A couple of weeks ago I had the fun experience of reading a few of my poems in a studio. My friends Hilda (fellow poet) and Wayne (the director, cameraman, et al) invited me to give it a go. They’ve been filming poets around Los Angeles for the last year and have a website where they post them. They credit me with being the catalyst for the venture. At a feature reading of our Night Birds poetry group at Coffee Cartel a while back I asked Wayne to take some pictures with my digital camera and it planted the seed in him to get a video camera and the whole thing blossomed from there. 

Michael, another of the Night Bird poets (this is what the six of us who workshop with Sarah Maclay call ourselves), volunteered his loft/studio space at The Brewery in east L.A. and filled in as the "sound man" on the taping. It took a couple of hours and the whole thing was really fun and interesting: getting the lights, the background, timing, camera angle, sound, all just right. So far there are three studio tapings: Michael’s, mine and a poet named Annette Sugden (not a Night Bird). You can take a look at them (and more) at Poetry.LA. Just click on the picture and it will take you to YouTube.

Of course, looking at the video, I can see where I could have done so many things better: smiling more, for one, and doing more voice modulation in tone and energy. Oh, well, it’s a learning experience and it could definitely have been worse. I took a couple of pictures of us at Michael’s after the shoot. We were breaking everything down and getting ready to go before I remembered, so the pics are staged after the fact.

Hilda, Wayne & me 

Pretending to be filmed–but it looks good! 

Michael outside of his loft at The Brewery. 

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

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

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

Promissory Note

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

Galway Kinnell
Strong Is Your Hold
Houghton Mifflin Company, Publishers

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

 One of the "chandeliers" hanging in the atrium.

Escalators from above.

 The Statue of Civilization

Mural: The Founding of Los Angeles

No, I haven’t been to Maine or Alaska, but I did just get back from a fantastic week of poetry in Napa Valley, where Show me a moose and Get wet were the two clarion calls that arose out of poems from our workshop led by David St. John. There are four groups of twelve that meet every morning, each guided by a Master Poet (Elizabeth Alexander, Jane Hirshfield, Stephen Dunn or David St. John). There is no set curriculum, with each Poet having the latitude to assign exercises and processes for the participants to produce a new poem every day and bring to the group for critique. I can’t speak for the other groups, but I was more than thrilled with quality of the participant poets in the group I was in and found the exercises David challenged us with, to be both fun and expansive. (See below for a sample.)

The conference hosts both fiction and poetry writers with craft talks and readings by each of the workshop leaders. It’s a long day, with lectures and workshops during the day and readings every evening. I had to find some time to recoup and to write my poem for the next day, so never did get to any of the fiction writer’s craft talks. The poets each gave great craft talks and I’ve included a couple of quotes from each below.

I have to give it to the administrative staff and all their support staff for running a seamless conference. Ann Evans, Nan Cohen & Willa Rabinovitch, the program directors, were always upbeat, supportive and efficient in taking care of the needs of both the instructors and the participants. Maybe I am just more relaxed, but it seemed to me that this year (I attended in 2005) the whole program was even more harmonious energetically and richer in valuable information on writing. Not to mention the food, (provided by Napa Valley Cooking School) which was super, super good—a light breakfast and delicious lunch every day, with an additional dinner on the first night with a final picnic on Thursday night. It was a culinary feast each day and you know how important it is to have great food when your brain is working overtime. As a vegetarian it can often be slim pickins at workshops and conferences, but these folks got it all right and provided an equal variety of tasty entrees and side dishes for the non-meat eater. 

As for my own process—I came away with a few good poems, but what is more exciting was the ease at which the poems showed up and how much fun they were to write. I don’t always get this—no writer does. But when it happens—WHOOPEE! You get on that pony and ride. I have to give big credit to the assignments that David handed out to us Sunday night. There were about ten of them and his instructions were to pick one every day as a guideline to write the next day’s poem—didn’t matter which exercise or which day. Some of the instructions were to write in a particular form (sonnet, rondelet, triolet), some were to use a particular process (the “martini” poem, dramatic monologue) and some you were to use a particular “evocation” to bring forth the poem (something “lost,” epistolary, or landscape/memory). I have to say, the results were both surprising and impressive, and got more so as the days progressed, not only in my own work, but very much so in how the whole group fed off the inspiration of each other and kept raising the bar, not in a competitive way, but in a supportive one. The caliber of the participants really blew me away, both in the quality of their work and the quality of their critiquing.

