Some days I’d like to believe that the most important thing in all the world (well, in my world anyway) is the poem I’m working on—my current one, the one that’s fresh and full of potential, still moldable and tweakable. I’ve got a couple right now that I wrote over the last few days. I may be talking on the phone with the online bank manager or taking a shower, walking in the meadow or watching Crossing Jordan on TV, but I can feel them circling around back there in my head, arranging and rearranging themselves. I go to the computer several times a day to pull them up, read through them, read them aloud, pull a word out here or there, switch another one out, shift the line breaks. When I’ve got a new version I like I print them out on a fresh sheet of paper and set them on the desk.

 There’s been a large red-tailed hawk circling around the house and immediate area the last few days. Sometimes I only catch the enormous shadow of his wings out of the corner of my eye. Just now I watched as he (or she) took a few turns right outside the window, seemed to have something in his sights, but then let the wind carry him away with no reward for his efforts. It feels that way with poems sometimes. I’ll have an inspiration that, in the moment, lyrically sings its way into my head. I write it down and it appears beautifully on the page, so fresh and authentic. In the moments, hours and days following I never take my eyes off of it, hover over it, nursing and encouraging it along, even though at times it may lose all of its luster, seem dull and unwilling to accurately portray the illumination of my original thoughts. More often than not, I must move on to another poem, let this one go, admit that it’s either not ever going to make the grade or that it needs time to mature, come of age, before I can embrace it fully and take it all the way home.

As for the two new poems presently on the table next to my left elbow—I am encouraged. They are coming along nicely, without any major hang-ups to wrestle with at this time. They’ve still got to go through the gauntlet of the workshop and being honed to the point of submission (that’s submission for publishing, of course). Time will tell. Tomorrow the forecast is for thunderstorms. Perhaps there’ll be a new poem there; in the lightening, the rain, the movement of the clouds in the sky. It’s not mine to ordain. The poem, just like the red-tailed hawk, glides into sight on its own clock, shows itself fleetingly. If you don’t look up in that moment, if you don’t grasp it in your heart with passionate adoration, it simply moves on over the trees, out of sight.
 

Rock and Hawk

Here is a symbol in which
Many high tragic thoughts
Watch their own eyes.

This gray rock, standing tall
On the headland, where the seawind
Lets no tree grow,

Earthquake-proved, and signatured
By ages of storms: on its peak
A falcon has perched.

I think, here is your emblem
To hang in the future sky;
Not the cross, not the hive,

But this; bright power, dark peace;
Fierce consciousness joined with final
Disinterestedness;

Life with calm death; the falcon’s
Realists eyes and act
Married to the massive

Mysticism of stone,
Which failure cannot cast down
Nor success make proud.

 
Robinson Jeffers
Selected Poems
Vintage Books, Publishers 

 

I wrote the piece below a few days ago when I was in New Mexico to renew body, mind and spirit at the Summer Solstice celebration in the Jemez Mountains. First my husband and I took a couple of days to ourselves, nestling down in a B&B in the Pecos Mtns. owned and run by a family who had carved a beautiful home and accommodations out of the side of a mountain. The father, aptly named "The Mountain Man" has a small tree farm and lives in his own cabin, while his daughter, Judy and her husband Steve live in the upstairs of the sturdy log and stone home they built just a few years ago. We stayed in the large suite downstairs with king bed and jacuzzi tub and breakfast served in the adjoining kitchen/dining/living room area. Our two days there were perfect for resting, doing nothing and going nowhere.

The following few days were spent on another mountain with fewer trees and many, many more people. We’ve been coming to Summer Solstice since 1972 and it has never failed to be transformative, starting every morning with the three a.m. wake-up, the call to stretch the body and mind, to awaken the soul to the field of infinite possibilities. During the day there are yoga classes, cruising the bazaar, children’s camp, karma yoga (chopping veggies, camp maintenance, serving food, the list is really endless), connecting with friends and making new ones and in the evening music at the Yogi Tea Cafe under one of the massive white canvas tents. It is always a timeless experience, a pause in the madness of every day life–an alternate paradigm where the spirit is the priority and each moment is a precious opportunity to open to what could be, how individually and collectively we have the power to live as compassionate, courageous and conscious beings.

Today, another mountain range, the Cascades, is where I reside–back in Oregon for a week–with a couple of days of family ahead, then days to dive into more revision and preparation of poems for going out there in the world. But more on that later. Here’s the piece from the PE-letter from Monday with a few photos of the journey. Peace.

