I am so anti-Halloween, the way we celebrate here in this country, anyway. Around my neighborhood there are so many houses with fake cobwebs strung all over the bushes, gravestones with R.I.P. stuck in the lawns, bones and skulls and witches on brooms all over the house. Then there are those crazy inflatable ghosts and goblins.

It brings out the monster in me to see all this ridiculous “celebration” of a holiday that was originally seen by the pagans “to be crucial joints between the seasons that opened cracks in the fabric of space-time, allowing contact between the ghostworld and the mortal one.” (This per The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets by Barbara Walker.) What is it about this culture that can’t deal with death? Why are we so surprised when it occurs? Why don’t we talk about it, study it, accept it as the natural transition of the soul from physical to ephemeral? What happened to us that we are so blind to the inevitable?

Okay, enough of the ranting. Maybe it’s the jet lag brain that’s got me so irritable. Let me try and put a positive spin on this Halloween gig. It’s time for a dog walk. I’ll go and get some fresh air and take some pictures of the neighborhood decorations. Maybe I’ll get a sign from the other side.
Got some great shots of the local scary lawn decor AND an undeniable sign (to be revealed after the pictures).

********

A Monarch butterfly, the only one I saw, on this cool Autumn day, flew out of a tree right when I walked by and kept circling me and the dogs while I stood there watching it. Orange and black. It’s orange and black–Halloween’s colors. Lighten up and have fun. Don’t get too full of yourself. Life is short. Soar. Spread your wings. Come out of your shell. Play. This is what I got from it. This was my message from the “ghostworld” and I’m keeping it. Bring on the trick-or-treaters! Bring on the horror shows! Dracula and Frankenstein! And bring on the scary poems…

Two from Emily Dickinson and one from our favorite scary poet–Edgar Allan Poe.

Because I Could Not Stop for Death

Because I could not stop for Death
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then ’tis centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses’ heads
Were toward eternity.

********

I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died

I heard a fly buzz when I died;
The stillness round my form
Was like the stillness in the air
Between the heaves of storm.

The eyes beside had wrung them dry,
And breaths were gathering sure
For that last onset, when the king
Be witness in his power.

I willed my keepsakes, signed away
What portion of me I
Could make assignable,–and then
There interposed a fly,

With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz,
Between the light and me;
And then the windows failed, and then
I could not see to see.

Emily Dickinson

********

Spirits Of The Dead

Thy soul shall find itself alone
‘Mid dark thoughts of the grey tomb-stone;
Not one, of all the crowd, to pry
Into thine hour of secrecy.

Be silent in that solitude,
Which is not loneliness- for then
The spirits of the dead, who stood
In life before thee, are again
In death around thee, and their will
Shall overshadow thee; be still.

The night, though clear, shall frown,
And the stars shall not look down
From their high thrones in the Heaven
With light like hope to mortals given,
But their red orbs, without beam,
To thy weariness shall seem
As a burning and a fever
Which would cling to thee for ever.

Now are thoughts thou shalt not banish,
Now are visions ne’er to vanish;
From thy spirit shall they pass
No more, like dew-drop from the grass.

The breeze, the breath of God, is still,
And the mist upon the hill
Shadowy, shadowy, yet unbroken,
Is a symbol and a token.
How it hangs upon the trees,
A mystery of mysteries!

Edgar Allan Poe

********

For more info on the origins of Halloween, All Saints Day & All Souls Day you can go to these web sites:

Celtic Religious Festivals

Library of Congress Folklife Center

Tuesday morning and a chilly one. Yesterday was productive. I worked on revising my essays. Liza wrote another chapter for her book. I spent all day on the property, only left the studio once to go down to Rock House and make a phone call. It felt good to be in the groove. My goal is to do a preliminary revision of each essay before I leave, also marking down how mang pages and words in the piece. I was saying to Liza yesterday how it feels like now I can talk about the essays as one entity, that they are starting to congeal and form into a chorus of many voices singing together, really that they are not “they” anymore but “It” and have a single destiny. Yippee!!

