The Night Birds is the affectionate monikor for five poets who meet regularly with our mentor poet, Sarah Maclay, to share new poems, thoughts on revision, what we’re reading, where we’re workshopping and sending submissions, where we’re stuck or flying high and basically roll like happy horses in the dust and mud and wonder of poetry. Night Birds is comprised of Barbara, Hilda, Michael, Stephany and myself. We were fortunate enough to be invited to read at The Coffee Cartel by our hosts from the Redondo Poets, Jim Doane, Larry Colker and our own, Stephany Prodromides, as a feature for their weekly gathering on Tuesday evening. Each of us have all read at different venues over the last few years, but this was our first foray as a group.

Starting from varying points we all began the evening by plowing through pre-Thanksgiving traffic, trekking south on either the 405 or Hwy 1 or winding through clogged city streets. It took Barbara and I a good hour-and-a-half of mostly bumper-to-bumper before we slid into a parking spot on Cataline Avenue, half-hour late for our dinner date with the group at the ZaZou Bistro. We quickly shed the traffic tension and relaxed into good food and even better conversation. Stephany brought her husband, Chris, Michael, his beautiful young daughter, Isabella and Hilda, her friend, Wayne, who agreed to be our official photographer for the night. Sarah had come to introduce us at the reading and proceeded (with a substantial twinkle in her eye) to pass out index cards and ask us each to write down a color, tree, flower, musical instrument, season, and clothing part, pass them to the left or right or across, setting us up to do a writing exercise for the next time we met. This kept us well occupied and filled in the gap between when we ordered and when we were served our food.

After dinner we walked two doors down to The Coffee Cartel and settled in on the scattered couches and around the small tables while the sound system was set up and people signed on for the open mic portion of the evening, which began at eight. About 8:30 the five of us were introduced as a group by Sarah (always eloquent and generous) and then as each of us took our turn reading, beginning with Hilda, then me, Michael, Barbara and Stephany. We each read about for four minutes (4-5 poems), then went one more round with a poem each at the conclusion. The crowd was friendly and appreciative. I think they might have enjoyed the variety of hearing five different voices in one feature reading. It keeps the interest level a little more acute, possibly, than hearing one poet for the full thirty minutes. Anyway, we all agreed it was a triumphant night, on a personal and poetical level. I toast my fellow Night Birds for their poetry and their panache! And to Sarah for taking time away from her incredibly demanding schedule to join and support us. And to friends and family who showed up that night and all the days and nights that we give to poetry.

Below are photos of the reading which, cosmically turned out to be in this golden, muted, slightly blurred form, possibly due to the lighting in Coffee Cartel or Wayne’s unfamiliarity with my digital camera (which I can barely operate myself). I kinda like them, actually. It gives the whole thing a surreal touch, as poetry readings most often feel like when you’re standing up there. I’ve also included a selected poem by each poet, with their kind permission.

*****

Chris (Stephany’s husband) was great moral support for all of us.

Isabelle, (Michael’s daughter) who is an artist and musician in her own right.

The cozy confines of Coffee Cartel.

Sarah introducing The Night Birds.

(Read on …)

It’s 85 degrees out today. Hard to get into the holiday spirit, though I did truck off to Trader Joes and Whole Foods to get pumpkin pies, whipped cream, yams, butter and pecans for my portion of our community potluck. I’ve been focusing on eliminating some of the richer foods in my diet so I’m not particularly excited about facing the four table spread that awaits on Thursday. I’d like to steer away from the food part of Thanksgiving and really, the historical piece of it doesn’t particularly enthrall me, although the reality that the settlers actually sat down with Native Americans and had a peaceful meal together must be saluted considering what ensued in the following two hundred years. I don’t particularly feel like counting my blessings or walking about in a delirium of gratitude (although I am blessed with a terrific life and am most, most thankful for all the love and support and prosperity).

What is it I’d really like to do this weekend? Just carry on, really, not do anything overly special. A movie would be nice—haven’t seen a new release at a theater in a few months. A walk on the beach with my husband, maybe drive south to Long Beach and take the dogs to the dog beach there—a family outing. I love to play games with friends, but not sure that’s going to happen this time as my good friend, who usually hosts the game night, is recuperating from surgery.

I’d like to write. I’ve been organizing my files, putting poems and essays into specific folders so I’ll know what stage of the process they’re in: Ready to Submit for Publication or Revisions in Progress or the sad Uncertain Fate. I’d like to get a couple of submissions out in the mail by Monday, have my essays all printed, 3-hole punched and snapped into the binder marked “Manuscript” that sits on the shelf to the right of me. Reading, yes, that’s a must, at least catch up on a couple of journals I want to leaf through, articles I’ve downloaded on publishing your manuscript, a novel that I’m two chapters into and a half-dozen other books that give me the come-over-here-and-pick-me-up eye every time I pass by them. If the weather turns and a chill should hit the air, a few clouds blow in or (hardly likely) rain should actually fall, then DVD’s, popcorn, a fire in the fireplace, leftovers warmed in the microwave, the Twilight Zone marathon or The Wizard of Oz, and hanging out on the couch at home sounds fabulous.