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The breeze is beginning to stir. It’s ten a.m. in the Pecos Mountains in northern New Mexico. Yesterday we rested, my husband and I, slept on and off all day, didn’t leave the premises. The pine and fir trees, the pond with trout, the wildflowers and blue sky were enough food for the soul. He watched golf on TV. I read Norman Dubie poetry and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. We both took long baths. I found myself inspired to reorganize my poems in my computer into those that were pretty much ready for submission and those that were still in need of some serious revision if they were to make the grade. It felt good to be ruthless about the readiness of the poems. I was determined not to cater to my attachment to any poem. To make it into the “Submission Ready” folder the poem had to meet a high standard of completion: rhythm, diction, form and meaning all had to mesh to make the poem sing. I was pleased to see that my standards have risen since I did a similar culling a few months ago. It has begun to mean more and more to me what the poem is aside from my sentiment or what I think it might convey. The poem must be an entity that is complete unto itself. It must have the ability to stand on its own two poetical feet.

We’re leaving here in a couple of hours. Everything back in the bags, back in the car and taking the drive through Santa Fe to Espanola and up into the hills to the 3HO Summer Solstice site where we’ll be there for a few days of yoga, meditation and connecting with our spiritual family of almost two thousand seekers. It will be hot and dry, the dust will blow, the skin will burn, thunderstorms will roll in and chanting will be heard echoing off the peaks and mesas. Just as the poems must be cut and amended, so it is time for a soul revision— a time of reflection and appraisal of the year past and the year to come and a look into the timelessness of the journey. I wish you all a blessed summer solstice and may all your revisions be clean and strong and may you always follow your bliss. It is the path to the center of your heart.

The Mountain Man 

The Pecos River 

Wild Irises 

A bucket of firewood.

The main trail through the Summer Solstice Camp. The yellow building is the kitchen, which is always jumping day and night! 

One of the yoga tents–looking out to the Jemez Mountains and Espanola Valley below. 

A little bluegrass music to end the day at the Yogi Tea Cafe.

I wrote the piece below, THE STORY, THE MOMENT, for the weekly P.E. e-letter. I also wanted to share a few poetry related books and websites with you.

Dog Years (HarperCollins): Mark Doty’s new memoir. I haven’t read it yet but it got a great write-up in the L.A. Times last week and I’m taking it on my trip to Oregon this week as my main read.

Ten Poems to Last a Lifetime (Harmony Books):The latest (and last) compilation of poems by Roger Housden, where he brings a few stunning poems to the page and includes his own short essay on the poem. Great gift — for yourself or someone, anyone, who can use the inspiration.

Poetry.LA: A new website started by my friends, Hilda & Wayne, with video of the local Open Mic poetry venues around town. Includes featured readers, interviews with the hosts and open mic readers. 

Billy Collins Poems with Animation: I found these poems on many sites. Charming and creative ways to "see" the poem as well as hear it. 

A Chaos of Angels (Word Walker Press: This is a lovingly compiled collection of poems that touches on the culture of psychotropic drugs–how the individual for whom they are prescribed struggles, both with the with and without them, to be real, be themselves. The poems speak as well for their family, friends and society at large as we all seek to understand and respond to the ever increasing numbers of men, women and children who walk among us who are living drug-induced intellectual and emotional lives. It is the soul seeking to break free that is heard in these poems, the voice of the individual, of the poet inside of all of us, fighting for its very life in an increasingly electronically spinning world. Thanks to Alice Pero and Lois P. Jones, two local L.A. Poets, who dedicated themselves to the creation of this book of poems.

THE STORY, THE MOMENT

I’ve been going through some old cast aside poems, going back three, four or more years, fiddling with them to see if they have any juice, any life left in them if I shear a few words or lines or even whole stanzas off here, change a word there, rearrange the stanzas, make the lines shorter, longer. There are two minds at work when I flip through these poems; the cold-hearted editor, who has no qualms about slashing and burning what was once thought so sacred to the life of the poem, a mind bent on crafting a work of art, words that shimmer and shake with the essence of what the poem wants to say. The other mind that shows up is prone to drift off into memories of where I was when the poem was conceived:  on a country road in New Mexico, a hotel in Costa Rica, after washing the dishes in my L.A. home, standing at a window at midnight in Oregon. Of course, recalling the place recalls the mood, recalls the times and who I was then, what I was struggling with and how things have changed one way or another, since then.

Poems are signposts, markers in our lives, a biography that doesn’t spell it out as plainly as prose, but has the inherent faculty to be infused with deep emotional content. This is done, as I see it, through the language, the syntax and the form the poem takes. A vivid picture can be painted with a poem that strips away pretense and takes the reader into the heart of the moment, laying bare the soul of the poet and touching the soul of the reader. It is a delicate balancing act to be able to “tell the story,” as well as infuse the poem with the emotionality needed to transfer the interior of the individual writing the poem to the individual reading/hearing the poem. This is where “becoming a poet” requires both of those minds—the one that can form and mold the words, willing to cut and slash as well and the one who has developed the interior landscape of their soul, allowing him or her access to thoughts and feelings which are both individually felt and universally experienced.