I was reading another encouraging and inspiring book yesterday by William Stafford. He’s always been dear to my heart as he was the poet laureate of Oregon for many years and that’s my home state. He also writes great poems and was a teacher at Lewis & Clark College for many years. His approach to writing poetry is so real, so uncomplicated. He (just as Brenda Ueland does) believes that the key to great poetry is the greatness of the poet, not whether they have multiple degrees, have read every classic backwards and forwards or have fame and fortune in their lives. This is what he says in his essay The End of a Golden String from his book Writing the Australian Crawl: “Let me say that a poem comes from a life, not a study. The influences pounce upon a writer, and any rules or traditions get buffeted. Entering the sequence–writing or reading–is entering what unfolds.”

Stafford rose every morning of his life at 4 AM to write. He knew that if he showed up for writing, if he sat there with pen in hand and began where he was at that moment that it was possible he would be led somewhere interesting. He believed in writing as a practice, not as a product. He says in his essay A Way of Writing: “A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them. That is, he does not draw on a reservoir; instead, he engages in an activity that brings to him a whole succession of unforeseen stories, poems, essays, plays, laws, philosophies, religions.” I feel in complete alignment with this view of writing. It is my experience that writing is 80% the heart and soul of the writer and 20% craft. I have read so much writing that did not move me–oh, there were deep contemplative thoughts, beautiful language arranged artistically on the page, but I felt nothing when I read it. There is nothing “wrong” with such writing or with the one who wrote it. There is only a misdirection of energy which has been perpetuated by the culture pointing the writer in the direction of intellect rather than spiritual and emotional depth.

I hadn’t been writing much of anything new since I had been here but after reading Stafford’s essays I sat down and did exactly what he suggests and this came to me by starting simply with describing what I saw…

Garden Studio Monday Morning

Out the window the water tower covered with ivy, a dozen red leaves clinging. On top a rotting two by four ensnared by the vine, moss clinging, three rusted nails protrude. A breeze shakes the yellow leaves. Inside the heater blows warm air. My fingers are chilled, goose bumps on my legs. I can feel the tip of my nose, icy and numb. In the garden below birds feed on decaying plants. The mottled hillside to the south is letting go the sun, slipping into winter. Somewhere people are wearing suits and ties, hose and high heels, taking elevators to the 23rd floor to their desks, opening their computer, a cup of coffee beside them, looking at the clock at nine, wanting it to be five. Somewhere trains are running and street lights change from red to green and mother’s drop their children at school, take the laundry to the cleaners, stop for groceries, fill the car with gas. Somewhere planes are flying to New York and Zurich and Bombay. Someone opens a magazine, another does a crossword, the earth passes below; farms and cities, mountains and rivers essing through the land. Here, outside the window, the tower, the trees and garden, the birds and clear blue sky. Here I am watching, recording. Here we are woven together, remembered; forever and immortal.

********

Here are some photos of the Garden Studio inside and out:

Road from Rock House up to Garden and other cabins farther up in the woods

The Garden Studio

The tower and garden shed.

My sleeping and meditation space.

My Writing Desk

This is a big room where performances can be held. That’s a grand piano in the corner.

Liza’s room

Out Liza’s window

Bukowski…one of those great and terrible and brilliant and heart-breaking and triumphant figures that chose in his life to write…to write about what he saw, what he felt and what made him who he was and to write like no one had ever written before. When I was studying in school a couple of years ago I spent quite a bit of time reading Bukowski’s poetry, went to the movie “Born Into This” about his life and wrote a couple of papers, one of which I’ve reprinted below and the other, which was about how I saw him and Rumi as some kind of poetry Odd Couple, I’ll save for some other time. I even had a very powerful dream about him when I was at the Idylwild Poetry workshop where I felt his spirit daring me to crack open the “nice” me and let out the lion. Of course I wrote a poem about the experience, which is still waiting to be revised (which of course Bukowski would hate). Anyway, since I’ve been facilitating a workshop on him this week he’s been cruising around in my consciousness with all his intensity and inspiration, so I thought I’d plunk down this essay. If you want more info on him there are dozens of websites and most of them have quite a few of his poems posted. Google away.