In truth, this holiday I’m doing a new thing. I’m going with the flow. I’m not fighting it or immersing myself in it. I’m showing up where I need to, where I want to and where the days lead me. It just feels right to do it that way. All around, I’m sure I’ll come out a lot more relaxed and more thankful when Monday rolls around. That’s the theory, anyway. I hope you have the Thanksgiving you most want and that giving and thanking swirl around you and in you, as well as every one you love.

Mushrooms

Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding.

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot’s in the door.

Sylvia Plath

How Happy is the Little Stone

How happy is the little Stone
That rambles in the Road alone,
And doesn’t care about Careers
And Exigencies never fears—
Whose Coat of elemental Brown
A passing Universe put on,
And independent as the Sun
Associates or glows alone,
Fulfilling absolute Decree
In casual simplicity—

Emily Dickinson

Last month I shared a piece I wrote about Charles Bukowski when I was in the Vermont College Adult Degree Program and thought I’d continue to post these essays/book reflections from time to time as a way for me to revisit my thoughts on the poet and their work and to see if you have any thoughts on them you’d like to put out there. Mark Doty has been a favorite poet of mine since I first started reading his work. After I heard him read and speak at the 2004 Dodge Poetry Festival he became even more dear to me because of his honest and generous nature. He always speaks of poetry in the highest terms and he seems clear that he is a servant of poetry, not the other way around. I like his playfulness and his profundity, his earthliness and spirituality. I appreciate his devotion to the art of poetry and to the art of life. To read more about him and hear him read his poems go to his website at www.markdoty.org.

Mark Doty

Source, Harper Collins, Publisher

Here’s the essay followed by a complete poem of his. If you want to read Fish R Us it is in Poems I Love.

The poems of Mark Doty in Source ring like clear bells through the heart and soul. His brilliance in language is clearly evident as he is completely competent writing in the most simple, straightforward vernacular, as well as a highly honed and studied one. One aspect of his poetry that can never be doubted is his ability to paint intensely vivid images intertwined with acutely personal perceptions. Doty writes angular poetry. There are few straight or curved lines of thought. I had to read many of his poems two or three times to tune into their rhythm and flow. Many times the leaps from one stanza to another, or one word to another, would leave me a bit baffled as in the first two stanzas of the poem, “Fish R Us”:

Clear sac
of coppery eyebrows
suspended in amnion,
not one moving –

A Mars,
composed entirely
of single lips,
each of them gleaming –

The jump from the first stanza to “A Mars” turned my logical mind around a few times before I just allowed it to be and enjoyed the thought of another planet, the concept of a totally foreign place where we have no point of reference.

(Read on …)

I was surprised to find the poem “Why Regret?” in the new volume of Galway Kinnell’s poetry. I had just been thinking about regret on Sunday while driving to the airport on my way back to L.A. from Oregon. I don’t know why it came up, maybe it was because I was in my old-stomping grounds, where I grew up and made so, so many blunders, as adolescents and teenagers have a proclivity to do. Maybe it was because I always have second thoughts after I speak in front of a crowd, immediately have a hundred different thoughts about what I could have said better, or why didn’t I say thank you to so-and-so, or tell a good joke or story, or slow down when I read, look up and smile at the audience, etc.

When the word “regret” passed through me my first thought was that it was such a small and pitiful emotion, that it was the forerunner of guilt and remorse and shame, all of which have the power to rend a human being helpless in having any kind of happiness in their lives. Oh, I’m not saying that we should bounce along doing all sorts of nasty and self-serving acts, have no sense of the harm we cause others by our actions and feel we completely deserve to get off scot-free. I fully agree it’s important to own up to where you’ve let others down, brought suffering or just plain been a jerk. You could say it comes down to semantics and I guess I see regret as another one of those heavy stones that you put in your sack of woes and drag around with you, along with resentment, hurt, grudges, etc, until you can’t walk, can hardly stand up straight anymore.

Reflection, realization and responsibility all seem to be more productive “re” words to me in healing and moving on in life. I love that Kinnell’s poem never once addresses the question of “Why Regret?” directly. He shows us everything to not regret, beautiful, tender, wild, images that fill us everyday with wonder: “ironworkers / sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable” and “the wren / and how little flesh is needed to make a song” and “pinworms as some kind of tiny batons / giving cadence to the squeezes and releases / around the downward march of debris.” If we must regret (and I believe it is possible to not), then regret only a little, only a fraction of what you have beheld in life, maybe three per-cent, at most five. For the other, the ninety-five to ninety-seven look around, inhale, reach out, swallow, lie down in a shallow stream, look into the eyes of a child, meditate so deeply you forget where you are and who you are. These are places where regret and guilt and shame do not survive. This is joy. This is the “mayfly struggling free,” the monarch’s “inner blazonry.” This is waking in the night to, “find ourselves / holding hands in our sleep.”

