A metal spoon with a lathe-turned wooden handle. A toolkit so tiny it fits in your hand. An album cover from a Chuck Berry record. 

These are among the significant objects chosen by 22 senior poets that reflect their life experiences: work, people, place, wisdom, identity. On Tuesday, Nov. 4, the poets will gather at Mother Foucault’s Book Shop in Portland to read the poems, which have been paired with photographs of the artifacts by Jim Lommasson, in a Cover to Cover event called “What We Hold & Leave Behind.”

Cover to Cover, which begins Nov. 1, is a weeklong run-up to the Nov. 8 Portland Book Festival. The schedule is packed with activities, many of them free, ranging from dance and music to storytelling, games, comic drawing, and speed dating for artists and writers. 

Lommasson and poet Willa Schneberg created the 90-minute event combining photos and poetry. The two have known each other since serving on the Visual Chronicle of Portland selection committee to choose art for city spaces a number of years ago. Schneberg gathered the poets, and Lommasson created 19-by-13-inch digital prints of the objects. The poems are handwritten in the white space around photos of the mementos, to be projected in slides as poets read aloud. 

“Poetry paints a picture with words, so you should be able to see the object in the poem itself, a powerful synergistic effect — something greater than the poem or the special object alone,” Schneberg said.

Schneberg has published six poetry books, including her most recent collection, The Naked Room. She won the 2002 Oregon Book Award in Poetry and in 2024 was nominated for the Pushcart Prize for her poem, Hungry Ghost. Schneberg also creates ceramic sculptures that tell their own stories and have been photographed and displayed at galleries and museums. 

“Being an older, seasoned poet, I had been thinking a lot about older people’s objects and my own: what to keep, what is suffused with meaning, what symbolized my life, what to pass down,” Schneberg said.

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Lommasson’s signature work portrays handwritten words on photos. In January, he released What I Carry, a photo exhibit with homeless individuals reflecting on objects they carry with them, now part of a Street Roots exhibit at the Oregon Historical Society. He is also known for What We Carried, a photo project about refugees and objects they brought on their journey to the United States. 

“I realized I wanted to do a project that combined visual art and poetry. I was already thinking of a project relevant to myself and his work with special objects,” said Schneberg, referring to Lommasson.

“This is a form of social justice,” she continued. “I want old people’s voices to be heard. They are marginalized in our culture, which goes with Jim’s social justice work. Seniors are not valued the way they are in other cultures, because as a society we have fear of old age and death. This project celebrates well-lived lives, with vitality in the past and present. They are seasoned and very much alive.”

Schneberg invited actively writing poets from the wide community of writers she knows to join the project, including Paulann Petersen and Kim Stafford, both former Oregon poet laureates. 

Lommasson said he was hesitant about the project at first, because most of his projects are about diaspora and this is a pivot from that. 

“I said, I’m not sure, let’s try three or four people to see if it makes sense,” Lommasson said. “Then we had 20 people and it did make sense. It was profound, heartbreaking, fanciful, and fun. Some objects they had their whole lives. It is kind of a family heirloom. I made eight extra prints of one for family members.”

After photographing the objects at his studio, Lommasson photoshopped, cleaned up backgrounds, and printed photos on large white paper. People then wrote poems on the prints. When it was completed, the poets gathered to read their words.

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“I love what everybody brings to be photographed and what they bring to write,” Lommasson said. “It’s a kind of language with pictures and words in their own hand. It’s true collaboration and closer to the truth than interviews that are transcribed. To me, we are collaborating to make new artifacts.”

Poet Sharon Wood Wortman has written a book and created projects about bridges in Portland. Her photo and poem represent something else she is passionate about.

“I couldn’t commit my 14 grandkids and great grandkids or bridges to paper, so there was another poem that came to me about my lifelong love of rock and roll music,” Wortman said. 

Wortman took some LPs of rock artists from the 1950s to Lommasson, who helped her by choosing a cover showing Chuck Berry with his hand cupped around his ear. 

“When I wrote my poem Rock and Roll, I didn’t know that the Berry album was going to be the art Jim would select to go with my poem,” Wortman said. “Nor did I know when I wrote my poem that Berry had sacrificed his hearing on the altar of rock and roll as I had, dancing my hearing — and a good part of my youth — away to his music in the ‘50s and ‘60s.” 

Acknowledging this commonality, the photo also pictures Wortman’s hearing aids. In her poem, she calls them “matching Bronze Stars for meritorius service in a combat zone.”

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