In a panel discussion at the AWP Conference on The Narrative Poem, B.H. Fairchild spoke about how every poem, by its very nature, will contain both narrative and lyric elements in it. There is always some kind of “story” and there is always some kind of “transcendent moment” occurring in every poem—at least in every poem that has any resonance at all for a reader. This is how it is in life: we exist here on earth, in time, in space, eating, drinking, eliminating, getting older, having relationships, children, and finally leaving our body. But that can’t be all. It isn’t all. To be fully alive, to be our own “poem” we experience grief, awe, intuition, love, forgiveness, wonder, joy and gratitude. In every day, every moment and every breath we are both connected with our earthly self and our otherworldly self. It is only to the degree that we are aware of the latter that we experience ourselves fully. I thought when I first started writing poetry that it was about making a nice piece of writing that would “say” something and for people who read to find it interesting and clever. Thank God, after many knock-down-drag-outs with my ego, I know now that poetry is for me another way of connecting me with me and me with others and me with the vastness we call God or Allah or Sat Nam or The Unknown and that is why it is worth the time and the effort to develop the skills to craft a poem, because it is, as well, a crafting of the self to a higher attunement, another inch moving towards being a more aware human being, to truly being a poet.

This is a reprint from the PE e-letter sent out earlier this week. I’ve added pictures of the art work as well as the well-known ekphrastic poem by Ranier Maria Rilke, Archaic Torso of Apollo. 

******** 

A few weeks ago I wrote an ekphrastic poem inspired by the painting The Little Yellow Horses by Franz Marc. I only became aware of this genre of poetry in the last few months when one of the poets in my weekly group shared one she had written with Georgia O’Keefe’s Horse’s Skull with Pink Roses as her inspiration. According to Wikipedia the definition of ekphrasis (alternate spelling, ecphrasis) is the following: a rhetorical device in which one art tries to relate to another art by defining and describing the essence and form of that original art, and in doing so, "speak to you" through its illuminative liveliness. To me, what they’re saying and how I experience it, is that one artist is having a dialogue with another artist, with their respective crafts as the medium.

I was attracted to the painting, The Little Yellow Horses, not only for the beauty and serenity of it as a work of art, but how there was this resonance with the subject matter, how the horses at once were so still, so content, but, as is the nature of horses, they could fight or flee instantly, if so provoked and that the fiery energy, the amazing grace and power of these animals is awe inspiring to me. I also know that when the horses felt safe again they would settle down, graze, lay down in the grass, swish flies and embody the docile side of the horse. I felt a kinship with this desire to be at peace as well as be passionate in life; to live simply in harmony with the earth and heavens, and also bare my teeth, strike out, or outrun anything or anybody that threatens that tranquility. On a larger scale I see this dichotomy between the desire for peace in the world and how as individuals or communities or whole nations, we can become spooked into rising up, often times without fully comprehending the nature of the threat. All of these thoughts and feelings played into the poem, some of which, (to tell you the truth) I didn’t even realize until I wrote it down this minute.

 

I highly recommend the book, Transforming Vision: Writers on Art. Edited by Edward Hirsch and featuring artwork from the Art Institute of Chicago.
 

 

 

 

(My poem originally appeared here, but has been removed. Many journals will not publish a poem that has been previously published anywhere, including a personal blog. Hopefully you’ll see The Little Yellow Horses printed elsewhere soon.)

 
 

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Stephen Mitchell

 

I took the last three days off from the world, chugged through Friday afternoon traffic, with my friend Siri Ved driving, leaving L.A. to climb into the mountains to Big Bear Lake. Even though we were bumper-to-bumper for half the way and it took an additional two hours to get here, we are both glad we came. We’re staying at a friend’s cabin that is cozy inside and surrounded by pines and fir trees outside. When we got here we started a fire, put our groceries away, unpacked a few things and made some tea, before showering and slipping into dreamland. The quiet is always the most blessed nourishment I receive when in the mountains; the relaxation that seeps into my tight city muscles, the slowing down of my thoughts and rapid-response mechanism, the way my eyes soften, how the tension in my face begins to melt like snow on a spring day.

One thing I notice right away when I’m in the mountains or at the ocean or desert, is how much more engaged my senses become; how the fragrance of the pines fills my nostrils, the spray of the ocean waves is salty on my skin, and the thin air of the desert brings everything into sharp relief. It is not that the senses disappear in the city, quite the contrary. I believe they are completely over stimulated, bombarded with such an array of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch that there is barely enough time for the nervous system to sort one out and send the message to the brain before the next one piles on top of the last. It’s simply the nature of living with thousands, or millions, of other humans, all doing what they do.

