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.