I returned to L.A. late last night. It was a long travel day and it was so, so good to sleep in my own comfy bed last night. Thursday, Friday, Saturday at the Poetry Festival were full to the brim with workshops, readings, presentations, more readings, panel discussions, an evening of dance and poetry jamming, and wrapping up on Sunday morning with the final workshop session for the participants. To tell you the truth I’m still a little woozy from all the travel and not in a particularly clear space to evaluate my experience there. What I do know is that the exposure to the featured poets, to their readings, the craft talks and panels and working with Mark Doty was really an opportunity to expand my own poems and ways of making them.

Instead of waxing on (at this point, I’m likely to fall asleep over the keyboard if I go on too long) I’ll post some photos with commentary as a way of playing tour guide.

This is the outside of the Crest Theater, one of several buildings on the grounds of the Old School Square. The theater is restored and has the original seats, a balcony and was a perfect venue for the readings and panels.

The Festival sponsors a poetry contest for high school students and awards cash prizes for the top one and the runners up. The students read their poems Saturday morning and this is a group pic with the featured poets.

Me reading in the Open Mic for the participants on Saturday morning. We could read one poem of one page length. And, even with that restriction the reading went an hour over the allotted time. The poems were quite good and it was just nice to give everyone a chance to get up and share one of their pieces with the larger group as we really only heard poems of those twelve poets in our workshops during the rest of the week.

Gini reciting her poem by heart! 

This was one of the highlights of the program for me and for many of the other participants who I spoke with. It was a two-hour panel discussion entitled "Beloved and Influential Poems." Each poet on the panel took a few minutes to read a poem that they particularly loved and to talk about why it meant so much to them. The following are the poets (from left to right in the photo) and the poems they discussed:

Mark Doty: A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island by Frank O’Hara

Thomas Lux: The Air Plant  Grand Cayman by Hart Crane

Heather McHugh: Vulnerability by Yannis Ritsos

Alan Shapiro: The Oxen by Thomas Hardy

Quincy Troupe: Only Death by Pablo Neruda

Ellen Bryant Voight: Sailing to Byzantium by William Butler Yeats

 The Doty workshop group gathered round the table. We each brought two poems that we wanted to get critiqued. We also were assigned a couple of exercises to do, if we chose to, and read these on the last day to see how they came out. We also each had a half-hour private conference with our poet-mentor. I used my time to get some feedback on a troublesome poem, ask a couple of philosophical "poetry" questions and get some reading suggestions.

Here’s Mark signing a book. I was so frustrated the night of his and Alan Shapiro’s reading because my camera batteries went dead and I couldn’t take any pics. It was a terrific reading by both of them. If you’re interested in getting any of the recordings from the four readings you can contact the Palm Beach Poetry Festival and order CDs from this year, as well as the last two. I highly recommend getting both the readings and the panel discussion recordings.

A last look down the hallway of my room at the Colony Hotel. Love those walls. Maybe I’ll be back again one of these years.

It’s been raining and the temperture dropped 20 degrees today. They came around to the rooms to check if the heaters were working. It might get down to 40 tonight, they said. I don’t have a heater in my room. I arrived Monday night after an uneventful trip (if that can be said of any flight these days) and checked into the Colony Hotel, a restored historic hotel on Atlantic Avenue in the revitalized downtown of Del Rey Beach. It’s brightly painted, with whirring ceiling fans and a quaint "lift" that has the accordian door and needs an attendant to get you up to your floor. They play jazz and blues in the lobby and the front doors are always open to the sidewalk seating where folks sit and watch the world go by. My room has most of the modern conveniences: king size firm mattress, TV w/cable and sometimes the wireless internet works (right now I’m in the lobby where it always works). The bathroom is tiny–barely enough room to sit down or slide into the shower stall, with the pedestal sink in the bedroom. It works and I’ve grown rather fond of the place, though the heat for the first couple of days was a bit oppressive and turning on the window air conditioner evoked a lot of rumbling and roaring.