Charles Bukowski was born in 1920 in Germany. He spent his childhood and the majority of his adult life in Los Angeles. He is somewhat of a cult figure in the Los Angeles poetic scene. His childhood was a “horror,” as he describes it, of brutal beatings and emotional deprivation. He turned early in life to alcohol for escape from the pain of his past. In the documentary on his life, Bukowski: Born Into This, he is queried on when he started writing poetry. He says that when he was 13 he picked up a pencil and just started writing. He discovered a way to have a voice, to express himself that no one could take away from him.

There is rawness in Bukowski’s poetry that can be crude, even brutal at times. He writes of the street, the bedroom, the bar and the racetrack. The people in his poems are whores, pimps, crazed poets, women who throw themselves at him, and always, himself. He never shies away from telling what he sees and how he sees it. He doesn’t make excuses for how he sees the world or the dysfunctional world that he inhabits. This is where he lives. This is what he knows.

When I first began to read Bukowski’s poems I had a difficult time getting through the harsh language he often uses, but as I read deeper into the collection I was able to let go of my judgments and hear the beauty underlying his work. It was a tremendous help for me to hear Bukowski read his poetry and see the interviews with him in the documentary. To know about his life and the circumstances and times through which he lived are instrumental (at least for me) in connecting with the essence of his poetry. He suffered greatly and for most of his life he struggled mightily with functioning in any kind of social or structured society. He himself said that the one thing the beatings taught him was to “do away with any pretenses.” This is seen clearly in his poetry and in the way he lived his life.

Bukowski was a prolific writer. He wrote over 45 books of poetry and prose. When reading this volume of poetry it was as if I was reading a history of Los Angeles spanning half a century. His poems are written in a style that is very prose-like, with few flourishes or nuances. You can read down the page as if a story is being told, with scenes, dialogue, drama and humor all packed into a page or two—like you’re reading a short story. One example of this is the poem, “my literary fly,” written on a very hot day when he is trying to write. This is the first stanza:

115 degrees
not even a turkey could be happy in this heat
but it beats burning at the stake,
and like my uncle once said
(when I asked him how things were going)
he said, well, I had breakfast, I had lunch and
I think I’m going to have
dinner;
well, that’s us Chinaskis,
we don’t ask for much and
we don’t get much,
except I have an awful good-looking girlfriend
who seems to accept my madness,
but still, it’s
115 degrees.

Bukowski shines a light on the everyday. He glorifies the weather, the words of his uncle, his girlfriend and, most significantly, how we human beings simply cope with the life that has been handed to us. This, I believe, is what drew so many of the rebellious young to his poetry in the ‘60’s & ‘70’s. He did not sugarcoat. He did not offer a philosophy. He did not say he had the “answer” to anything. He put his screwed up life out there on the page and laughed at it, screamed at it and cried over it. He said, as the title proclaims, that “what matters is how well you walk through the fire.”

There is a tremendous amount of heart in Bukowski’s poetry. Underneath his crusty, belligerent exterior is a man of great tenderness. He is ferocious in his desire to be real in a world where there is so much pretension and conformity. He understands the men and women who are down and out, on the streets, who do what they have to do to survive. He knows he is one step away from being one of them.

winter: 44th year

I am sad
like
a
dead angel

I am sad
like
porksalt

I am mad
like
a
dead angel

a woman has
told me
when things get bad
she’ll come and
bring me
lovely living
angels.

I phoned her
an hour ago
holding a
sharp knife
in my
left hand.

the phone service
said
they’d

leave the
message.

Through all the drinking, gambling and rage Bukowski goes on. His message is always one of hope. There may be much despair in the lives of the people he writes about, and in his own circumstances, but every day he rises from his bed and he writes. He gives of himself and he has the courage to put what he knows down on paper and send it out into the world to be heard, to be felt and to be a hand reaching out to those who are lost and confused in an overwhelming world, where their voices are rarely heard.

