The day after the Thanksgiving weekend I took off for my own private holiday, driving east on the 10 freeway past Riverside and San Bernardino, past the hills of Palm Springs to the dusty little town of Desert Hot Springs and the Sagewater Inn & Spa, where the doors are painted turquoise, the linens are European, you’re handed a pound of Gramma B’s coffee cake when you check in and aahhh, the mineral water flows into the Jacuzzi at 104 degrees. The last two years I’ve made reservations to come out here, after a recommendation from a friend, and have cancelled each time, either for financial or scheduling reasons. This time I was determined to get out here. I knew I’d need it after my usual bout of “holiday fever” over the Thanksgiving weekend. (We won’t go there for now.)

I brought three suitcases. The first had my clothes and toiletries. The second was really a plastic filing case, but I used it to tote all the food I’d need for three days, as each room has its own kitchenette. In the third suitcase was all my reading material: The New Yorker from two weeks ago with an article on Robert Hass & Mark Strand’s new books of poems, the Sunday L.A. Times crossword puzzle and Book Review (with an article on Bukowski), literary journals (FIELD, Willow Springs, Pool, The Ledge), my trusty Moleskine journal, a spiral notebook with notes from all my poetry workshops and, of course, a plethora of books: The Universal Myths by Alexander Eliot and Joseph Campbell (for an upcoming workshop with David St. John), Handbook of Poetic Forms, by Ron Padgett, The Situation of Poetry by Robert Pinsky, Robert Hass’  and Mark Strand’s new books, They Came to See a Poet: Selected Poems by Tadeusz Rozewicz, Hapax: Poems by A.E. Stallings and The Paper Rose (a new book of poems by my Vermont College professor, Tom Absher). Oh, a few more, but enough is enough.

It takes awhile to settle into not doing your routine. I’ve had the urge several times today to go into town and find a bookstore or a grocery store or go on some inane errand that will get me out of my room, away from the very thing I came here to do. Funny how that is. I do have to ease into it and I find two things very helpful: water and television. No, not at the same time—that could be dangerous. Taking baths, showers, dipping in the Jacuzzi, drinking lots of water (which is fantastic here), all these things get me relaxed and unwound from the city. TV, well, it’s a distraction and one that has to be carefully monitored or it could end up consuming inordinate amounts of precious reading and writing time. I find them (distractions) valuable as process time, beyond the very useful ones of sleeping, walking and meditating, which all fall under the healthy category, whereas blobbing out in front of the tube is purely indulgent and necessary in allowing myself freedom to simply enjoy without guilt.

I’ve been here a little over 24 hours and have another 40 or so to go before the two hour drive back home to L.A. I’ve gotten through a couple of journals, organized some poems for submissions, read that New Yorker article and gotten half-way through the crossword puzzle. Dinner is over, I’ve watched enough TV for the day, so it must be time for a soak in the hot tub, where, who knows, under those magnificent stars, inhaling the good, clean, dry air, any number of transcendent poems may arrive to fill up the rest of my evening. If not, I’m sure the faces of the books strewn across the white duvet will be vying for my attention to fill up a few minutes of these precious hours in the desert.

Pictures and a Desert poem by Tom Absher below. Also, if you are interested in any of the books or journals I mention, just roll over the title and click for a link to more info. 

Courtyard outside of my room. It’s been windy today, as you can see.

View of the mountains with the whirling windmills below.

Wood carving of a Chief at a nearby Museum

 
 There are 15-20 inns and spas in this area of Desert Hot Springs. They run the range of funky to sublime. This one is the former, but I do love the sign!

THE DESERT

Many people have walked
into one desert or another
to find their gods, like Arabia,
east of the Euphrates, an unholy
violence of heat, sand and those
salamanders which thrive
on fire from the sun, because
there is so little else to eat.

If one seeks to hear the voice
of a deity it might be found there,
where sky overwhelms the land,
where there is no sound
but the pulse of blood in the ear.

It has been said that divinity
does not speak in thunder clouds
or a whirlwind, or from the bottom
of a well, but in the presence
of animals, or the voice of a child,
ordinary, soft-spoken words, sounds,
musings, a question,
a voice so small one must go
into the desert to hear it,
to believe it.

I have heard it is a voice that addresses us every day
in one form or another,
but we never notice,
perhaps like the voice Abraham heard
before he set out for the Promised Land,
that place overrunning with milk and honey
and war, endless war—
words first heard so faintly
so close by, he might have thought
they were from the salamander
beneath his feet:

Return here often and listen for me.

Tom Absher
The Paper Rose
Plain View Press, Publishers
 

Last Thursday I went to a reading at the downtown L.A. Public Central Library through ALOUD, which is a wonderful series of readings, discussions and performances held in the Mark Taper Auditorium (beautiful venue, great sound) and presented by the Library Foundation of Los Angeles. If you live in the L.A. area and want to get on the email list for upcoming events you can go to the Aloud website and sign up. There were three readings I would have liked to have gone to on that same night, but chose to see Kinnell, as he doesn’t get out to the West Coast often and I hadn’t seen him read before. I was supposed to go with a friend but she had to cancel at the last minute. I decided to go ahead and brave the rush hour traffic on the 10 freeway and left early enough not to be stressed about being late. I took a few minutes to walk around the library and snap a few pictures. The library was built in 1926 and was extensively remodeled from 1993-1996, after an arson fire in 1986. You can read more about the library on the Wikipedia website and the L.A. Public Library Site. There’s a few of my pics at the end of this post, too.

