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

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

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

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

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

Gini reciting her poem by heart! 

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

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

Thomas Lux: The Air Plant  Grand Cayman by Hart Crane

Heather McHugh: Vulnerability by Yannis Ritsos

Alan Shapiro: The Oxen by Thomas Hardy

Quincy Troupe: Only Death by Pablo Neruda

Ellen Bryant Voight: Sailing to Byzantium by William Butler Yeats

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Building across the street from the Old School Square.

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

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

The old gymnasium as the Gala was just getting started.

Talking poems at our table. 

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

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

Dorianne Laux and Stephen Dunn answering questions. 

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

It’s 4:30 in the morning. I’ve been in and out of sleep for an hour or so. The heater in the studio clanks and booms every time it comes on but I’m snuggled deep under the comforter trying to get some much needed rest. Just as I am slipping deeply into sleep again I am startled awake by loud (I mean LOUD) shrieks coming from Liza’s room and I’m bolt upright in bed shouting, “What is it? What is it?” She’s on my bed in two seconds flat. “A mouse! A mouse on my chest, looking right at me! I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it” There are critters around here and possums and raccoons roam the property at night alongwith their furry friends, but we were fairly certain that we wouldn’t be having any visitors in our studio but this little guy had another idea. Well, after talking Liza down and waiting for the sun to rise we both decided that this was a clear message that it was time to head out of Hambidge and back home to Boston and L.A. We were planning on leaving on Friday anyway and it turns out a big storm is whooshing up the east coast in the next couple of days so it was a good idea to get going before it hit. We (well, I’m not sure Liza’s in complete agreement) call the mouse “our little angel” as he prompted us to leave and miss the storm.

All in all we come away from Hambidge with a lot of good writing down and some life lessons that we’re still in the process of sorting through–and I’m sure we will continue to do so for a long time. We’re in Chester, Virginia tonight and heading to bed early to get up at 5 and on the road at 6 driving to Philly where I’ll be getting on a plane to L.A. Liza will be getting home that evening. We’re both ready to be home and in our own beds, under our own covers, hopefully with no mice to contend with. We’ll see where the writing goes from here. Posted below are a few more photos I’ve taken over the last week.

Fran, the resident co-ordinator, in her office.

Back door to the Rock House.

Spot, the cat. Where were you when we needed a mouser??

The garden shed.

The recycling and garbage shed.

In the garden.

Down the road at Hambidge.

On the back porch at Garden.

Abandoned house and barn.

At the Dillard pharmacy and soda shop.

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

I don’t know if you can ever really tame your dragons. More likely you can come to peace within yourself and learn to accept a certain amount of turmoil when you stir up their nest. What am I talking about? Well, coming thousands of miles across the country and ending up in a cabin in the woods, a rustic cabin, without phone or internet, and me without a car, well, that got my dragons out and roaring. I’ve spent three out of five nights at the Holiday Inn Express and Liza and I were on the brink of making like trees and “leafing” this morning because we were having such a difficult time sleeping and focusing on our work. We decided to check out one last option…the Garden Cabin, which has a very large room and a small “apartment” in the back with a bedroom, kitchen and bath. We decided to give it a go and unloaded our bags once more and rearranged the furniture, setting up a futon bed for me in the big room and settling Liza in the back. With that settled we’re hoping to get back to honing in on our writing.

I’ve been working on compiling and organizing my essays and have enjoyed seeing them all again, like old friends, reminding me of the times and the places when they were conceived. I have a lot of affection for these writings. They feel like a conversation I was having with friends, working out what was difficult or joyous or curious or infuriating. I can see in them where I speak authentically and where I can tend toward more of a stiff, prosaic voice. I just got through reading the book, If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland. I’ve had it on my bookshelf for at least five years (a recommendation from a friend when I first started writing) and pulled it out last week just before I left, thinking it would be inspiring to take it with me this week. Ms. Ueland was a strong and independent woman who taught writing to “regular folks” and reveled in seeing how when someone spoke true to their own way of being, how alive and engaging their writing was for the reader. She loudly and clearly denounces academic writers who make their work complicated and convoluted, not telling their stories from the heart, but from the head. I felt she spoke so directly to my own misgivings and have now put her right up there as one of my muses along the journey of creating this manuscript. I highly recommend this book for writers–beginning, intermediate and especially, advanced.