Poetry clearly saved Bukowski’s life and if not for writing he might have ended up a violent criminal or a derelict on the street. He fought the good fight and through his poetry he found his way. In the final poem of this collection, an older, wiser and softer Bukowski speaks directly to the reader in “roll the dice.”

if you’re going to try,
go all the way.
there is no other feeling like
that.
you will be alone with the
gods
and the nights will flame with
fire.

do it, do it, do it.
do it.

all the way
all the way.

you will ride life straight to
perfect laughter, it’s
the only good fight
there is.
(last 4 stanzas)

Bukowski brought a dynamic new voice to poetry at the time when it was sorely needed. He freed many poets to follow him to speak in their natural voices, to speak of what they knew (even if it wasn’t “pretty”) and to throw a good majority of the “rules” out the window. His disdain for pretenses gives his poetry a freshness and an honesty that grips the reader from the first word to the last.

In all the multitude of poems that Charles Bukowski wrote there is one constant; if a man such as he, who has been through such unspeakable pain, can do his laundry, sort mail at the post office for 15 years, and sit down at the typewriter to write poetry every day of the year, then there is hope, and a place in this world, for all of us.

Monday morning I was feeling down in the dumps. I was sitting on the floor by the side of my bed doing a bit of yoga and trying to breathe myself out of my head and into a more expansive space. On my nightstand was the latest edition of the Best American Poetry (2006), so I picked it up and opened it to see what might fall out and found this poem by Mary Oliver. I was reminded how her poems were the portal through which I reconnected with poetry and understood the power of poems to reach into the soul and lay it open. I think what I love most about her writing is that she is so grounded in the earth and all of the plants and animals and minerals that inhabit it and she has the vision to see how we, the humans, are eternally trying to reconcile the earthly ways with the transcience of our own existence. We are made of the same fragile flesh but we have this capacity to comprehend that there is something beyond, that there is some organizing force pulsing through it all. Her poetry continues to touch me deeply.

The Poet with His Face in His Hands

You want to cry aloud for your
mistakes. But to tell the truth the world
doesn’t need any more of that sound.

So if you’re going to do it and can’t
stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can’t
hold it in, at least go by yourself across

the forty fields and the forty dark inclines
of rocks and water to the place where
the falls are flinging out their white sheets

like crazy, and there is a cave behind all that
jubilation and water fun and you can
stand there, under it, and roar all you

want and nothing will be disturbed; you can
drip with despair all afternoon and still,
on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched

by the passing foil of the water, the thrush,
puffing out its spotted breast, will sing
of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.

from New and Selected Poems, Volume Two
Beacon Press, 2005

I want to share a couple of poem and a few more photos from Dodge before moving on to other thoughts. It’s taken me this week just to get a little bit of a perspective on what I experienced there. If I was to say anything about what was lacking at the festival, for me it was more personal contact with the poets, real conversation about how they make their poetry and how they make their way as a poet in the world. The panel discussions and craft talks were fascinating and provocative and even though questions were always taken from the audience, a real discussion was not possible with the time constraints and the nature of the format. I guess it’s asking a bit much for a four-day extravangaza with thousands of people and only a handful of poets. It was a sampling that made me think about what poets I would want to hear again and perhaps take a workshop from in the future.

It could not be escaped, while we were there, the sentiment against the Bush administration and although there was little “political” poetry (Anne Waldman provided some powerfully presented pieces, however) there was poetry that did speak of the physical and emotional suffering born out of the conflict in the Middle East. Taha Muhammad Ali, a Palestinian poet living in Lebannon, who published his first poems at the age of 52, read an amazing poem called “Revenge” on stage the first day. I bought his most recent book of poems So What thinking it would be in there, but it wasn’t. I will share another one of his poems, followed by one by Brian Turner, a veteran of the Iraq war.