I’ve been reading the book, Western Wind, a poetry textbook that is a treasure trove of knowledge; organized and written in a way that is easy for the novice poet to grasp, engaging as well for the more experienced. It is chock full of poems written in an incredibly wide range of styles and spanning the full pantheon of poetry from Sappho to Li Young Lee. I’ve had this book for a couple of years and because of its length (over 600 pages) I have been reluctant to really dive into it, really just scanning a chapter now and again or reading some of the poems in the anthology section. I brought it with the intention of at least settling down and reading a chapter or two, priming the pump for when I return home, where I plan on continuing the practice of reading a chapter every day or two. The very first aspect of poetry addressed in Western Wind is “The Role of the Senses,” and how images are created in writing through attunement of the senses. When a writer is adept at expressing what is felt through imagistic writing, the reader is able to have an emotional response to the poem, not merely an intellectual one. This ability to place images on the page, to create metaphor, similes, the bridges from concrete objects to ideas, this is what separates literature from purely expository writing. Involving the imagination, allowing the reader to “sensorize” (this is my own made-up word, by the way) what is being expressed in a poem or story is where the universal connection is truly experienced, it is where one soul touches another.

In order to regain a deeper connection with the sensory world, if you do live in a heavily populated area, I find you must first have the desire to do so as well as a practice to slow down the internal mechanisms of thought, to practice a mindful attunement to the environment. One way I’ve found that works is to sit and breathe long and steadily, to focus on relaxing my body and mind until I’m at the point where my thoughts are like a stream passing by and I am on the shore simply watching them. At this point I tune in to one of my senses, for example hearing, and allow my ears to separate the sounds I hear, to isolate them one by one. Right now, for instance, I can hear the refrigerator, a pulsing kind of rumble, with a bit of a whine. I can hear a plane passing overhead, a muffled roar; two people talking animatedly next door; a bird chirping in regular rhythm; my friend turning the pages of her book. I find it a beautiful thing, a kind of reverence I feel when I pay attention to these individual sensory experiences, so very different from lumping them all together, where they lose the power to affect me with their unique voices. This mindful kind of exercise works with all the senses and has the power to enrich not only one’s writing, but much more importantly, one’s experience of the world in which we live.
 

Quotes from Western Wind:

"I no sooner have an idea, than it turns into an image."   Goethe

"To generalize is to be an idiot. To particularize is the alone distinction of merit."   William Blake

" The poet is a professor of the five bodily senses."   Frederico Garcia Lorca

"The artist seeks out the luminous detail and presents it. He does not comment."   Ezra Pound  

 

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 …)

There’s something I like about prose poems–the freedom to get a little wild, whacky, I guess. A poem in stanzas is so, well, “poemish.” It has a certain dignity and it has rules, wants to be respected in a particular way. (Although, we’ve all seen some wild poems written in formal poetic forms.) I guess the prose poems says to me…Ramble On! I do like to ramble, go off on a subject and make long, drawn out, sentences connected with ands and buts and so’s and …’s and —’s. It’s a way of draining my brain, of letting all the many variations on a theme have their say without feeling they have to be tied up in a bow.

I have two anthologies of prose poems. One is No Boundaries, edited by Ray Gonzalez, which has selections by 24 contemporary poets including Charles Simic, Robert Bly, Amy Gerstler, Naomi Shihab Nye and Cambell McGrath. Great American Prose Poems, edited by David Lehman, is the other one. It covers a much wider swath of time and poets starting with Emerson and winding through T.S. Eliot, e. e. cummings, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, Mark Strand, Frank Bidart, Anne Carson, Rita Dove, Mary Ruefle and many more along the way. Here’s playful piece by Louis Jenkins about, well, of course…

The Prose Poem

The prose poem is not a real poem, of course. One of the major differences is that the prose poet is simply too lazy or too stupid to break the poem into lines. But all writing, even the prose poem, involves a certain amount of skill, just the way throwing a wad of paper, say, into a wastebasket at a distance of twenty feet, requires a certain skill, a skill that, though it may improve hand-eye coordination, does not lead necessarily to an ability to play basetball. Still, it takes practice and thus gives one a way to pass the time, chucking one paper after another at the basket, while the teacher drones on about the poetry of Tennyson.

**********

My husband once entered a zucchini in the county fair and won a blue ribbon for the largest of the year. I think he still has the ribbon pinned to his wall. We haven’t had a garden the last two years but before that we had them for twenty, in Oregon and here in L.A. The rite of turning the soil, planting seeds, watering, watching the seedlings pop out of the composted soil was always amazing. Every year the zukes and the tomatoes and chard, beans and corn were so delicious. You know, real taste, not what we settle for out of the store these days. I read the poem below by Naomi Shihab Nye to him tonight and he got a good chuckle out of it. I asked if he had any pictures of that giant zucchini so this sent him on a quest to go through six boxes of photos. Couldn’t find that particular one, but here’s a photo of some of the bounty from a few years ago.