Okay, enough about the environs. On to the poetry. Tuesday night we had an informal gathering as a whole and then broke into our respective workshop groups, meeting for an hour to introduce ourselves and set up the protocol for the ensuing three workshop sessions. Our fearless leader is Mark Doty, who immediately made us all feel at ease and welcomed and supported as he asked us to go around and say our names and what we were struggling with in our writing. At one point we were talking about how to get all the elements in a poem to jive and he pulled out a pencil and drew a triangle on the butcher paper covering our conference table. At one corner he wrote "Intellectual" at the other "Material" and the other "Emotional." These are the three fundamental elements of a poem and although they need all be present in a poem, they don’t necessarily need to be in balance. It was a perspective that helped me evaluate mine, and others, poems in a new light. We proceeded to pass out our poems to each other and agreed that we would each have two poems "workshopped" over our three sessions. It was an early night so I went back to my room and made my comments on the poems for the next day and finally got to sleep around 12:30. (I can’t seem to shake the west coast time schedule.)

Wednesday we had our group workshop in the morning from 9-12. From the hotel it’s a ten minute walk to the Old School Square where the Festival is being held, along cobbled walkways, past a dozen cafes with patio seating, souvenier shops with pink flamingos and embroidered pillows and brightly colored "beachwear" hanging in the display windows. The morning went great and we were all given a writing exercise to chew on, which I haven’t been able to get my head around quite yet.

 Building across the street from the Old School Square.

In the evening we put on our party clothes and headed over to the 1926 gymnasium for the "Gala" with music, drink and a delicious catered dinner. Following this was the first of four readings by the featured poets. This one was with Dorianne Laux and Quincy Troupe, both dynamic and engaging in their own way. Unfortunately my camera battery went dead and I hadn’t brough any replacements so there were no pics, but I’m sure I’ll have other chances. This morning from 10-12 was a craft talk with Stephen Dunn and Dorianne Laux in the old theater, which is where the readings are held as well.

The week is planned out so that there are events open to the public,
such as the readings and craft talks, while the workshops are for the
participants. Miles Coon is the founder and spiritual heart of the
festival, which is in its third year. It really is amazing the talented
poets he has attracted to teach here. Miles is always smiling and
running, but he always, always stops when poems are being read or
someone has a question or to lend a hand wherever he sees the need.
He’s got a great staff and so far all is running smoothly. Tonight’s
another reading from 8-10 with Thomas Lux and Heather McHugh. I’ll be
sure and have my camera ready to go.

The old gymnasium as the Gala was just getting started.

Talking poems at our table. 

I met Gini at Squaw Valley this summer. Yoga teacher in San Francisco and a great poet.

 
Me, looking posed and (I hope) somewhat poised.

Dorianne Laux and Stephen Dunn answering questions. 

Natasha (front) and Marilyn–fellow Los Angeleans. I met Marilyn at Squaw Valley this summer. 

Not only did my husband bring me roses, he arranged them, tied bows around the vase, took a photo and gave me that, as well. They look a little disheveled, like they’re jockeying for position, while their stems slide along the bottom of the vase, causing them to tilt, scrunch or hang awkwardly out the side. I feel a little like this myself on a day-to-day basis trying to corral the items strewn across and piled upon my desk, tend to the phone calls, errands and chores that accumulate expoentially if I don’t line them up and knock them down regularly. Inevitably when I slack off, well, that’s when my feet start sliding, a deep fog rolls into my frontal lobe and the ascending piles begin to rock and then slither helter-skelter across the desktop or onto the floor, crashing down upon the smooth surfaces of my mental order. But, all good analogies have to end somewhere and unlike these roses, this disarray does not smell sweet to the nose, brush the cheek softly or light up a room with color. Telephone bills (no one just has "a" telephone bill anymore), grocery lists starting with beets and ending with toothpaste, and insurance claim forms to be submitted, rarely inspire poems, (although I can’t say they never have) and any tears shed over them will be surely be ones of frustration, not the sweet tenderness that rose petals evoke when strewn upon a path.

