”. And when I put out “Susceptible to Light” there were so many unknowns and I had no idea what the response was going to be to it.
I was so emboldened and empowered and encouraged by the feedback I got from “Susceptible to Light” that it gave me the courage to sort of, I don't know, experiment and push the edge with “Let Us Dance” and to address different themes. Like, I use the word clitoris and let us dance. It's a fantastic word. It's such an excellent word and I needed to, you know, get some courage to use it. There are just different tones expressed in each book. I feel like “Let us Dance!” feels very catalyzing and activating and there’s a loving intention to challenge old concepts and “Susceptible the Light” feels like this balm and this gift.
- Chelan Harkin from her book of poetry, Susceptible to Light
- Chelan Harkin from her book of poetry, Let Us Dance! The Stumble and Whirl With The Beloved
There’s a lot of spirituality expressed in your poems. What role do you think poetry can play in spirituality and in human evolution?
I'm so glad you asked this question, and after our conversation, I’m going to continue to think about this. Well, I think part of the nature of mystical poetry is that it carries this particular energy about it. It's somewhat like energy work, I feel. And it sort of opens the heart and then implants concepts that have this somewhat living dynamic energy about it, that if people want to open their hearts to it, it can kind of have this beautiful, catalyzing effect, on their perspective. So, that is the main hope and goal. Something else about poetry is that you can say things that don't really raise defenses in people. Opinion and commentary and prose form can bring up walls and kind of argumentative or defensive responses in people. Mystic poetry is this art of just, like opening those defenses and opening the heart. And so, I think it can somehow enter people in a way that other statement pieces aren't. Such a good question.
I shifted into full-time writing this last year, but before that, I worked as a hypnotherapist for ten years and so in some ways, it’s kind of the same thing that I was doing as a hypnotherapist. It's like poetry is a new modality of opening the gateways to the subconscious mind and planting these ideas to benefit people in moving forward.
To learn more about Chelan Harkin’s upcoming works and book signing events visit her website ChelanHarkin.com.
