{9} the Gallery housed a crowd of poets Friday evening. Smooth jazz music hovered in the air, while harsh lights pressed against bright, white walls. Intensity and excitement filled the spaces in the already crowded room. Rosemarie Dombrowski, a host of this Poetry Beat Night, scurried around collecting names and finalizing poems for the open microphone portion of the evening.
Her influence on the poetry scene in downtown Phoenix is defined by her work with the Phoenix Poetry Series and as an editor for Write On, Downtown and Four Chambers literary magazines. Dombrowski’s relationship with poetry began long before the creation of these showcases.
At a young age, Dombrowski’s mother would only read her nursery rhymes and poetry. But Dombrowski found a new love during her childhood: dance. She didn’t think much about poetry again until high school.
“Maybe for me, in high school it was like dance. It was like the verbal form of the movement that I had come to love and that was so engrained in me. It just seemed like this physical poetry translated onto the page using words,” she said. “I saw them as kind of interchangeable.”
After she graduated from high school, Dombrowski took a trip to England to study poetry for a month. Primarily, she found that her interest was in 19th century to present day poetry.
Dombrowski, now an English professor at ASU’s Downtown Phoenix campus, earned her bachelor’s degrees in Anthropology and English and a Ph.D. in American Literature with an emphasis in poetry at ASU.
When she started her first teaching job, she confessed she “almost vomited in a trashcan outside the classroom” on her first day.
“Barely having turned 24 and knowing that I was in charge of educating college students was overwhelming,” she said.
But at the end of the day, Dombrowski knew she was hooked.
Personal challenges arose early in Dombrowski’s teaching career.
“I got pregnant my second semester of grad school, so I was a very new teacher and a very new graduate student, and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do at that point,” she said.
The pregnancy was difficult to manage while she worked to gain the respect of her students. But the challenges didn’t stop with the birth of her son.
“He had a profound heart defect and since has been diagnosed with severe autism,” she said. “He has never spoken. He had two heart surgeries before he was 6 months old. His heart doesn’t function at capacity, he still has defects that they haven’t repaired.”
Dombrowski continued to excel in teaching because of, not in spite of, raising her autistic son on her own.
“I wouldn’t be the teacher I am today if it weren’t for him,” she said. “Those challenges, no matter how frustrating they have been to me, have certainly taught me invaluable lessons about teaching that I don’t think I would have gotten from the general college classrooms.”
Just a few years later, Dombrowski founded her first poetry journal. The journal was started after a group of students from her creative writing class decided the course was not enough. So Dombrowski and her students began poetry workshops every Friday night at a local coffee shop.
“I had found my strange little group of outcasts,” Dombrowski said.
Not long after, Dombrowski and her former students started “Merge,” which was a small collection of poems that they bound and sold for two dollars at First Fridays. She said they would sell out every time.
“To see how much we have all grown, and to see how much we have grown into a community and how effortlessly we have integrated with other communities downtown,” she said of her greatest accomplishment at “Merge.”
Dombrowski has gone on to edit for Four Chambers and Write On, Downtown. She cofounded the Phoenix Poetry Series in 2008 with Nadine Lockhart. Both Lockhart and Dombrowski now host the monthly events. Friday’s “Beat Night: the best minds of our generation (not yet destroyed by madness)” was the latest such event at {9} the Gallery.
Dombrowski has created a scene that merges the downtown community at large with the university. She said she makes an effort to include her students in her poetry series because they work hard and practice for events like the Beat Night.
“I feel like the poetry scene, the way that poets interact with other artists, the way poets interact with the community in general; that has really grown by leaps and bounds,” Dombrowski said.
The intensity inside {9} The Gallery had no negative effect on Dombrowski. These were the nights she worked so hard for, and it showed with her students and colleagues.
Jonathan Kistner, one of Dombrowski’s students who was at Beat Night, said that her involvement with the downtown poetry scene “makes her super knowledgeable in what she’s talking about in the classroom.”
“Poetry is her passion,” Kistner added. “She loves it.”
Lockhart, Dombrowski’s co-host, colleague and close friend, had nothing but praise for Dombrowski.
“I always call her my twin separated at birth by twenty years,” Lockhart said. “I’ve worked with her long enough that I want us to both get the same tattoo.”
When asked about Dombrowski’s involvement with poetry in downtown, Lockhart simply replied, “She lives for it.”
Lockhart also praised Dombrowski on her ability to raise her son, Brendan.
“She does that along with everything else, alone.” Lockhard said. “I admire her.”
Brendan faced some rough years growing up, being the subject of many medical tests for his heart as well as extensive therapy. Dombrowski now takes the knowledge she learned when Brendan was young to live healthily now.
“He’s the best version of himself he’s ever been, and I’m really proud of that, but I also know that I wouldn’t be the teacher I am today if it weren’t for him,” she said.
Though Brendan might be different than most 15-year-old boys, Dombrowski said her relationship with her son is stronger because of that.
“I love the fact that my son is different and quirky and weird and odd because he’ll go antiquing with me for five hours. I love that about him,” she said.
“I’m just so glad that I have a different kind of boy, a different kind of son,” she said.
Dombrowski pointed out that, undoubtedly, the challenges she faced in raising her son molded her into someone more understanding.
“As challenging as that whole road has been, I don’t really think that I would change any of it,” she said.
Contact the reporter at melissa.szenda@asu.edu.