Rock House, where meals and laundry and phone are. The first night we went to dinner we were swarmed by thousands of lady bugs right at the front steps. It was a warm day and they must have hatched. By the next day they were all dead.

Liza & I in Rock House catching up on email.

On Friday night we had an impromptu get together. I read one of my essays and a couple of poems and Kathy (below) did a presentation of one of her pieces (she’s a storyteller, writer and actress) about the women of the South during the Civil War, spoken with their own words. It was really wonderful.

It’s high color season here in the Southern Appalachians. I took some photos of the local landscape and even though a couple of them are a bit hazy, you can see how absolutely stunning Autumn is here in northern Georgia.

Please Note that you can click on book and author titles and be taken directly to Powell’s Bookstore to purchase or peruse. Or, you can use the Powell’s Search on the sidebar to look for and purchase on their site.

The food here is fantastic (didn’t I say that in the last post?) and last night Cindy outdid herself with herbed soup, pasta with garlic, mixed green salad with homemade dressing and these little breaded eggplant rolls stuffed with cream cheese and ricotta that were so delicious of course I had to have seconds. And everything is vegetarian, which is such a blessing when there are so many of these kind of workshops or retreats where I’m reduced to eating lettuce, tomato and cheese sandwiches.

Before each meal all the fellows (that’s the term for the artists here, male or female) all hang out eating hors d’oeuvres and talking about our projects, our day and anything that happens to come up. Last night the discussion included Rilke’s poems, if the artist can ever make art without imprinting his/her mood or intention into the art, the thousands of swarming lady bugs (most of which were laying dead on the windowsills, floor and tables all over the enclosed porch), and about the bear hunters who might have been out that day treeing a bear.

Janet, Kathy and Liza

Dick and Norma

Fereydoon & James

I slept at the cabin last night, watched a couple of my movies from The Spiritual Cinema Circle, locked all the doors and turned on the night light so I could find my way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I didn’t sleep particularly well, but that’s not news these days. I loved the quiet and felt very warm and secure in this little cabin. In the morning the light coming through the mist onto the leaves was exquisite and a good omen for a creative and productive day.

In the morning I read and wrote for a couple of hours then organized my printed essays to prepare for the afternoon when Liza came over and we put them up on the white board into preliminary categories with poems to go with them. Tomorrow I’m going through quotes I have saved over the years to match a quote with each piece. This is all such a great process and we were so stoked by the end just looking at them all hanging there–actual manifestation of a budding manuscript.

Today the sun arrived and the temperature went up into the 70’s. We arrived yesterday at Hambidge in the rain, pouring at times, fog and wind, like it was going to go on for days or weeks. But it moved on, went south and today the colors of the trees on the hillsides call to be admired, to be stared at, open-mouthed and with reverance. It’s the south and everything here seems of a gentler nature; people passing on the street slow their step just a bit, say hello, nod, look you in the eye. The little town of Clayton, five miles south of Dillard (where The Hambidge Center resides) has a health food store, a coffee shop called the The Grape & the Bean, a local medium who visits once a month to do readings at Mindful Expressions, a “new age” shop owned and run by Christy, a 64-year old, whose charm and wit kept Liza and I buying crystals, candles and charms for ourselves and friends until we’d racked up a good $100 each.

Last night was our first dinner with the other artists here. There are eight of us this week: Norma, a quilter from Asheville; James, a painter from Atlanta; Dick, a composer, from Atlanta; Kathy, a storyteller, from Murietta, GA; Fereydoon, a painter from Atlanta; Janet, a poet from Columbus, OH. The chef, Cindy (whose reputation as a fantastic cook preceded her), laid out a delicious dinner of lentil dahl, curry, basmati rice, collard greens and pumpkin bread for dessert. Better even than the wonderful taste was the loving energy felt in the ingestion of such food. It was a sweet beginning to our week and we were welcomed with loving arms into the Hambidge family of artists.

