Schoolroom lore has it that English mathematician, physicist, astronomer (and later, Sir) Isaac Newton came up with the idea of earth’s gravitational whirl after being hit by a falling apple.

Educator, poet, guitarist and emerging sketch artist Gary Silva said last week that becoming Napa County’s poet laureate occurred in a similar, Newtonian-like manner.

“It just sort of fell on my head,” he joked during a conversation at the upper campus of Napa Valley College before heading off to a sketching class. “It was magical, really a surprise.”

This past spring Silva stepped into the shoes of the county’s first poet laureate, Dorothy Lee Hansen, a published poet and former Napa school teacher who served two terms in the honorary position.

“The timing was perfect,” said Silva, who retired from Napa Valley College in June after 20 years of teaching creative writing and the occasional poetry workshop.

Once he got through what he calls “the throes of retiring” — mostly writing letters, clarifying health insurance coverage, cleaning out decades of office detritus and finding a home for 15 boxes of books — Silva was ready to apply some thought to this unexpected “gift.”

“One of the reasons I couldn’t resist it was I had promised myself when I retired I’d do some things for poetry in the community,” he said. “I’d get some readings going. Poets need to get together, they need to know each other ... The poet laureate position allows me to do all the things I already wanted to do. It’s like putting a label on something already there.”

Hidden poets

So far Silva has interviewed several of the county’s “hidden poets” for columns appearing in the Napa Valley Register. His subjects to date include newspaperman and actor Michael Waterson, East Bay Municipal Utilities District wildlife biologist Roger Hartwell, NVC assistant professor of English Lisa Yanover and teacher, naturalist and volunteer Bale Grist Mill miller George Stratton of St. Helena.

Last month Silva and the Napa Valley College Writing Center collaborated on the first in what Silva hopes will be a series of invitational poetry readings spotlighting Bay Area poets (NVC president Chris McCarthy was in the distinguished lineup). If Silva can find the appropriate locations he plans to have readings in every Napa County community.

Also on Silva’s to-do list, more involvement with the schools as well as a poetry/poster contest, which he envisions as a visual and verbal arts collaboration with the results displayed locally.

Wherefore it began

Silva, 62, said his own interest in poetry started in a high school Shakespeare class taught by a track coach who went on to become a Shakespeare specialist.

The groundwork for writing compact lines, however, could very easily have been laid by Silva’s childhood visits to his dad’s Western Union telegraph office in Hayward.

“He’d let me do the ‘telegrams,’” Silva recalled. “They had these little sticky tapes, strips really. I just loved that. I thought it was so great, so concise. I was programmed before high school I guess.”

But it was Buzz Ranier’s class at Carmel High School that got Silva writing sonnets and poems and contributing to the school’s literary magazine. Silva developed the habit of writing poems in his head on his way home from school — heavy-handed “statement poems,” he admitted. “Profound things that weren’t really profound.”

At the time Silva was also interested in science and his dad thought that optometry was the career for him. Silva might have gone along with it — he was good in science — but then he read “Hamlet.” It struck a chord and Silva changed his mind. He set his sights instead on becoming an English major, maybe even a teacher.

Learned to teach

As he recounted his 44-year path from high school to poet laureate, Silva said that he “stumbled into” major life decisions. He went to Monterey Peninsula college because he hadn’t gotten around to filling out college applications until it was too late. But once there he came across a number of memorable teachers, including one who played flute in the annual Bach festival. Then Silva went to Fresno State College — because a buddy was going there — and wandered into a poetry class he thought he’d like to take. Turned out it was taught by Philip Levine, later a Pulitzer Prize winner and now one of the most respected of the nation’s poets.

Although Levine was just starting as a teacher, he was tough, Silva said. “Very tough. He didn’t pull any punches. He’d stand up in front of the class and read your poem to everybody and rip it apart, throw in on the table saying, ‘This is junk.’ He was so dramatic. He challenged me.”

Silva said he was determined to write a poem Levine would praise. He did, but it took two years.

Silva went on to earn a teaching credential, taught high school in Fresno, Seaside and Merced, all the while working on a masters degree at Fresno State University. He was also teaching guitar — something he studied seriously in high school and college — and taking graduate-level writing seminars. He followed up the first master’s degree with a master’s in fine arts at UC Irvine, specializing in creative writing.

In the 1980s, Silva set out for the University of Utah to work toward a Ph.D. in creative writing. In the four years he was there he taught college level composition, technical writing, business writing and creative writing, studied literature and learned to survive Utah winters. But he didn’t return to the West Coast with a doctorate.

Instead he took a teaching position with Napa Valley College, met his future wife Eve-Anne Wilkes (now chair of the college’s fine and performing arts division, and director of vocal studies), and was adopted by two feral cats, Bart and Belle.

Poets tell stories

Not surprisingly, Silva is an accomplished teller of tales. But then, so are most poets, he said.

“A lot of poems are like little short stories, little fictions,” he said. “I tell my students that. If they don’t know what to write about, tell a little story but try not to get too like a Hallmark card.

“I think people put poetry into a whole separate category,” he added. “For them it’s a mysterious thing, like a Monarch butterfly. They don’t see poems are just stories.”

Thinking about his own poetic jottings, Silva said if it weren’t for paper, “I probably wouldn’t write poetry. When I sit down with a piece of paper and look at the blank page it starts to come to me.”

In the his early writing days, however, he ignored the music of the written word, he said, “I just wanted the imagery. I wanted to paint the picture and tell the stories. Then I saw I needed to get more music and balance by using alliteration and echoing.”

Silva’s explanation of why he is drawn to poetry is almost a poem itself.

“A poem can do almost everything. It’s visual, it’s aural, it’s got an idea and a concept, and it usually tells a story. It fits my brain like a good suit,” he laughed, “or a pair of New Balance shoes. It’s so wonderful to read a poem.”

“I guess, “ he added, as he explored his love of poetry, “the main thing is in reading a poem you’re able to get into another person’s mind. It seems like the most intense way of getting into what someone else is thinking. It’s like a painting, or a photo, or maybe like a movie.  It is not just the ideas and thoughts on the surface, it’s the images and the stories and the symbols and the sounds — there is so much depth — and you can exit easily. Poems can be read very quickly then read again and treasured.”

And poems can be revealing, Silva said, quoting E.M. Forster, “‘How can I know what I think till I see what I say?’”

“When we write poems we are working on what’s going on inside us, we find out who we are ... I think that’s what the arts are for.”

Silva has been surprised by his new role as poet laureate. A while back he pictured himself “hanging out” in cafes, writing. Instead he is considering numerous ways to shine the spotlight on poetry and poets in the Napa Valley.

When he first took the two-year job in May, he thought he had plenty of time to accomplish the projects he has in mind, he said. “But when you start exploring, it doesn’t seem like enough time at all.”