To wrap up (and get to the good part, the photos), the week was a success on multiple levels, in that I came away having learned a lot (still digesting), met some wonderful people and connected with others I’d met before, and I feel my poetry “toolkit” has been greatly enhanced. All of these combined to bolster my own work and propel me one inch further along the path of “poet.”

Landscape/Memory Poem Exercise:
Deliver us to a place you once lived, perhaps between the ages of 9 and 12 and describe it with meticulous physical detail. That’s section 1. Now, in section 2, confront the memory of an event or person from that place and time. Let us see the event of section 2 against the backdrop of section 1.

Quick Quotes from the Craft Talks:

Elizabeth Alexander:
Is the poem cleanly achieving its possibilities?
Consider the relationship of the breath to the iambic line.

Jane Hirshfield:
As children go to storybooks, adults go to poems to be rightfully frightened.
A window in a poem is where the poem breaks open—enlarges the view.
Insight is not gained by domestication.

David St. John:
A poem is a model of consciousness—an experience.
You can seize a language that belongs to you through writing poetry—bring the fullest sense of yourself.

Stephen Dunn:
Where the poem turns is where the poet makes their most significant discovery.
Grace is what occurs when technique has been loved for a long time and then forgotten.

 
Hilda & I flew into Sacramento and drove the back roads to St. Helena. This "luggage sculpture" is in the baggage claim at Terminal 2.

The first night’s reading was outside at the Napa Valley Community College, where the course was held.

 
A few of the participant poets in the David St. John workshop preparing for the morning. The tables were sprinkled with glue, paint and who-knows-what ground into them, making for a very "artsy" surface on which to muse and write.

Hilda & I in front of the fountains at the Rubicon Estate where the third day’s reading took place.

 Roy, our host at the Spanish Villa Inn where we stayed in St. Helena. Hospitality PLUS!

Hanging out on the lawn. Ann knitting, Nan in stripes, Jane Hirshfield standing at left.

Milling about before the food arrives at the picnic.

 Mickey (from Alabama), Greg & Joel finishing up their yummy meal with good conversation.

David and Greg working on their poems (or, maybe not).

Christina and Melissa, two of my roommates from Squaw Valley last year. 

First Books Panel: Austin Grossman (fiction), Indigo Moor (poetry) and Albert Flynn DeSilver (poetry). Indigo was in my workshop with Jane Hirshfield in 2005. You can check out (and buy) his book, Taproot, at Main Street Rag Publishing. 

Last day, eating our bagged lunches and saying Good-bye (David, Christina, Bonnie & Wendy) 

Wendy (from Virginia) and her partner, Gary (who was there for moral support and is a poet and professor and all-round nice guy.) 

Hilda & I bid Adieu to the Spanish Villa and a great week of poems! 

Yesterday, at the Ruskin Art Club here in L.A., I took an all day workshop with David St. John, a USC professor of poetry and well-known local poet. I had heard so many great things about his workshops from my fellow poets in the last couple of years, but this was the first time I actually made it to a workshop. The title was Lyric Inspiration in Contemporary American Poetry: Cinema, Fragmentation and Erasure. The content of the session was far more accessible than the title. David gave us a general overview of how the cinema and pop culture has affected literature and poetry in particular, especially in the times following the first and second world wars. Poets like Frank O’Hara, Larry Levis, Norman Dubie and John Ashbery. He also talked about how the fragmentation of the culture, the move away from an agrarian society to an industrial one particularly was a catalyst for poets to speak more personally, to seek connection and community through their writing and to speak as the “I” and represent the “we.” T.S. Eliot’s, The Wasteland, was one of the first poems of this kind.