It’s been a week and they are still in their vase, having never fully opened, rusting around the edges and the water in the vase has gone murky. I will leave Monday for Florida and don’t have the heart to toss them. I’ll leave that to my husband. He brought them into our world. He can usher them out.

Here are a couple of "rose" poems taken off the web at Poets.org. (To see publications by these poets click on their names.)

Go, lovely rose!
by Edmund Waller

Go, lovely rose!
Tell her that wastes her time and me
  
That now she knows,
When I resemble her to thee,
How sweet and fair she seems to be.

    Tell her that’s young,
And shuns to have her graces spied,
    That hadst thou sprung
In deserts, where no men abide,
Thou must have uncommended died.

    Small is the worth
Of beauty from the light retired;
    Bid her come forth,
Suffer herself to be desired,
And not blush so to be admired.

    Then die! that she
The common fate of all things rare
    May read in thee;
How small a part of time they share
That are so wondrous sweet and fair!

********

The Separate Rose: I
by Pablo Neruda
Translated by William O’Daly

Today is that day, the day that carried
a desperate light that since has died.
Don’t let the squatters know:
let’s keep it all between us,
day, between your bell
and my secret.

Today is dead winter in the forgotten land
that comes to visit me, with a cross on the map
and a volcano in the snow, to return to me,
to return again the water
fallen on the roof of my childhood.
Today when the sun began with its shafts
to tell the story, so clear, so old,
the slanting rain fell like a sword,
the rain my hard heart welcomes.

You, my love, still asleep in August,
my queen, my woman, my vastness, my geography
kiss of mud, the carbon-coated zither,
you, vestment of my persistent song,
today you are reborn again and with the sky’s
black water confuse me and compel me:
I must renew my bones in your kingdom,
I must still uncloud my earthly duties.

This week I included this audio recording in the Poetry Evolution E-letter. It is from Poetry Speaks: Elise Paschen & Rebekah Presson Mosby, Editors, Published by Sourcebooks, Inc. 

Silken Tent by Robert Frost

Today is my husband and my 34th wedding anniversary. Married January 13, 1973. Seems I’m talking about someone else when I consider how long ago that really was. I’m listening right now to one of my favorite songs from that era, "The Weight" by the Band. It brings friends and places flooding through my heart, a lump in my throat. A certain song, a scent, an old photo–they can transport me into that "me" who still inhabits my soul, who dared to take the road less traveled, who fell in love at first sight, who, even now watches him and wonders how she was so blessed, how they have survived all these years, how they both still believe in the power of love, the triumph of the spirit.

The following is a short piece I wrote a couple of years ago. It will be reprinted as a part of a book on marriage by Shakti Parwha K. Khalsa. I’ve also included a poem I wrote recently and a recording of "our" song. Love to you all!
 

Why Stay Married? 

There is no making sense of why he and I still eat at the same breakfast table, sleep on the same mattress, work out plans for next year and the one after that. Oh, it is totally comprehensible why we first fell together. He was cute, blond with a bit of a mustache, wearing blue jean overalls, a vibe of farm kid mixed with rebel-without-a-cause. Irresistible, at least to me, who hadn’t had much luck in love since letting the high school boyfriend go, our paths set in opposing directions. Yes, at 19 there were hormones involved (little did we know), but, as my numerologist said many years later, the two of us have been linked together for many lifetimes. Brother and sister, or perhaps I was his mother or he the master to my slave. Nevertheless, she says, we are as bound as four hands tightly crossed and held.