It took awhile for the room to fill up, as it does at most events in this town, but the night was sold out and I saw many of my poet friends settle into the comfy chairs, most reading, or holding in their hands, a copy of one of Kinnell’s books of poems. The evening was relatively short, with a very nice introduction and then Kinnell reading a few poems, taking a few questions, reading a few more poems and then he signed books afterwards. I truly enjoyed just closing my eyes and listening to his sonorous voice roll out into the room. He is an icon of American poetry and it was just delightful to sit and hear his poems, his thoughts, watch him fuss with papers and pages, trying to find the poem he wanted to read, telling us a little bit about the poem, or not. He was casual, unassuming about his work, seemed mildly uncomfortable, but a seasoned veteran of this sort of thing, playing some old favorites and bringing out a couple of new poems for the crowd.

One of the poems Kinnell read, Neverland, is a lovely portrayal of his experience at the bed of his sister Wendy, as she lay dying. Before he read it he rustled around a bit searching for a pen and then made a note to revise one of the lines. I’ve heard he is well-known for this propensity to alter his poems, even after they’ve been published. If you’d like to hear an audio recording of Kinnell reading Neverland you can click on this link to Poetry.org. Guaranteed you’ll enjoy it. Strong Is Your Hold is his latest collection of poems. I just pulled it out and realized there’s a CD that comes along with it. I’ll have to pop it in the player and see what’s on it. Below is one of the poems from that collection.

Promissory Note

If I die before you
which is all but certain
then in the moment
before you will see me
become someone dead
in a transformation
as quick as a shooting star’s
I will cross over into you
and ask you to carry
not only your own memories
but mine too until you
too lie down and erase us
both together into oblivion.

Galway Kinnell
Strong Is Your Hold
Houghton Mifflin Company, Publishers

 
A night shot taken with my little digital. It’s an impressive building night or day. 

 One of the "chandeliers" hanging in the atrium.

Escalators from above.

 The Statue of Civilization

Mural: The Founding of Los Angeles

It’s been a little while since we’ve heard from Liza, but she’s back with another book review and she promises me she has two or three in the hopper, so we’ll have more to come. She and I both fell in love with the poetry and the prose of Mark Doty when we were at Vermont College. I had the privilege to study with Mark last year at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. Liza has a special connection as she has lived in, or around, Provincetown, Massachusettes for much of her life, where Mark has lived and where much of Heaven’s Coast is set. Enjoy!

Heaven’s Coast
by Mark Doty

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what anyone supposed and luckier.     Walt Whitman       

With death, there often comes a wondering about meaning for those who are left behind in its wake. In the opening preface of Mark Doty’s luminous memoir, Heaven’s Coast, he embraces the mysterious immediately. He writes, “The Lakota Sioux say that when nature gives one a burden, one’s also given a gift.” The repetitive experiences of magic that make up this book seem in part to be the journey that encompasses such a gift. 

Against the mystical, coastal backdrop of the natural world in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a town forgotten by time and ordinariness, a town where the less “normal” you are the better you fit in, Mark Doty has used his experiences with the otherwise unexplainable as a passage to and from heaven’s coast, both for himself and his reader, as they pass together in and out of grief.  

With the keen eye of a poet and a deep curiosity about, “the texture and weight of a word,” with sparse language and clear, unsentimental prose, “Writers try to make the world into themselves, and then when they return to the outer life they expect to have changed it,” Doty chronicles the illness and death of his long time partner, Wally Roberts and his assent into heaven from their home on the Massachusetts coast.

Roberts’s death from AIDS in 1994 left an open door for Doty to peer into. Almost as if Doty, in his mind, went to heaven with Wally, only to return after a time to tell us what it’s like. He writes, “In the months after Wally died I felt a kind of spirit with me that sustained me, even though I was miserable; it was strange how I could be in so much pain and feel, at once, somehow close to the heart of life, in a place of no little radiance.”  

Doty handles the meaning and magic of his dreams with brevity, “I dreamed one night that I was wondering how I would survive this, how I’d come through these days, and I saw in front of me a stack of books and papers and pens. The message: You have everything you need,” and then moves quickly back to the story. In a sense this brevity allows the dreams to inform the reader in the same way the writer was initially informed by them. They are there to be considered and to resonate as the ends come in against the middle.    

This portrait of Roberts’s slow and painful death breathes and lives as it dissects the connections we often feel, but can’t otherwise put into words. It taps into something we often avoid because we can’t define it. Into the abyss we go with Doty as he confesses, “To write was to court overwhelming feeling. Not to write was to avoid, but to avoid was to survive. Though writing was a way of surviving, too: experience was unbearable, looked at head on, but not to look was also unbearable. And so I’d write, when I could, recording what approached like someone in a slow moving but unstoppable accident, who must look and look away at once.”

So clear is Doty’s rage, “And partly my rage is at the world, at God, at the blind bone-breaking ugly design of things,” set against the ethereal images of their home and the landscape of the coast that we hold our breath as he writes about a winter afternoon as the two men wait together for death to arrive. “The afternoon’s so quiet and deep it seems almost to ring, like chimes, a cold, struck bell. I sit into the evening, when he closes his eyes.”  There’s the clear ear of the poet again. “A cold, struck bell.” You can almost taste the tarnished metal against your tongue. Doty’s prose is like a poem. To read him is to watch the soul see before your eyes.

(Read on …)