The Mind of a Squash

Overnight, and quietly. Beneath the scratchy leaf we thicken and expand so fast you can’t believe. Sun pours into us. We drink midnight too, blue locust lullaby feeding our graceful sleep. When you come back, we are fat. Doubled in the dark. Faster than you are. Sometimes we grow together, two of us twining out from the same stalk, conversational blossoms. Bring the bucket. Bring the small knife with the sharp blade. Bring the wind to cool our wide span of leaves, each one bigger than a human head, bigger than dinner plates. Wait till you find the giant prize we have hidden from you all along–no muscle-rich upper arm exceeds its size. But the farmer doesn’t like it. Too big for selling, he says. Only for zucchini bread. Never mind. We like it. We have our own pride.

**********

In case you live in the L.A. area and in case you’re interested in exploring the world of the prose poem, you might like to participate in a workshop at the Ruskin Art Center on October 14th taught by Sarah Maclay. I guarantee it will be a good romp. Sarah’s a terrific poet and workshop facilitator. Here’s the scoop…

The Prose Poem
October 14, 2006 9:30am - 4 pm
The Ruskin Art Club 800 S Plymouth Blvd LA CA 90005
$75: Send $35 Deposit to the Ruskin Art Club
310-669-2369/ 640-0710

What is a prose poem, and how does it force us to re-examine our notions of what, in fact, a poem might be? This workshop will examine the many ways in which this seeming paradox cannot be understood as simply narrative or paragraph, and is very often neither. What, instead, does it seem to allow, or even promote? Where did it originate? And how does it skew our expectations of both poetry and prose? Participants will have the opportunity to workshop their own prose poems (or other poems) after we’ve looked at examples from some of its many explorers: Arthur Rimbaud, Russell Edson, Killarney Clary, Mary Jo Bang, Robert Hass, Carolyn Forche, Nin Andrews, W.S. Merwin, Lynn Heijinian, Rene Char, Franz Wright, Karen Volkman, Allison Benis, Mary Ruefle, Charles Simic, Robert Bly . . . and others.

I was just milling about in my Squaw Valley poem file and thought I’d share with you the last poem I wrote. Well, truth be told it isn’t exactly a poem–unless you chose to call it so. It was one of my goals (although not one that I was married to) at the workshop to try out new forms, writing a different kind of poem each day. I had done pretty well with a prose poem on Monday, an abecedarian on Tuesday, Wednesday I did an ode (in a “primative sound”), and Thursday a list poem. On Friday I read a “conversation” poem” in Sharon Olds’ group that had really been a tough one to write and even tougher to read. Sharon urged me (more like laid down the gauntlet, in her oh, so, gentle way) to take the poem I had written and go deeper into the subject, let it rip, find out what I really wanted to say and write that for my Saturday poem. This was a daunting task considering there was a dinner party that night and I could barely stand up straight and keep my eyes open as it was after the poetry blitz of the previous six days.

I did try. Oh, I sat in front of my computer until midnight but it wasn’t going to happen, no matter how much I tried to dredge up the fury from within. I did want to come with something to Saturday morning’s workshop so I thought I’d write a letter…take a lighter approach and just let myself get silly. It was fun and I felt the pressure lift as I gave myself permission to take what Sharon had said with me and let it settle in. I would write that poem another day. Sometimes I (feel free to insert “we” here) just have to accept my limitations–and maybe they aren’t so much limitations, but opportunities to go easy and let myself slide. Nothing wrong with sliding now and again. You never know when you’ll get a good laugh out of it.

(The “C.D.” in the title is C.D. Wright as she was the group facilitator that morning.)

********

Dear C.D. & Respected 12 Poets of Squaw Valley Poetry Day 7,

It is my sad duty to inform you that today is the day I have failed. I have not brought a poem of any means, have not finished my week with a roar, rather I offer you a whimper. I didn’t mean to disappoint. Ah, kept at it until there was little left of me but acid. But, my dears, it was not to be this day, this sun drenched morning in Bar One. I must look into your soft eyes and say to you that there is nothing here that will light them up or (most desirably) evoke a tear or moment of deep introspection to swell the chest and provoke an almost indiscernible nod of the head, sway of the torso, inner glow of epiphany.

No. I must disappoint. And no one (least of all myself) wants to disappoint but it seems my fate to do so on this our last morning, our last poeming around this table. I do so with my head held high and my integrity in tact as I know you would want me to, as I know you will, with your immense empathy be kind, say not that this does not qualify as a poem—remark that it is neither abecedarian nor sonnet, that it would be far better a work of art to cut the first line, scrap the title or point out that the syntax does not match the tone.

It is my fervent wish that today’s offering does not, in your generous and kindly eyes, diminish the esteem I have so ardently striven to engender in this last week so much so that you consider striking me from the blue-sheeted email list as an outsider, one who didn’t rise to the moment, failed to do the assignment given to follow up yesterday’s poem where I had reached down my throat, ripped out my heart and thrown it on the page, the oh, so gentle suggestion that I do it again, only this time go deeper, go for the gut, dragging the kidneys, pancreas and spleen along with it. I do hope that you will understand, in your benevolence, why, instead I chose to obfuscate, to defer, to wave the white flag of surrender.