We didn’t know each other those first few years of marriage. We hardly knew ourselves. Like a genie in a bottle, there was so much we kept inside, with only smoky whiffs escaping when one of us tried to pry the lid off just a bit. It wasn’t that we didn’t want to know each other. We just didn’t know we needn’t to know. We were busy. We had to maintain a home, pay the bills, go to yoga class, work more than one job at a time (cleaning offices, running a sandwich shop, planting fledgling trees, hauling garbage from summer campgrounds). We had to get-by and move-on. We took a trip to Los Angeles that lasted 28 years. He went to chiropractic school, finished in 1982 and is still showing up every day at the office. I worked, put him through school, raised a child (through potty training, the India program, rebellious teens and world-wide wanderings), as well as searched for my own place in the planetary scheme. We were busy. Did I already say that?

We have a lot of differences. I want to vacation in the Caribbean, lay on the beach, read and contemplate the turning planet. He plans a weekend at Yosemite in the dead of winter to stay in the Awahnee Lodge (#23 on his 100-things-I-must-do-before-I-die list). I want to visit museums, shop, play cards and read poetry. He spends Sunday afternoons watching the Yankees or Raiders, buys a collapsible kayak, periodically proposes we sell our house, get a motor home and roam the country for a few years.

Is it like this in all marriages? I have no idea. I’ve never been married to anyone else. I have seen those TV shows where real-life couples ride bikes together in Belize or hoist the sails in their sailboat named “Forever,” or behold Greek sculpture all the while holding hands, smiling into each other’s shining faces and declaring, “We do everything together. We can’t imagine it any other way.” I really can’t imagine it that way. We do have our joint bank account, IRA’s and local mailing address. We drive the same make of car and get teary eyed when we hear the Moody Blues play our song. We like to go for long drives and talk about moving to a place where pine trees shed three-pronged needles and the sky has a million stars. After we meditate together our voices soften, our hands reach to massage and we laugh about silly things.

You try to make it work, beyond all the odds—two people, born at a different latitude and longitude, separate species of the human race, clumping along on two feet, hearts beating at different rates, each with their own enormous brain full of god-only-knows-what kind of rot designed to tear you away from each other, to make you stand up and scream to the other, “Me, me! It’s about ME!”

Maybe we’ve given up on trying to mold each other to our own specifications. Maybe now we prefer that the other feel safe, supported. We now dare to reveal our fears and find that they are not as far apart as we had at once believed. Chasing the truth in oneself, in the other or in the marriage is an elusive, snakelike creature. At one moment it looks hard and fast, the next it slithers across your consciousness sideways and you see its fluidity, its ability to shapeshift right before your eyes.

My husband and I have not solved all our problems, but we are forgetting more and more that we have them. We are not perfect, but the picture of perfect has grown murky, taken on a surrealistic pattern and tone. We aren’t sure if we are “in love” anymore. What we are sure of is that on a winter day over 30 years ago we vowed to hold the hand of the other, even should our heads roll, and though our heads have rolled this way and that a thousand times over the years, one of us has always reached out a hand to catch it and return it to the other. And then we have walked on. We will always walk on.

Our song. For years I thought it was "Knights" not "nights." I still like to hear it that way.

As you can see I’ve been taking it easy the last couple of weeks, giving my hands and eyes and head a rest from the computer and allowing myself time to just hang out, which can be ever so irritating until you get used to the idea you don’t have to be online and on top of everything every minute. The holidays evoke mixed emotions for me (ring any bells?) so I usually go into the major ones with caution, wary that I’m prone to the cynic’s point of view and that watching It’s a Wonderful Life or Elf might send me over the edge into the black night of judgment about materialism and fantasy and how all the rituals we so piously deign as originating with the Christian tradition have their roots in pagan Solstice celebrations or Norse mythology or Wall Street entrepeuners. My husband is the festive one in the family and every year gets out the handtruck and swivels the potted sequoia tree into the house, pulls the plastic bins full of ornaments out of the garage and festoons not only the tree, but every flat surface in the living, dining and sun rooms with angels, bells, drums, reindeer, Santas, ribbons and stockings in green, red, gold and silver. I’ve learned to surrender to it all. He loves it. It makes him happy and truthfully, it does serve as a reminder that life is joyous and playful, if you take the time to see it that way.