My little nest in the woods is called Cove Cabin. It has wood floors painted white, a red roof, windows that stretch across one entire side of the house looking out into the trees to the hills beyond. There’s a small bedroom, living room with two desks in it, a couch, chair and fireplace. The kitchen and bathroom do what they were intended–no frills, definitely this is a “cabin” not a condo. I set up a little altar, hung a sparkling angel in the window, burnt incense, lit candles, laid out my books and bought a flowering plant to place on the desk. It is beginning to feel like home. Today I read and slept and wrote a little bit–a warming up exercise, mostly, about the leaves and the sounds of the animals in the woods. Last night I slept in a hotel in town as I wasn’t quite ready to be alone in the cabin, but tonight I’ll sleep there on my little single bed and listen to the night and hopefully, dream a good dream.

The woods outside my cabin at twilight in the rain.

Leaves on the path.

The road up to the cabin.

Cove Cabin with the sun breaking through.

Leaves, leaves.

The Grape & Bean in Clayton.

I’m sitting in a hotel in Asheville, North Carolina. The rain is drizzling outside. It’s dark. Liza and I were in the car from 8 am until 6. We drove through the Blue Ridge and the Applachian Mountains. We ate Mexican food at a little town in southern Virginia. We listened to two CD’s of poetry with Sandburg, Auden, St. Vincent Millay, T.S. Eliot, Langston Huges, H.D., and more. We talked about our writing projects, our kids, friends, her enrollment in the MFA program at Lesley University. Claudine (that’s what we call the satellite navigator in her car) kept us on track telling us in her calm, but insistent voice, when to turn right or left, what exit to take and exactly how many miles and how many minutes to our destination. We talked about the heart chakra and Tony Hoagland and how road trips give you a chance to examine your thoughts and allow fresh input into sometimes stale brain cells. I got a motto for the upcoming week from a Langston Hughes poem “Deeds cannot know what dreams can do.” Oh, my God, if this could only be broadcast throughout the land–downloaded onto every IPod, MP3 player, computer and run across the bottom of the daily news–what a different world it would be. We ate sushi and salad and veggies with rice for dinner, checked our email and our phones and now we’re at rest until tomorrow and the adventure begins as we get settled in our little cabins, hang our clothes in the closet, put our almond milk and blueberries and tofu in the fridge, make the bed, set out a candle or two, stack the books on the desk, set up the computer, pull out a pen, a notebook, stare out the window at something new, something we’ve never seen before. Tomorrow is full of possibilities, just as today was and as every day will be, because that’s what we feed on, as much as air or water or food or love…be they grand or be they humble, we must have possibilities, or we have nothing, we only trudge along…we do not sing, never dream. Wow! That got heavy all of a sudden. Well, here’s to dreams and possibilities and blue, smoky mountains and sushi and a good night’s sleep on a tempurpedic bed with down pillows and cotton sheets!

A Dream Deferred

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
…Langston Hughes

The photos below were taken at the rest stop right after we crossed over the Tennessee state line. They had a whole visitors center there with brochures for all the sites in Tennessee, including Dollywood, which Liza was keen on going to. (I’m going to get in big trouble for that one.) They also had the highest rating so far on the trip for bathroom cleanliness and fragrance…and that’s no small thing to accomplish.

Tomorrow, at 5 AM I am driving to the airport and flying to Philadelphia where my friend Liza will pick me up (she’s driving down from Boston) and then we’ll be on the road for a day and a half on the way to Rabun Gap, Georgia to spend two weeks at the Hambidge Center for the Arts and Sciences. We both were granted fellowships and will be helping each other work on our writing projects, each in our own cabin with no TV, no internet (except for one line that we all share), no husbands, no jobs, no errands, and all the rest that comes with maintaining one’s “regular” life. I’ve never done anything like this before and up until a couple of days ago was trying all sorts of ways to understand how I was going to do it–felt like I had to really accomplish something big…go with a plan and come away with a product. Well, that’s pretty much disappeared and I’m simply looking forward to dreaming, reading, taking my journal and writing while I sit on the porch swatting flies and sipping tea. I desperately need the “nothing” where anything can, and often does, happen in the creative realm. I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to blog, or even if I’ll want to, while I’m there but you can be assured I’ll be taking pictures and jotting down my thoughts to share.

Yesterday, here in L.A., there was a substantial cloud burst in our neighborhood. It was a very local event but the sky and the light and the rainbows were spectacular. I thought I’d share a couple of photos I took, one looking north, the other south. The contrast was amazing. If you look closely you can see the rainbow in one of them. I’m taking it as a good omen (it did happen on Friday, the 13th) for my trip and that the muses will be with me.

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