Somehow I missed getting the email with instructions for the day, so neither brought a well-known poem to illustrate the cinematic influence, nor did I bring a poem of my own to be workshopped in the afternoon. No loss though, the day was thoroughly enjoyable. There were several friends of mine in attendance and David has an ease of manner and an openness that makes everyone feel uplifted and relaxed sharing their thoughts and their poems (which were all quite good). Because I was having such a good time I completely forgot to take a picture—which can often be a bit awkward in these small groups, anyway. I’m definitely getting on the email list to get notice of David’s workshops in the future. Besides, I have a one-poem credit to get critiqued for the next one—kinda like a gift card for $20 from Best Buy or Trader Joe’s, but infinitely more delicious!

One of the several Larry Levis poems read in the morning session:

    Photograph: Migrant Worker, Parlier, California, 1967

    I’m going to put Johnny Dominguez right here
    In front of you on this page so that
    You won’t mistake him for something else,
    An idea, for example, of how oppressed
    He was, rising with his pan of Thompson Seedless
    Grapes, from a row of vines. The band
    On his white straw hat darkened by sweat, is,
    He would remind you, just a hatband.
    His hatband. He would remind you of that.
    As for the other use, this unforeseen
    Labor you have subjected him to, the little
    Snacks & white wine of the openings he must
    Bear witness to, he would remind you
    That he was not put on this earth
    To be an example of something else,
    Johnny Dominguez, he would hasten to
    Remind you, in his chaste way of saying things,
    Is not to be used as an example of anything
    At all, not even, he would add after
    A second or so, that greatest of all
    Impossibilities, that unfinishable agenda
    Of the stars, that fact, Johnny Dominguez.

    Larry Levis

After hearing for months from my friend Hilda about the monthly poetry reading at Village Books in Pacific Palisades I finally made it last night. I allowed myself plenty of time to make the drive down Pacific Coast Highway and up Temescal Canyon Road to the village center. Three of us (Hilda, our friend Barbara from the Nightbirds, and I) met at six for dinner and to catch up on our respective personal and poetry news, then we walked the two blocks in the crispy coastal air to Village Books. The place was packed, and that doesn’t take much in this diminutive bookstore. It’s one of those rare (I refuse to say "dying") breeds of locally-owned booksellers and with the cost of rents in a place like the Palisades they have to use every square inch to sell their books, which were stacked, piled, and shelved from top to bottom, wall to wall. There were about twenty chairs set up in the front facing the display window and we were advised to grab one now or risk standing.

The monthly readings are called the Moonday Poetry Readings and are co-hosted by Alice Pero and Lois P. Jones. Alice was the emcee for the evening and had us all seated and the first half-hour of open mic readings started right on time at 7:30. Both Hilda and I had signed on to read, along with about fifteen other local poets. Spirits were definitely cheerful and there was a warm and welcoming energy from the regulars, which helped the few newbies, such as myself, feel right at home. Each reader was given two minutes or two poems and the poems, for the most part were well written and well read. I went fourth in the line-up and read a new prose poem and a list poem I had written at Squaw Valley this summer. (To read and hear them scroll down to the next post.)

There is always a "feature" poet or poets, and this month it was a father/son duo, Willis (the father) and Tony Barnstone (Associate Professor at Whittier College). Tony went first and read from a variety of pieces: his translations of the Chinese poets from a soon-to-be-published manuscript and his own poems, both published and new. His presentation was lively, engaging and relaxed. He was good at keeping the audience from glazing over (as he put it) by varying the length of the poems and the subject matter. There were a few poems from one manuscript he is working on that were about WWII soldiers, relaying their own accounts of the events of that war and how they were changed by them. These were my favorite and I would love to have this volume when it comes out. For more information on Tony and to read a couple of his poems click HERE.

Willis Barnstone is a man who has been many, many places on this earth and has rubbed elbows with the likes of Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg, been published in some of the top journals and magazines in the country, as well as being fluent in Greekand French (he read one poem in each of these languages). He read poems some wonderful poems taking us all over the world and into some lyrical and often humorous places. It was truly inspiring to see a man of his age and stature so delighted to be reading to this small, but enthusiastically attentive group. For more on Willis Barnstone click HERE.