Taha Muhammad Ali w/translator, Peter Cole

Warning

Lovers of hunting,

and beginners seeking your prey:

Don’t aim your rifles

at my happiness,

which isn’t worth

the price of the bullet

(you’d waste on it).

What seems to you so nimble and fine,

like a fawn,

and flees

every which way,

like a partridge,

isn’t happiness.

Trust me:

my happiness bears

no relation to happiness.

Taha Muhammad Ali

So What: Publisher, Copper Canyon Press

*************

In the Leupold Scope

With a 40×60mm spotting scope
I traverse the Halabjah skyline,
scanning rooftops two thousand meters out
to find a woman in sparkling green, standing
among antennas and satellite dishes,
hanging laundry on an invisible line.
She is dressing the dead, clothing them
as they wait in silence, the pigeons circling
as fumestacks billow a noxious black smoke.
She is welcoming them back to the dry earth,
giving them dresses in tangerine and teal,
woven cotton shirts dyed blue.
She waits for them to lean forward
into the breeze, for the wind’s breath
to return the bodies they once had,
women with breasts swollen by milk,
men with shepherd-thin bodies, children
running hard into the horizon’s curving lens.
Brian Turner

Here Bullet: Publisher: Alice James Poetry Cooperative, Inc.

I had this thought that with all the survellience by the NSA on the internet that they might be searching sites that mention Muhammad and might even stumble on Poetry Evolution and read the poems thinking there could be something subversive going on and how the poems just might give whoever read them the tiniest bit of awakening, of tender thoughts of the pain of war. It’s possible.

A few more photos and if you’d like to check out some other websites with Dodge related commentary here are a few I found on a blog by a guy who was there and did the research to find the sites and included P.E.

Uncle Tonoose

Bud Bloom

Poet Mom

Late Night Meanderings

Steve’s 2 Cents

I flew back to L.A. on Monday. Liza and I drove from New Jersey to Boston on Sunday afternoon. We didn’t stay until the end. It was rainy and chilly and Liza was feelin’ a bit under the weather. We had a lot to talk about on the drive through the quickly turning autumn leaves–Tony Hoagland’s morning talk on the craft of poetry was fresh in my mind, as was the early session of reading Rumi and Hafiz with Robert Bly and Coleman Barks. I sat up front for both of these presentations and even though I was shivering (my thin California blood), enjoyed every minute of the two very different experiences. Bly and Barks have a trio of musicians with a cello, flute, and drums to accompany them and they trade off reading poems or stories of their own, of Rumi or Hafiz or Mirabai. Bly likes to throw in his own little comments as he’s reading the pieces and the spirit is very high as the wisdom of the mystical Sufi poets fills the giant tent. I’ll share a couple of photos with you of the two of them (apologies for the fuzziness), plus one of Tony Hoagland.

Tony Hoagland on Sunday

Robert Bly

Bly & Coleman Barks reading Rumi, Hafiz & Mirabai

I always enjoy the mixture of the spiritual and humor that the Sufi poets bring to their poetry. They encompass the ecstatic, the tragic and the comic.

Backing up to Saturday–it was my longest day at the festival. I started at 9:30 with panel of Ekiwah Adler-Belendez, Kurtis Lamkin and Brian Turner with the subject of “Going Public with Private Feelings.” All three of these men are so very different in their backgrounds, subject matter and style. Ekiwah (his name means courage) is 19 years old and has cerebral palsy, Kurtis Lamkin is an African American poet from New York City who performs his poetry playing a stringed instrument called the kora and Brian Turner, who is a veteran of the Iraq war and wrote his first book of poems, Here Bullet, during the time he was in Iraq. After their talk I cruised the Border’s bookstore tent and picked up way too many books to list here.

