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. 

It’s been a busy poetry week, not to mention the revving up for the holidays (which I don’t participate in at full bore). I’ve been to two readings and met with three different workshop groups. I had on my schedule to go to another reading this afternoon, but decided to stay home instead. Starting in October it was my intention to branch out more into the poetry community here in L.A. until I’m off and traveling later in the spring. I’ve made it a point to attend and participate in more workshops, readings and events in the local Southern California area–to get a taste of who’s doing what. I also wanted to do more open mic readings, to get myself out there. What I’m understanding more and more is that although I often enjoy these outings and find them useful in my own process, not to mention supporting fellow-poets, they can be a drain on my creative energy. It’s not just the physical aspect of driving the L.A. streets and freeways to get to these things and staying up a little later than would be my preference. It’s more about realizing that there is only so much of other people’s poetry and opinions my psyche can handle, quite a bit of which I don’t find useful and often times find detrimental in enhancing my own creative process. Suffice it to say, I’ll be cutting back on some of these excursions and pinpointing those activities that really do have the maximum amount of juice for the effort—small get togethers with writers I know and trust to be honest and supportive and quality readings where the poet uplifts and inspires with their work and with their humanity. (Such as the reading last Monday by Robert Hass.)

I’ve also been thinking a lot about what it means to be a “poet.” What I’ve come up with is that I’m not interested in being any one thing and truthfully, what I’ve observed in our cultural is that there is way too much baggage that comes along with any particular label and I don’t want the parts that never will apply to me and the parts I don’t want to ever apply. I know that sounds rather vague, but the distinction really is between being tagged as falling into a general category or being me, Hari Bhajan, with all the subsets underneath: Woman, Mother, Daughter, Wife, Friend, Sikh, Life Coach, Business Administrator, Writer of Poems, Workshop Facilitator, etc. You get the idea. It’s way less pressure not to feel squeezed into a mold that will never quite fit and actually be a distraction from the truth of the whole, of who I am.

Oh, by the way, a regular reader mentioned the other day that she hadn’t seen any of my poems in the e-letter or on the blog in quiet awhile. The reason is that I’ve been submitting many of my poems to journals for publication these last few months and generally they do not accept any work that has been previously published, even if it’s on your own website. The good news is (well, it’s good news for me, anyway) several of my poems will be appearing in issues of journals around the country very soon. I’ll keep you updated on which ones with links to their sites. The latest two are at Poetic Diversity, an online journal that published a poem in their August issue and Lilliput Review, which is a small journal devoted to small poems. In their most recent issue, #159, they published the poem Spirito, which I wrote for my father on his 85th birthday, just a few months before he passed away.

Here’s a little Christmas fun for you…our next door neighbor, Billy, and his family built a gingerbread house to enter into a contest to benefit a charity. It had to be constructed of all edible materials. My husband helped them load it into their SUV to take to the hotel where they were all being displayed. I haven’t heard how it fared in the contest. I don’t think Billy much cared. He was just having a good time putting it together. It’s really quite amazing!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

View of the mountains with the whirling windmills below.

Wood carving of a Chief at a nearby Museum

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

THE DESERT

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

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

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

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

Return here often and listen for me.

Tom Absher
The Paper Rose
Plain View Press, Publishers
 

Saturday night, following a week when fires raged, Mercury was doing it’s retrograde thing and the moon shone full on it all, four Vermont College graduates of the Class of Fall, 2005, found a way to spend nearly an hour together trying to catch up on each other’s very creatively active lives. The catalyst was our New York City friend, Tamara, who came to town for the installation of her partner’s paintings in a local gallery. We had hoped to have a few more folks join us and to find more time to connect, but that wasn’t to be, so we did the best with what we were able to eke out.  Here’s who they are and what they’re up to…

Tamara:  Graphic artist (designed our graduation program), painter, collagist and altar maker (click HERE for website), blogger (HERE for blog) and lover of her pup, Bear. Of course this is only the short list. The exciting news is that Tamara will be leaving for Bern, Switzerland in January for a six month artist residency, where she will have the opportunity to visit fabulous museums and galleries, but most importantly focus solely on manifesting the brewing ideas and visions in her head. (The painting in the picture is by Chris, her partner. It’s Wonder Bread, in all it’s glory.)