Galway Kinnell

Why Regret?

Didn’t you like the way the ants help
the peony globes open by eating the glue off?
Weren’t you cheered to see the ironworkers
sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable,
in a row, like starlings, eating lunch, maybe
baloney on white with fluorescent mustard?
Wasn’t it a revelation to waggle
from the estuary all the way up the river,
the kill, the pirle, the run, the rent, the beck,
the sike barely trickling, to the shock of a spring?
Didn’t you almost shiver, hearing book lice
clicking their sexual dissonance inside an old
Webster’s New International, perhaps having just
eaten of it izle, xyster, and thalassacon?
What did you imagine lies in wait anyway
at the end of the world whose sub-substance
is glaim, gleet, birdlime, slime, mucus, muck?
Forget about becoming emaciated. Think of the wren
and how little flesh is needed to make a song.
Didn’t it seem somehow familiar when the nymph
split open and the mayfly struggled free
and flew and perched and then its own back
broke open and the imago, the true adult,
somersaulted out and took flight, seeking
the swarm, mouth-arts vestigial,
alimentary canal come to a stop,
a day or hour left to find the desired one?
Or when Casanova took up the platter
of linguine in squid’s ink and slid the stuff
out the window, telling his startled companion,
“The perfected lover does not eat.”
As a child, didn’t you find it calming to imagine
pinworms as some kind of tiny batons
giving cadence to the squeezes and releases
around the downward march of debris?
Didn’t you glimpse in the monarchs
what seemed your own inner blazonry
flapping and gliding, in desire, in the middle air?
Weren’t you reassured to think these flimsy
hinged beings, and then their offspring,
and their offspring’s offspring, could
navigate, working in shifts, all the way to Mexico,
to the exact plot, perhaps the very tree,
by tracing the flair of the bodies of ancestors
who fell in this same migration a year ago?
Doesn’t it outdo the pleasure of the brilliant concert
to wake in the night and find ourselves
holding hands in our sleep?

Galway Kinnell
Strong Is Your Hold
Houghton Mifflin Company, Publishers

On Thursday in my home town of Redmond, Oregon a high school auditorium will be dedicated to my father, Clyde Moore. He is 85 and lives in Portland with my mother. He was the band teacher in the Redmond school system for 28 years, teaching in grades five through twelve. In a few short years he put our little town of 5000 residents on the map by developing one of the top bands in the state. He dedicated his life to the kids and to music. He spent evenings in the spring and summer marching the band through the town’s streets in preparation for the County Fair, Spud Festival and often the Rose Parade in Portland where we wore our military style uniforms of maroon with gold trim. There was a Christmas Concert in December and a Pops Concert in the spring. There was a dance band and marching and pep bands for the football and basketball games. We competed individually at recitals all over the state and as a group went to band competitions and festivals all over the country, including Hawaii, Canada and Mexico.

Dad was big on practicing and being one of his kids I was expected to tow the line. I played the flute in the concert band, piccolo and sometimes cymbals in the marching band. My older brother played the clarinet and saxophone and was by far the best musician in the family. My sisters and I did the best we could and were fairly competitive in vying for the “chairs” in the section that we played. I look back on it now and I suppose I would have been better suited to sing in the choir than play an instrument, but the choir was the ugly stepchild to band in those days, and of course, my father would not have heard of it. Band was his life and therefore our life. It was important that we play and it was doubly important that we play well. It was a tough row to hoe at times but, as time has the ability to do, I see now where there were so many gifts in being in the band, most of all it was being a part of something—something that brought these rowdy, headstrong, and terribly insecure teenagers together in a common endeavor. We were expected to excel, to show up, dress up and damn well do our best out there. We were part of the band, part of his band.

God, I haven’t thought about it in so long. I can see the band room at the high school; the practice and instrument rooms the windows along the north side facing the street where yellow school buses loaded and unloaded twice a day, the tiered risers set in a semi-circle with the director’s podium at their center, my father’s glassed in office in the corner, the smell of the cleaning oil, the squeak of tennis shoes and scrape of chairs on the brown tiled floor. I remember my flute in it’s felt lined case, pulling it out, twisting the three pieces together, blowing into the cold mouthpiece, starting with C and running up and down the scales, my fingers knowing exactly when to lift and when to fall. I remember turning to Carol or Betsy in first chair and leaning in to them, tuning to their C, the whole band tuning, woodwinds, brass, percussion tapping and rumbling in the background. I remember the rap-rap of the baton on the music stand, looking up to see my six-foot father raising his right arm in an arc, the look of authority in his eyes and posture, the look that bodes no monkey-business, that lets every one in that room know exactly who’s in charge and we are about to begin and you better stop goofing off and pay attention
while you’re in his classroom.