Kurtis Lamkin playing his kora while Ekiwah reads a poem

Liza, Becca and I took our lunches into the main tent where we waited for the feature poets to read from 12 to 3. We all enjoyed the reading of Andrew Motion, the poet laureate of England, who read a fantastic poem about the passing of his mother when he was a young child and one about his father who passed away not long ago. I don’t have any good pictures of him but you can go to his web site at andrewmotion.com. There was also a very powerful reading by a Bangaldesh woman poet, Taslima Nasreen, who has been exiled from her country for speaking out for the rights of women. Lucille Clifton wound up the afternoon with grace and style. Becca and I dashed off right after the readings for a panel discussion on “Finding Poetry’s Inner Music, Saying the Unsayable” with Toi Derricotte, Jori Graham, Tony Hoagland and Linda Pastan. Becca had been following Jorie Graham around since the first day, fascinated with how she approached the art of poetry and I was getting my first taste of her. I found her to be insightful and incredibly intelligent. She also spoke of connecting with spirit and seeking a higher source as a participant in her writing.

The crowd under the big tent.

Lucille Clifton

Tony Hoagland, Toi Derricotte, Linda Pasten, Jorie Graham

It’s only 6:30 pacific time right now but my body is still thinkin’ east coast so it’s getting late and I’m yawning and my mind cloud over. There are still a few more pictures and thoughts to share with you but I’ll get to it tomorrow or the next day. I haven’t begun to really digest all of what went in over those four days and how it will affect my writing and reading of poetry in the future. Here’s one last photo I took on Sunday at Waterloo Village.

It rained all night. No gale force winds or torrential downpours but it did rain on into the morning enough for us to pull out our umbrellas and raincoats. Didn’t stop us though. We arrived at Waterloo Village at 8:45 for the 9 a.m. poet conversations. Liza went to hear Tony Hoagland on the main stage and I decided to listen to Ko Un, a Korean poet who was born during the Japanese occupation of his country, lived through a wrenching war, was a Buddhist monk for ten years then a militant activist who was jailed for ten years, and is now married with a college-aged daughter. This morning he spoke of the rain as being our “guest” and how it was important to have rainy days in life, not always sunny, that it was good to struggle against the elements, how it built layers of resilence and character in the landscape.

Here is one of the poems he read (Ko Un read in Korean and the translation was read by Richard Silberg, co-editor of Poetry Flash):

The Poet

For a long time he was a poet.

Children

called him a poet and

women did too.

Surely he was a poet

more than anyone I knew.

Even the pigs and the boars

grunted him poet.

He died returning from a distant land.

In his hut there was not one word of poetry.

Was he a poet who didn’t write?

So a poet wrote a poem for him.

As soon as the poem was written,

the wind blew it away.

Then all the poems of the East and the West, old and new,

flew away, swish, swish,

every one followed suit.

*************

There is much more to say about this day but I will leave you with a few more pictures so I can, once again, get to bed and sleep well. Suffice it to say the days are filled with rich language and deeply expressed longings. There is vigorous conversation, tears of joy and sorrow and so much thought–contemplation on how words, language have the power to transform the human spirit–for better or for worse. This sacred trust is one the poet takes on as part of the mantle. It is no small thing and requires questioning and a willingness to forge into territory where one can err and come back to the page again and again to put thoughts on the page.

Linda Hogan and Gerald Stern

Billy Collins

Ekiwah Adler-Belendez (19 y.o. disabled in body–inspiring in his poetry and courage)

Brian Turner, an Iraqi vet who wrote about his experience of war

Main Stage Tent–After the sun came out

Becca (from Chicago) and me lookin’ good!

One of the buildings at Waterloo Village

There is beauty everywhere you look here

The geese who eat anything they can find (including candy wrappers)

The port-a-poddy. An essential (but not pleasant) part of the experience

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.

Next week is the Dodge Poetry Festival—a bi-annual poetry extravaganza staged in the village of Waterloo, New Jersey. This will be my second pilgrimage. I went two years ago for the first time. It was a year of record rainfall on the east coast as a result of hurricanes blowing through Florida and then angling north into New England. The mud was thick, cars got stuck, shoes were gummy and the organizers had to lay tons of hay all over the fields so we wouldn’t all be sucked down into the squishy muck. For the first time in the history of the event it was held at an alternate site, the Duke family park/estate. Despite the best efforts of all involved, the grounds took a beating and it’s clear that it was thought better to return to the old haunts, even though they are smaller and the event has grown substantially over the years.