Christine: Photographer (I have three of her photos from Romania hanging in my home in Oregon), painter and interior stylist. Christine’s also a mother of two and grandmother of three, who’s become quite the accomplished yogi and has plans to spend a few weeks in India at an ashram in the coming year. She just bought a new home in Mar Vista, remodeled it and set up a darling little art “shack” to work on all her projects.

Brit: One of a kind guy, Brit got his B.A. in “Popping,” a dance style akin to break dancing. He’s from Maine, but has been in L.A. for a few years (took some months to travel to Israel and Egypt after graduation). His mission is to get the whole world up and dancing—feeling the spirit of movement. His group is Elastic Illusion and they perform and make instructional videos.

 
Group Pic and the closest thing Vermont College will ever have to a cheerleading squad!! 

For the first time in years I look forward to the mail dropping down the chute. There are more than bills, coupons and credit card solicitations coming in the mail these days. In the last three or four months I’ve been submitting my poems to journals—actually getting them out there into the world and seeing if they stick anywhere. I’ve taken the whole submission process on with vigor; setting up computer files containing documents on the submission guidelines of nearly 150 literary journals (gleaned from their web sites), two or three “cover letter” templates, folders with a copy of each poem submitted (hard copy and on computer), and the same for each journal submitted to, organized by date and alphabetically. There’s a bit of OCD in all of this, but it’s a way, I think, of keeping some emotional distance, of relegating this part of the poetic journey to the left side of the brain where it belongs.

When submitting work rejection is the norm, as all poets and writers know, and you’re doing well if you get one poem accepted out of a hundred submissions. This can be hard to take, unless you grow alligator skin or have a plan that keeps you in motion, preventing you from spending a whole lot of time hung up on why that editor didn’t like your poems or even worse, concluding that your work should all be thrown in the toilet and never see the light of day again. To me, it’s always about writing the poem, the experience of expression and awakening to an insight that wasn’t there yesterday. I figure if I spend a lot of vital emotional fluid moaning over what didn’t happened, then I won’t have the juice to create what’s waiting to happen.

Back to the mail—it’s those self-addressed-stamped-envelopes that I look for amongst the Lands End catalogues and electric bills; checking the return address to see which journal it’s from, sussing out from their thickness if there’s an iota of a chance that a poem got accepted, then taking a kitchen knife (most often I can’t wait long enough to get them to my desk to use the letter opener) and slitting the envelope open and most often pulling out the slip of colored paper or Xeroxed memo stating, ever-so-kindly, that the editor has read my submission “with interest” but has found that “it does not meet our present needs,” or the very generous “we wish you the best in finding a home for your manuscript elsewhere.” What provides a little dangling hope is when there’s an actual scrawled message on the rejection to, “send more” or “really enjoyed these” or an arrow pointing to one of the poems with “liked this one the best” written in the margin.

It’s all okay, the submitting, the rejections and the occasional acceptance. The latter, that rare and lovely moment when you open the envelope or receive an email that says Yes to one of your brave little poems—ah, that is a glow to revel in for a day or two, maybe even share with a couple of your closest friends and, if a particularly sought-after journal takes a poem or you get more than one poem accepted, then tell the spouse, being sure to alert him/her that, of course, this doesn’t mean you’ll be getting any money for your efforts, that it’s really all about creative satisfaction anyway.

It’s almost four and there’s no mail yet. The last couple of days a substitute carrier has had our route and it’s been here before noon. Today, it seems, our regular guy is on the job and it could be as late as 5 or 6 before he arrives. The tally so far this week is:  Monday, one submission out, three rejections in; Tuesday, nothing out, nothing in; Wednesday, three submissions out and nothing in. (The mail finally arrived.) The truth of it is that it’s all about perseverance, confidence (maybe not all the time) and a lotta, lotta luck.  And, in the final analysis, it’s really in the hands of those almighty and wise poetry gods. Now, it’s on to tomorrow and to forgetting about the results and focusing on the process. 

Suffice it to say, not much blogging has gone on here in the last month. No particular reason–just fell off the blog wagon and still not quite on board yet. This week I’m in Napa Valley at the Napa Valley Writer’s Conference, in a workshop with ten other fabulous poets from all over the country and David St. John as our fearless leader. It’s been very fruitful so far (in fact I wrote a poem about fruit yesterday) and I’m feeling relaxed and in a kind of juicy flow with the work. That said, I’m still going to stay off the blog pages for a little while, but I do promise to get some pictures and commentary about the Napa experience up in the next week or two after I get home. My words of wisdom for the rest of your summer: Get sun! Get wet! Get poetry!