And so dear ones, fellow poeteers, we must part on this fine day to return to our abodes across the land. I wish you well in all your revisions and may your submission acceptances be many. I hope to meet you all again one day, one bright and clear morning in this fine valley where bears eat Hagen Daaz in the kitchen, ants milk aphids for their sweet poop and poems grow like lichen on every rock and tree.

Humbly,
Hari Bhajan

July 29, 2006

Not easy. Not as hard as you might think. Excruciating. Humiliating. Inspiring. Challenging. Heartbreaking. Exhilirating. Okay, enough, enough already! When you come to Squaw Valley for the poetry week, what you sign on for is to write a poem a day, have it done each morning by 9 AM and be in workshop awake and ready to read your poem to the 12 other poets and the presiding senior poet. Everyone comes with their own intentions: to break through some old habits and play with new ideas, forms, language or to focus on a particular subject matter, writing poems that have a link in some obvious, or not-so-obvious way or to experiment purely with what comes up on any given day, to manifest material that can then be molded into a more cohesive and refined piece of writing.

My focus this time was to try something a little different each day, mostly to do with the structure of the poem, as well as being open to how that might affect the subject matter, or vice-versa. One day I wrote an abecedarian poem (the first word of each line begins with a letter of the alphabet in a descending order A-Z). On another day, inspired by Dean Young’s craft talk on the “primative poem,” I was inspired to create a chant-type poem using rhythm and a type of musical score to write an “Ode to the Flame, the Teardrop, the Flute.” On the last day I was so exhausted (physically and creatively) that I wrote a letter, a funny letter, to my fellow poets, trying to lighten my own load, as well as theirs, as we were all on our last legs that Saturday morning.

There are days during the week when the poem pops out as sweet and close-to-perfect as can be and there are days when the battle has been joined and you joust with your mind and the words on the page and your idea of how that poem is supposed to look and feel and sound…ultimately, though, the week is about going there…wherever the muse takes you and keeping up! I’m sure we all had those days when we were ready to hang up our Thesaurus and jump in one of those rubber rafts cruising down the Truckee River, but the truth is, that no one, not even the seasoned, published poets, knows for sure what’s available on the cosmic poetry highway on any given day. You show up with pen in hand with an idea and a willingness to go the distance…that’s all you can do. There’s always that possibility that magic will happen and a poem will be born and live long enough to actually be heard by others, to be a force for good in this crazy world.

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Here are some more photos from the week of poets at work….

What’s that thing you’re pecking at, Christina??

Sharon Olds & Michael in one of the “morning meetings” as Sharon preferred to call them.

Harryette Mullen with Jenny doing a “Poem First Aid” Session under the sparkling aspens.

Lori getting her poem ready in the SV central headquarters. Hopefully, this one won’t get eaten by the computer.

Dean Young & C.D. Wright signing books after the Thursday night reading.

Sharon at the Thursday reading–always a hint of humor, a deep well of passion.

Dean reading his poems–funny and poignant–an outlaw with a heart of gold.

By following some links from one spot to another (can’t remember where I started exactly) I found myself at the site of Poetry Society of America. I don’t know much about them but am going to read more when I get a chance…but really what I found was a fantastic poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti written when he received a Frost Medal in 2003. I wanted to save each line and pin it up on my wall. I read it aloud. It has a great rhythm and pulse to it. When a poet really stands up for passion and for humanity and for spirit I am inspired in so many ways, especially to keep writing, to keep going deeper and to keep the flow of sharing poetry going round and round. It does make a difference. It can change how we think and how we respond to what life brings us. I’d love to hear any thoughts you have on the poem, especially what lines most resonate with you. There are a few lines of prologue and then the poem. It’s long but well worth the time to read…and read again.
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The poet by definition, as the bearer of Eros and love and freedom, is the natural-born non-violent enemy of the state. Militant poetry as the agent of truth is the best arm against home-grown fascism.

Dissident poetry is not Un-American.

There are three kinds of poetry. Lying-down poetry is supine poetry that accepts the status quo and is so laid back it has a hard time keeping awake. Sitting poetry is ambivalent poetry written by the sitting establishment with vested interests, its bottom line dictated by its day job. Standing poetry is the poetry of commitment, often great, often dreadful.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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What is poetry?

Love lie with me, and I will tell.

Poetry a lawless enterprise.

Poetry the truth that reveals all lies.

Poetry a camera-eye without a shutter.

Poetry, unlike armchair philosophy, does not leave the world unchanged.

What is poetry?

Wind stirs the grasses, howls in the passes.

First light and a dark bird wings away: it’s a poem.

Poetry is looking down both roads that diverge in a narrow wood.

Words wait to be reborn in the shadow of the lamp of poetry.

The flight-path of a poem must be upward or it will crash.

Poems are emails from the unknown, beyond cyberspace.

