Carson City poet draws crowd at senior center

Carson City resident and poet Kathy Nelson believes poetry can create a “personal geography.”

“I believe that when a poet writes about a landscape, an outer landscape — an actual physical geography — it’s inevitable, really, that it’s tied to an internal landscape as well,” she told the Appeal. “What we see outside of ourselves becomes a reflection of what’s going on inside.”

Nelson, 72, is author of the poetry collection “The Ledger of Mistakes” and a 2024 Nevada Arts Council Artist Fellow. On Jan. 30, she spoke about poetry to a packed room at the Carson City Senior Center. She also read some new poems evoking the Carson City region.

Nelson moved from North Carolina to Carson in 2021 to be close to her two daughters and three grandchildren.

“The story is we lived in western North Carolina. We were very happy there, but all of our kids and grandkids lived west of the Rockies,” she said. “We were happily flying three, or four times a year sometimes, to visit them, and then the pandemic happened, and for almost two years we didn’t see anybody … I found it unbearable. I think there was a little bit of impulsivity in it (the move), I have to confess, but we did move across the country, and our daughter lives here in Carson City.”

Kathy Nelson reading ‘Letter to the Sierra Nevada’ at the Carson City Senior Center on Jan. 30. (Scott Neuffer photo) 

Nelson worked as a telecommunication engineer, a teacher, and a hospice chaplain before earning a Master of Fine Arts degree at age 70. Nelson said she’d always been a poet, since age 7, but really focused on the artform when working as a chaplain in her late 40s and early 50s.

“I think being a hospice chaplain, specifically, was the best career I had. It was a wonderful career, but it put me in situations where I didn’t feel I really had the language to speak about my experience,” she said. “So that’s when I turned to poetry as another language, really.”

A recent poem by Nelson posted on the Nevada Arts Council website, “Letter to the Sierra Nevada,” is dated March 2023. It was written during the unrelenting winter in Carson last year.

The second stanza of the poem reads:

Another shipment

of snow

arrives today

on the atmospheric

river. Tires

spin on ice before

engaging. Along

the galleries

of wind,

a stratocumulus

contusion.

The poem can be read in its entirety online: https://www.nvartscouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/Letter-to-the-Sierra-Nevadas-Kathy-Nelson.docx.pdf.

In another poem called “Hunger,” published in the literary journal Rabid Oak, Washoe Lake is “spread like a spill on a countertop,” and Nevada’s “broad bare belly” is stretching out before the poet.

Nelson said the Nevada landscape can be difficult.

“When I first arrived here, all I could see was what wasn’t here,” she said, “because I had come from an environment where there was this enormous forest in every direction. Overstory. I was always under trees.”

Nelson also noticed Nevada’s lack of rain.

“It seemed like it could go months without a drop of rain,” she said. “So, I found the physical environment difficult at first. And that’s really why I started writing poems about this area — because I knew I needed to ground myself here and connect with it somehow. Poetry really was a vehicle for that.”

Nelson said her favorite things about the Nevada landscape are mountains and sun.

“I love how they are chiseled,” she said of the mountains. “And I love the walk down the Carson River. I walk to the Mexican Dam pretty regularly, and I love that walk. It’s beautiful … And I love the sun. It took me a while to get to that point, but I do. I love the sun.”

Nelson said she and husband Bruce plan to stay put in the capital city. If the Jan. 30 reading is any indication, Nelson will have no problem finding an audience and sharing her love of poetry.

“Poetry speaks to everybody,” she said. “Not everybody listens, but I think it speaks to everybody.”

For information about Nelson, visit https://kathynelsonpoet.com.

Carson City Senior Center Executive Director Courtney Warner told the Appeal the center has more literary events in the works and is trying to cultivate lifelong learning for community members. She encouraged anyone with ideas for speakers to contact her at cwarner@carson.org.

“The sky’s the limit,” Warner said.