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Mountain Man 

The Pecos River 

Wild Irises 

A bucket of firewood.

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

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

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

It’s ten p.m. and I was just sitting on the side of the bed, in the dark, ready to crawl in and drift away and I started thinking about what it means to be a poet and that got me up off the mattress and to the keyboard. It’s been one of those month-long stretches of time when I have rarely been in the “poetry zone” and mostly on the go, taking care of business. It’s fine. There’s a big part of me that enjoys getting things done and flexing the left side of my brain as I get my new computer set up or train a new assistant in the chiropractic office or supervise workers installing new pipes in the shower and others trimming bushes in the backyard. 

I have grown a bit wiser over the last few years, at least enough to know that when there is such a spell of “doing” that seems to last forever, not to get too frustrated or upset or think that I’ll never write a line of decent (or any kind) of poetry again. It’s not how it has turned out in the past. I have always come back to write. What I know as true for me is that it is in the quiet, the silence, my creativity finds an opening to come forth. In the dark, or when I am alone, vulnerability shows up, a little fear. I walk nearer the edge of sociability and being a recluse. My senses awaken and deepen. I hear the spider move across the ceiling, feel the blood pulse in my veins and taste the chicken soup my mother fed me when I was seven, in bed with mumps.

Writing when there is noise, whether it is the television in the next room, cars and trucks on the street or my own head running down my to-do list a hundred times an hour, just doesn’t work. Sometimes I can do revisions on a poem or essay when there’s a lot going on around me and often lines or words or ideas I’d like to explore come floating along and I jot them down for future reference, but rarely, if ever, can I write anything worth its salt when I can’t lay down the stuff of the day and be prepared to weep at the unbelievable beauty and sadness of this human existence. I don’t expect to find much time in the next few days or possibly weeks to bask in quiet reverie, but I so cherish the opportunity to snatch an hour or two, like now, when the house sleeps and the only light is the glow of the computer monitor as the blank page slowly fills up with words.

As to my question about what it is to be a poet, I’m not sure if history is the best reference, if being a poet means you must withdraw from the world, to separate from it so that you can see it more clearly, or if it means that to write relevant and humanistic poetry you must participate with full vigor in all your life has to offer. My guess is that each poet has to define his or her own environment of involvement, how much to weave in and out of the inner and outer world and that they must do this based on what life has handed them and how they produce their best work. I’m still in the process of ferreting out the give and take of my own "poetry zone" and perhaps this, in the end, is what it is to be a poet—to be searching for a way to be of this world; to have a family, to love and hate, succeed and fail and through it all still be the one who speaks in tongues, the one who states emphatically that the emperor has no clothes, the one who dances on the slender edge of the night.

WANTS

Beyond all this, the wish to be alone:
However the sky grows dark with invitation-cards
However we follow the printed directions of sex
However the family is photographed under the flagstaff –
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone.

Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs:
Despite the artful tensions of the calendar,
The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites,
The costly aversion of the eyes from death –
Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.

Phillip Larkin
Collected Poems
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Publisher

JET

Sometimes I wish I were still out
on the back porch, drinking jet fuel
with the boys, getting louder and louder
as the empty cans drop out of our paws
like booster rockets falling back to Earth

and we soar up into the summer stars.
Summer. The big sky river rushes overhead,
bearing asteroids and mist, blind fish
and old space suits with skeletons inside.
On Earth, men celebrate their hairiness,

and it is good, a way of letting life
out of the box, uncapping the bottle
to let the effervescence gush
through the narrow, usually constricted neck.

And now the crickets plug in their appliances
in unison, and then the fireflies flash
dots and dashes in the grass, like punctuation
for the labyrinthine, untrue tales of sex
someone is telling in the dark, though

no one really hears. We gaze into the night
as if remembering the bright unbroken planet
we once came from,
to which we will never
be permitted to return.
We are amazed how hurt we are.
We would give anything for what we have.

Tony Hoagland
Donkey Gospel
Graywolf Press, Publisher
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE STORY, THE MOMENT

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

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

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

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.