Poetry as a first language preceded writing and still sounds in us, a mute music, an inchoate music.

Poems like moths press against the window trying to reach the light.

Poetry is white writing on black, black writing on white.

It is a Madeleine dipped in Proust’s tea.

It is a player-piano in an abandoned seaside casino, still playing.

All the world is one poem, all poetry one world, give or take a bomb or two.

Poetry is what we would cry out upon coming to ourselves in a dark wood in the middle of the journey of our life.

Poetry is news from the growing edge on the far frontiers of consciousness.

Poetry is a mute melody in the head of every dumb animal.

It is a descant rising out of the heart of darkness.

It is the light at the end of the tunnel and the darkness within it.

It is the morning dove mourning night.

It is the morning dove mourning love, and nothing cries out like the cry of the heart.

Every great poem fulfills a longing and puts life back together.

Every bird a word, every word a bird, and birdsong is not made by machines.

Poetry is boat-tailed birds singing in the setting sun in the tops of jacaranda trees in the plaza of San Miguel de Allende.

It is all the birds of the universe flocking together for a congress of birds and singing singly.

And every poem an exaggeration understated.

No need to write a great epic: two trout head-to-tail in a frying pan make a tragic poem.

A poem is a phosphorescent instant illuminating time, a moment of Absolute Spirit. (Thank you, Hegel.)

Poetry is more than painting sunlight on the wall of a house.

It is Van Gogh’s ear echoing with all the blood of the world.

It is the primary conductor of emotion; if it don’t conduct, it ain’t poetry.

It is a lightning rod transmitting epiphanies.

It is a dragonfly catching fire.

It is the sea-light of Greece, the diamond light of Greece.

It is a lamp of the imagination lighting up every darkness.

It is a bright vision made dark, a darkling vision made bright.

It’s the trees in spring in a back garden on Morton Street.

It is what the late November’s saying about the disturbance of the spring.

Poems are shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave glimpsed but fleetingly.

Poetry is eternal graffiti in the heart of everyone.

A poem is a mirror walking down a wide street full of visual delight.

Poetry is the shook foil of the imagination; it should shine out and half blind you.

It is the sun streaming down in the meshes of morning.

It is white nights and mouths of desire.

It is a tree with live leaves made from log piles of words.

A poem should arise to ecstasy somewhere between speech and song.

Poetry is the still sound between the strings of a lute.

It is the birth of ideas before they are distilled into thought.

It is made by dissolving halos in oceans of sound.

It is the street talk of angels and devils.

It is a sofa full of blind singers who have put aside their canes.

A poem must sing and fly away with you or it’s a dead duck with a prose soul.

Poems are lifesavers when your boat capsizes.

Poetry is the anarchy of the senses making sense.

It is all things born with wings that sing.

It is a voice of dissent against the waste of words and the mad plethora of print.

It is what exists between the lines.

It is made with the syllables of dreams in unwritten dictionaries.

It is far far cries upon a beach at nightfall.

It is a lighthouse moving its megaphone over the sea.

It is a picture of Ma in her Woolworth bra looking out a window into her secret garden.

It is an Arab carrying colored rugs and birdcages through the streets of Baghdad.

A poem can be made of common household ingredients: it fits on a single page

yet it can fill a world, and fits in the pocket of a heart.

The poet is a street singer who rescues the alleycats of love in the South Bronx.

Poetry breaks the brass wall between races.

Third World poetry may be the voice of the future.

But politically-correct identity-politics do not necessarily make great poetry.

Poems are the lost pages of the books of day & night.

Poetry is the distillation of articulate animals calling to each other across a great gulf.

It is a pulsing fragment of the inner life, an untethered music.

It is the dialogue of naked statues.

It is the sound of gaiety while weeping.

It is the sound of summer in the rain and of people laughing behind closed shutters down an alley at night.

It is Helen’s straw hair in sunlight, without a permanent.

It is a sword on fire where someone has thrown in to become a pacifist.

It is a bare light-bulb in a homeless hotel at three in the morning.

It must be more than want ads for broken hearts.

It is worth nothing and therefore invaluable.

It is the incomparable lyric intelligence brought to bear upon fifty-seven varieties of experience.

It is a high house echoing with all the voices that ever said anything crazy or wonderful.

It is a subversive raid upon the forgotten language of the collective unconscious.

It is a real canary in a coal mine, and we know why the caged bird sings.

It is a sounding sea without shores.

Poetry is a rope to tie around you.

It is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.

It is the voice of the Fourth Person Singular.

It is the face behind the face of the race.

It is the voice within the voice of the turtle.

It is the voice of everybody’s inscrutable future.

It is made of night-thought; if it can tear itself away from illusion, it will not be disowned before the dawn.

It is made by evaporating the liquid laughter of youth.

It is a book of light at night dispersing clouds of unknowing.

It hears the whisper of hunted elephants.