Being there, where poetry is spoken fluently and there are so many venues with so many different poets speaking, reading their work or dialoguing is–as these things often go—alternately exhilarating and exhausting. Some of the highlights I remember were the early mornings at the main stage under a gigantic tent with a hot cup of tea listening to Coleman Barks read Rumi, accompanied by the music of the Paul Winter Consort; crowding into under an overflowing canopy on a sunny afternoon to hear Mark Doty talk about how poetry is made and keeping us all enthralled and entertained; Seeing Lucille Clifton, Sharon Olds and Gerald Stern, who I had the privilege to work with at Squaw Valley. And, really the best was being there in a community of people dedicated to something that has very little to do with money or power—an art form that, throughout all history, has spoken for the lost, the repressed, the dreamers, to be with those who do not see the primary source of fulfillment as a human being as one of acquisition and manipulation but one where the interior world of the heart and the commonality of our grief and desire is given a voice.

Throughout the week I’ll be logging on with commentary, photos and poems to share the experience with those of you who would like to be there but can’t be and those of you who are just curious to see what it’s all about. I’m flying out on Monday, the 25th to Boston where I’ll stay a couple of days with my friend Liza and drive to New Jersey on Wednesday. The poetry fest starts on Thursday and we’ll be there when the gates open, rain or shine.

Waterloo Village

The following is a guest post by friend and fellow poet, Sarb Nam Khalsa. She participated in the Five Days With a Master Poet Course in July on Anna Akhmatova and I felt the writing she did about how the poetry and the life of Akhmatova affected her were both eloquent and insightful. I hope to include Sarb Nam’s thoughts and poems again from time to time in the future.

What I find so powerful about Akhmatova’s work is her

accessibility and universality, which makes her poems

so relevant and present. Being of Russian descent,

I found a deep resonance with the words of this poet

whose pain and courage fired an amazing body of work.

This is a discussion of some of her poems and how they

speak to my personal life experience.

Sarb Nam

*************

*************

How many demands the beloved can make!
The woman discarded, none.
How glad I am that today the water
Under the colorless ice is motionless.
And I stand — Christ help me! –
On this shroud that is brittle and bright,
But save my letters
So that our descendants can decide,
So that you, courageous and wise,
Will be seen by them with greater clarity.
Perhaps we may leave some gaps
In your glorious biography?
Too sweet is earthly drink,
Too tight the nets of love.
Sometime let the children read
My name in their lesson book,
And on learning the sad story,
Let them smile shyly. . .
Since you’ve given me neither love nor peace
Grant me bitter glory.

Akhmatova 1913

Each line of this poem seems to echo some time in my life when I struggled with issues of self-worth, self-love, co-dependence, and an overwhelming need to be appreciated and loved by others, when I felt that my needs were being subsumed by the overwhelming needs of others and I repressed my creative spirit to please them for fear of losing their presence in my life, however dispiriting or crippling. Knowing that as a woman in society I could never really pursue my dreams without the support of men. How only the power of surrender and prayer to God would finally save me and allow me to walk safely on the brittle ice without fear; to face the death of my ego and my weakness and my insecurity and still come out a warrior. To escape the “nets of love” and dare to hope that I might leave a legacy of truth in the pursuit of the spirit, that my suffering shall not have been in vain and that others, generations hence, might find solace and inspiration. That I can dare to hope for something compensating that is not so much a bitter glory but a greater gift of knowing that one has made a valuable contribution that will live on beyond one’s physical death.