I know it was impossible then, but now when I go back and look up from my chair in the front row, brush away my drooping bangs and teenage angst and rebellion, when I look now at the imposing figure of this man, my father, my teacher, I see so clearly the heart and soul of someone who loved what he did, gave everything he had to impart courage and confidence in his students and I if I listen closely I am sure I will hear softly flowing out of his cloaked heart and into all of us sitting there, all of us who would be forever changed by him, the rhythmic, melodic, and entrancing wonder that is music.

My parents in San Diego right after they were married and he was still a Navy man.

This must have been in the fifties when I was still in diapers.

The concert band. If you get your microscope out you can see I’m the third flute on the left, first row (after Betsy & Nancy, of course).

The Pep Band at a basketball game.

At the football game–a page out of my junior yearbook.

*****

Here’s a poem I wrote this summer on his 85th birthday when I was at our house in Sisters. It came while I was looking out the window at the tall grass moving in the breeze.

Spirito

In slanted light long grasses sway, bow
to the east, a swirling concert of blades—

flats and sharps, tempo and cadence, allegro,
andante, pianissimo, piano, oh, insistent forte,

intrepid crescendo, glide of diminuendo,
flaming sky cantata slurs to lengthy shadows.

And the winds rest and the woods fall dark.
Still the roots play on…dolce, dolce, dolce.

Last night when I was dozing off to sleep with a book in my hands, trying to read just one more line, get through at least five pages before giving over to sleep, I had this realization that I was feeling content. The whole day I had this feeling, though I had not named it. It was one of those days in L.A. where the morning haze never did burn off and it was that kind of overcast where no rain is going to happen but everything is muffled; colors, sounds, movements. I spent most of the day in the house, only went out in the afternoon to run to the pet store for dog food, the beauty shop to pick up some facial cleanser and Trader Joes for the macaroni and cheese I just had to have for dinner. I didn’t do anything special during the day, though everything I did felt special in some way or another. Even paying the bills or watching TV later on in the evening–taking in a few minutes of a Laker game and liking the look of the team this year, actually considering going to a game and cheering them on (which I haven’t felt since Magic & Kareem hung up their tennies).

It was elusive, really, where that contentment originated, but I think most likely it was a response to all the traveling I’ve done in the last few months and the appreciation deep in my bones, to being home, to being secure and comfortable–an appreciation for all that I have and not wanting to be anywhere else or with anyone else at that moment. Everything was just as it was supposed to be. I was just as I was supposed to be. It was sweet to drift off to sleep with these thoughts in my mind. I thanked the comforter on my bed, the green water glass on the nightstand, the carpet on the floor, pictures on the wall of my son and my teacher and the Golden Temple in India. It was all right. Perfect. In harmony. Ah, to be human in these moments is such a blessing and helps me understand the other side, those dark nights of the soul, so much more. They exist side by side. Just as there are dragons and goblins and mice that come into my life to shake lose what I hold onto and open me up to what I fear, there are those moments so soft and tender where no one is witness; those moments when life is poetry and poetry is all around, not in words but in essence, in vibration, in every cell and molecule in and around me.

********

Ten Thousand Flowers

Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn,
a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.
If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things,
this is the best season of your life.

Wu-Men

***

Why Log Truck Drivers Rise Earlier Than Students of Zen

In the high seat,
before-dawn dark,

Polished hubs gleam
And the shiny diesel stack
Warms and flutters
Up the Tyler Road grade
To the logging on Poorman Creek.
Thirty miles of dust.

There is no other life.

Gary Snyder

***

The Perfume of Flowers!…

The perfume
of flowers! A haw

drops such odour
it stops me

in the wall
of its fall. Love

arrests

Lime-trees
saturate

the night. We walk
in it

On a path jonquils
fill

the air. Love
is a scent.

Charles Olson

***

West Wall

In the unmade light I can see the world
as the leaves brighten I see the air
the shadows melt and the apricots appear
now that the branches vanish I see the apricots
from a thousand trees ripening in the air
they are ripening in the sun along the west wall
apricots beyond number are ripening in the daylight.

Whatever was there
I never saw those apricots swaying in the light
I might have stood in orchards forever
without beholding the day in the apricots
or knowing the ripeness of the lucid air
or touching the apricots in your skin
or tasting in your mouth the sun in the apricots.

W. S. Merwin

***

from
Vacillation

My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.

While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.

William Butler Yeats

Artwork from AllPoster.com