It knows how many angels & demons dance on the head of a phallus.

It is Ulysses’ horses mourning his death.

It is a saxophone singing the birth of the blues.

It is a humming, a keening, a laughing, a sighing at dawn, a wild soft laughter.

It is the final gestalt of the imagination.

Poetry should be emotion recollected in emotion.

Words are living fossils; the poet must piece the skeleton together and make it sing.

A poet is only as great as his ear; too bad if it is tin.

Poetry is perpetual revolt against silence exile and cunning.

It is a guillotine for accepted ideas.

The poet a subversive barbarian at the city gates, challenging the status quo.

It is creative destruction, the poet a master ontologist, questioning reality and reinventing it.

He is the gadfly of the state mating with a firefly.

He is a pickpocket of reality.

Poetry is a paper boat on the flood of spiritual desolation.

It is the existential dance of the self and the other.

It is the rediscovery of the self against the tribe.

Poems are questions posing further questions.

The poet mixes drinks out of wild liquors and is perpetually surprised that no one staggers.

He is a dark barker before the tents of existence.

He should see the rose through world-colored glasses.

He may be a singing animal turned pimp for an anarchist king.

Poetry is what can be heard at manholes echoing up Dante’s fire escape.

Poetry is religion, religion poetry.

A poem is a dinghy setting out to sea from the listing ship of society.

A poem is a shadow of a plane fleeing over the ground like a cross escaping a church.

The poem is a telescope waiting for the poet to focus it.

The poet is his own priest and confessor.

Poetry is at once sacred and pagan play at its most utopian.

It is the ludic play of homo ludens.

It is the humming of moths as they circle the flame.

It is a wood boat moored in the shade under a weeping willow in the bend of a river in the Deep South.

The poet must have wide-angle vision, each look a world glance, and the concrete is most poetic.

He sees eternity in animals’ eyes and in the eyes of women and men before they look away.

Poetry is not all heroin horses and Rimbaud; it is also the powerless prayers of airline passengers fastening their seatbelts for the final descent.

It is the real subject of great prose.

It speaks the unspeakable, utters the inutterable sigh of the heart.

Each poem a momentary madness, and the unreal is realist.

Poetry a strange form of insanity, tempered by erotic bliss.

A poem should still be an insurgent knock on the door of the unknown.

Like a bowl of roses, a poem should not have to be explained.

The lyric poem must rise beyond sounds found in alphabet soup.

Chance is not art, art is not Chance, except by chance.

A poet should be the antennae of his race with more than rabbit ears.

The images in a poem should be jamais vu, not déjà vu.

If a poem is hard as a diamond it’s too hard.

If a poem is pure as a pearl, it’s too pure.

Poetry a radical presence, constantly goading us.

The Platonic boy scout virtues are still Truth, Beauty, Goodness, Wholeness, Harmony, Radiance.

Add claritas to that. The poet’s unintended obscurity is the eighth type of ambiguity.

The poet should deal in chiaroscuro; the kind sun of Impressionism makes poems out of shadows.

A sunflower maddened with light sheds the seeds of poems. Some sprout.

Let poetry discover the invisible template of reality, and make it new.

In poetry trees and grasses, beasts and humans try to talk to each other.

Poetry is walking on water and always about to sink.

It gives voice to all who see and sing and cry and laugh.

It is a window through which everything can be seen as never before.

Each poem a passion-fruit, a pith of pure being.

The poet a trance-dancer in the Last Waltz.

Eyes & lips are the doors of love, sight & sound the portals of poetry.

What is the use of poetry? If you have to ask, you need it.

Poetry a plant growing at night to give a voice to desire.

It is amore, pan’e vino.

It’s a mediation between everyday reality and us.

It’s a meditation that assuages the loneliness of the long-distance swimmer.

It serves many masters, not all beatific.

Speech is to poetry as sound is to music, with open-tuning.

Poetry is making something out of nothing.

Its function is to debunk with hard light.

Poetry like love dies hard among the ruins.

Poetry like love a natural painkiller.

It sometimes sees its own shadow at midnight and despairs.

The poet a membrane to filter light and disappear in it.

Poetry a handprint of the invisible, a footprint of visible reality, following it like a shadow.

Love delights in love, joy delights in joy, poetry delights in poetry.

For great poetry to be born, there must be hunger and passion.

To the lover, it is a pearl. To the hater, food for thought.

The mind thinks it knows its way around the heart.

Thinking poetry need not be sans ecstasy.

Poetry is thinking with your skin.

Any child who can catch a firefly owns poetry.

Life itself the greatest tragi-comic poem.

The poet must decide if bird cries are cries of ecstasy or cries of despair.

Poetry is bare ruined choirs where last the sweet birds sang.

Poetry is the last refuge of humanity in dark times.

Now that the new dark age of the Kali Yuga is upon us, poetry must burn brightest.

Let a new lyricism save the world from itself!