*************
Somewhere there is a simple life and a world,
Transparent, warm and joyful. . .
There at evening a neighbor talks with a girl
Across the fence, and only the bees can hear
This most tender murmuring of all.
But we live ceremoniously and with difficulty
And we observe the rites of our bitter meetings,
When suddenly the reckless wind
Breaks off a sentence just begun –
But not for anything would we exchange this splendid
Granite city of fame and calamity,
The wide rivers of glistening ice,
The sunless, gloomy gardens,
And, barely audible, the Muse’s voice.

Akhmatova June 23, 1915

Again, I too feel a longing for a “simple life and a world / Transparent, warm and joyful.” I remember this world from my childhood, shrouded in the blissful ignorance of youth. This poem transports me to that time and just as quickly reminds me of all the trappings of modern society lived “ceremoniously and with difficulty” as we “observe the rites of our bitter meetings.” I pray not to experience a loss of words, not to know a “reckless wind” that “breaks off a sentence just begun,” but to step forward courageously and speak my piece. Okay, I know I chose this life with all of its accompanying limits and challenges. However, like Akhmatova, I too would not “exchange this splendid / Granite city of fame and calamity” for anything…would not give up the opportunity to hear “barely audible, the Muse’s voice.”

*************

Wild honey has the scent of freedom,
dust–of a ray of sun,
a girl’s mouth–of a violet,
and gold–has no perfume.

Watery–the mignonette,
and like an apple–love,
but we have found out forever
that blood smells only of blood.

Akhmatova

What a poetic way to say that War Sucks!

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For the Ages

Sonnet
so slow that I can hear the
creaking of ages
Lines
written in solemn spaces
or noisy anterooms
with quill pens
and computers
dotting I’s and crossing T’s
so that we won’t forget
won’t slip into
a downward spiral
away from Art
Religion & Poetry
away from all that has
elevated us
one note
one ideal
one hope
at a time
out of the darkness
into the Light.

Sarb Nam Kaur Khalsa © 2006

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Lot’s Wife

And the just man trailed God’s shining agent,
over a black mountain, in his giant track,
while a restless voice kept harrying his woman:
“It’s not too late, you can still look back

at the red towers of your native Sodom,
the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed,
at the empty windows set in the tall house
where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed.”

A single glance: a sudden dart of pain
stitching her eyes before she made a sound . . .
Her body flaked into transparent salt,
and her swift legs rooted to the ground.

Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem
too insignificant for our concern?
Yet in my heart I never will deny her,
who suffered death because she chose to turn.

Akhmatova

For some reason, the poem “Lot’s Wife” has haunted me this week. I am taken by the simplicity of the telling of this story, without judgment, of a woman who had every blessing for a spiritual destiny (the theologians tell us that she was the wife of a professor and had access to the holy teachings and leaders of her time, including Abraham, who was her uncle by birth). Yet she chose to turn away from all this, even with a warning from God’s angels that to do so would cause instant death. What compelled this woman to turn her head, just to look, knowing that she could never return to her former life and all its comforts. Was she so fearful of the spiritual and physical terrain that lay ahead that she would rather die than meet her destiny head on? I feel drawn to this poem and to Akhmatova’s telling of the story. I feel redeemed by the poet’s forgiveness as she grants redemption to a woman lost in the pages of history, a woman condemned not by one religion but many for her lack of obedience and duty. Maybe she was answering to a higher call?

The Pillar

Who will grieve for me
when I am given up
to the burnt place
when the ashes of my body
sail in the immortal spaces
where once I played
and rejoiced?

Who will cry and mourn
my death, a passing
signifying nothing
and everything
to one who has invested their Soul
in a journey both monumental
and insignificant?

Will I sit counting
the wasted days and hours
when I could have been
working, or healing, or praying?
Will I regret the emotions
unexpressed and words unspoken
from fear or lack of imagination?
Why did I care so much about
the trash, or the laundry, or the housekeeping
when my Soul yearned for its
Home of Homes?

We all reckon with our own days
we wrestle with our daily regrets.
If I leave, let my legacy
be a grain of Truth
and not a pillar of salt.

Sarb Nam Kaur Khalsa © 2006