Following the feature reading there was another half-hour of open mic with some wonderful poems; one lady sang, one young man read his poems from his Blackberry (having forgotten to bring poems on paper) and the last gentleman (who came all the way from Westchester) played an exotic stringed instrument with two fret boards (is that what you call them?). I think he said it was a kind of dulcimer, but I could be completely wrong. At about 10:15  the evening wound down and then books were signed and sold. Myself, I was pretty tuckered out so headed on home having had a perfectly charming and surprisingly stimulating evening. As much as I love poetry I have found that even I can get too much of it and start to zone out after an hour or so. Not last night. It was good stuff and I’m definitely going to be frequenting the Monday night readings in the future and keep bringing my poems along. Next time I’ll bring my camera and get some shots to post, as well. If you’re in the area I highly recommend it. Click on MOONDAY to visit their site.

The Night Birds is the affectionate monikor for five poets who meet regularly with our mentor poet, Sarah Maclay, to share new poems, thoughts on revision, what we’re reading, where we’re workshopping and sending submissions, where we’re stuck or flying high and basically roll like happy horses in the dust and mud and wonder of poetry. Night Birds is comprised of Barbara, Hilda, Michael, Stephany and myself. We were fortunate enough to be invited to read at The Coffee Cartel by our hosts from the Redondo Poets, Jim Doane, Larry Colker and our own, Stephany Prodromides, as a feature for their weekly gathering on Tuesday evening. Each of us have all read at different venues over the last few years, but this was our first foray as a group.

Starting from varying points we all began the evening by plowing through pre-Thanksgiving traffic, trekking south on either the 405 or Hwy 1 or winding through clogged city streets. It took Barbara and I a good hour-and-a-half of mostly bumper-to-bumper before we slid into a parking spot on Cataline Avenue, half-hour late for our dinner date with the group at the ZaZou Bistro. We quickly shed the traffic tension and relaxed into good food and even better conversation. Stephany brought her husband, Chris, Michael, his beautiful young daughter, Isabella and Hilda, her friend, Wayne, who agreed to be our official photographer for the night. Sarah had come to introduce us at the reading and proceeded (with a substantial twinkle in her eye) to pass out index cards and ask us each to write down a color, tree, flower, musical instrument, season, and clothing part, pass them to the left or right or across, setting us up to do a writing exercise for the next time we met. This kept us well occupied and filled in the gap between when we ordered and when we were served our food.

After dinner we walked two doors down to The Coffee Cartel and settled in on the scattered couches and around the small tables while the sound system was set up and people signed on for the open mic portion of the evening, which began at eight. About 8:30 the five of us were introduced as a group by Sarah (always eloquent and generous) and then as each of us took our turn reading, beginning with Hilda, then me, Michael, Barbara and Stephany. We each read about for four minutes (4-5 poems), then went one more round with a poem each at the conclusion. The crowd was friendly and appreciative. I think they might have enjoyed the variety of hearing five different voices in one feature reading. It keeps the interest level a little more acute, possibly, than hearing one poet for the full thirty minutes. Anyway, we all agreed it was a triumphant night, on a personal and poetical level. I toast my fellow Night Birds for their poetry and their panache! And to Sarah for taking time away from her incredibly demanding schedule to join and support us. And to friends and family who showed up that night and all the days and nights that we give to poetry.

Below are photos of the reading which, cosmically turned out to be in this golden, muted, slightly blurred form, possibly due to the lighting in Coffee Cartel or Wayne’s unfamiliarity with my digital camera (which I can barely operate myself). I kinda like them, actually. It gives the whole thing a surreal touch, as poetry readings most often feel like when you’re standing up there. I’ve also included a selected poem by each poet, with their kind permission.

*****

Chris (Stephany’s husband) was great moral support for all of us.

Isabelle, (Michael’s daughter) who is an artist and musician in her own right.

The cozy confines of Coffee Cartel.

Sarah introducing The Night Birds.

(Read on …)