We stayed in L.A. this year. In the past we’ve used this break from work to travel to India, Bali, Costa Rica, Yosemite, Oregon and other getaways, where we can reflect on the year just passed, make plans for the year ahead and just get out of the magnetic field of the eight million people zipping around Southern California. The weather was superb and the vibe pretty mellow around the city this year. We went on a couple of hikes up in the Hollywood Hills at Runyon Canyon, where dogs are king and can run off leash. We had a delicious Greek dinner at Taverna Tony’s in Malibu with the staff of our chiropractic office; Jane, Lori & Dr. Theo. We didn’t make it to any movies, though we watched Pirates of the Carribean Part 2 and the aforementioned, Elf, on video. Our son, Sat Sangeet, came down from San Francisco for three days over New Years and we played a couple of games of Scrabble, had breakfast with friends after one of our Runyon excursions and while my husband went to the Rose Parade he and I took a long walk to the parkand back then hung out, watching the parade on TV then the Rose Bowl game.

It was relaxing. I found myself letting go of "the push," allowing for flow to happen.  There is no urgency. There is no deadline. The only deadline is when I die and really that’s just a transition to another energy field, so why not take it easy, be kind, look into the eyes of not only my dear ones, but every ONE? What’s all this desperate scrambling about? Why can’t things just unfold? It’s like taking this hard, hard clay of determination and driven-ness and pouring water over it until it softens, softens and can be gently molded into a work or art, something smooth and curved, something that never would have come forth had it been kept in a clenched ball, not allowed to breathe, to open up. 

I go into 2007 knowing that there are still many doors in my psyche that need to be pried open so that the fresh air of gratitude and joy can flow into the dusty and musty corners of old thinking. In my writing, my thoughts, spoken words and deeds I am ready for more beauty, grace and kindness to be present. In each of us there is the most profound wonder that exists–that unique combination and permutation of time, space and circumstances that is who we are, the only one that ever was and ever will be, who is uniquely me and perfectly you. It’s pretty heady stuff when you think about it. Seems like a big waste if you don’t run with it, or swim, or fly with it. So, for you my prayer is that each minute of each hour of each day of the coming year be a bounty of blessings, whether they look or taste or feel like it, they always are and may you look in the mirror and love that crooked nose, wrinkles around the eyes, the funny way your mouth tilts. It’s all perfect, simply because it is.

The Lake Shrine in Pacific Palisades at the Self Realization Fellowship Center 

Holiday Dinner with (left to right) Lori, Jane, Me, Hubbie & Dr. Theo 

The Family at Runyon Canyon 

Breakfast at Hugo’s in Hollywood with friends. 

 
Sleeping in and snuggling with Yoshi. 

*********** 

A Man in His Life

A man in his life has no time to have
Time for everything.
He has no room to have room
For every desire. Ecclesiastes was wrong to claim that.

A man has to hate and love all at once,
With the same eyes to cry and to laugh
With the same hands to throw stones
And to gather them,
Make love in war and war in love.

And hate and forgive and remember and forget
And order and confuse and eat and digest
What long history does
In so many years.

A man in his life has no time.
When he loses he seeks
When he finds he forgets
When he forgets he loves
When he loves he begins forgetting.

And his soul is knowing
And very professional,
Only his body remains an amateur
Always. It tries and fumbles.
He doesn’t learn and gets confused,
Drunk and blind in his pleasures and pains.

In autumn, he will die like a fig,
Shriveled, sweet, full of himself.
The leaves dry out on the ground,
And the naked branches point
To the place where there is time for everything.

Yehuda Amichai
Yehuda Amichai: A Life of Poetry: 1948-1994
HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.