I got home on Sunday night. It seemed that half the plane was L.A. poets. All in all the experience in Atlanta was a success–both informationally and inspirationally. The focus of the conference is to support teachers of literature, so I have to admit some of the panel discussions did waft over my head a bit, but I found something of value in everything I attended. I especially enjoyed the readings and on Saturday went to the University of Tampa one, where my mentor, Sarah Maclay, was one of six readers representing the UT Press and Tampa Review. There were also panels on "How Poems Begin" and "More Than One Way to Tell a Story."  The latter included Stephen Dunn as one of the speakers, a poet who’s work I very much enjoy. He has a great book out about poetry called, Walking Light: Essays and Memoirs, that is funny, poignant and inspiring writings about his life and his life with poetry.

Hilda and I finished up around 4:30 then headed out for an early dinner with a short walk around downtown Atlanta before the reading at eight with CD Wright and Coleman Barks. Barks read mostly his own poems, with a couple of Rumi’s in the mix. CD Wright read from her soon to be released book of poems, One Big Self: An Investigation. The poems are taken from a previous published art book where her poems accompanied photos by Deborah Luster taken in  three prisons in Louisiana. It was riveting stuff–powerful in the use of language and the woven emotional textures of the sorrow, resilency and brutality of the inmates, wardens and the reflections  of the writer herself.

I’m happy to be home now and happy I went. I met some great people and connected with some folks in the bookfair, publishers of journals I wasn’t familiar with and came home with a folder full of flyers, postcards and pamphlets to pour over. Not to mention the half-dozen books I picked up that I had to stuff in my already bulging suitcase. With all the stimulation I’m ready to pull out a stack of poems and match them up with some journals and send out those submissions. I got a good start today just printing out the poems, doing some quick revisions here and there and making a preliminary list of the journals. I plan on having ten submissions in the mail by the end of next week. Wish me luck. Below are the last photos from the conference and a couple of what I saw of Atlanta–not much, I’m afraid.

Coleman Barks & CD Wright before the reading. That’s Hilda right behind them and my empty chair. 

Sarah & Holaday hanging out before the reading. 

Stephen Dunn 

I’m digesting–a dinner of edamame and vegetable fried rice from the Pacific Rim Bistro–and the days events. It’s Saturday evening, with only one more event to go before the conference wraps up. There are readings tonight in fiction and poetry, with the poets being two southerners, Coleman Barks and C.D. Wright. But, let’s get back to yesterday. It started out a little more relaxed as I skipped over the first session of the day, finding nothing compelling to attend, thus having some time to putz about, eat a late breakfast and get over to the Hilton for the 10:30 panel on Narrative Poetry: Past, Present, Future with B.H. Fairchild, David Mason, Kate Daniels and David Rothman. It proved to be highly engaging and, unlike the day before, my eyes did not glaze over with mental overwhelm, rather I found their arguments and advocation for the narrative poem not only intelligently outlined, but passionately felt. What I came away with was the understanding that every poem tells some kind of story, even if it is simply random words on the page, the mind will seek to make associations, to create a story. It is what we do as humans–and that a poem that is purely narrative is not a poem. It must have lyricism, it must sing, to connect in the way a poem, by its very nature, is required to connect. Otherwise, it is reporting, dry and unimaginative and leaves the reader with no emotional reverberation.

At noon I went to the Graywolf Press reading, which was lively — and after listening to mainly poetry for the last two days, it was great to hear some fiction and essay pieces read. The room was packed and the energy high. I particularly enjoyed the essay read by Anders Monson from his book of essays, Neck Deep about technology; from the telegraph to high speed internet–really how we communicate and connect, what goes obsolete and what never changes. Really lively and funny and true.  

I took a cruise through the masive bookfair, stopping at various booths to pick up a flyer, a postcard, submission guidelines, a couple of chocolate kisses, small yellow buttons with the Chinese letters for Poetry on them from Copper Canyon Press, and of course bought enough books to weigh down a small donkey. It’s the proverbial candy store for someone like me, and I suspect a good majority of the poets and writers and teachers of both, who mill about touching the covers, flipping through the pages and making small talk, while they calculate in their heads how much $$ they can spend and how much weight they can pack into their suitcases to take home. (Books are HEAVY!)

There were great readings by Charles Wright and Terrance Hayes in the afternoon. I had read Wright and especially love his new volume, Scar Tissue. He writes poems that speak plainly but with deep eloquence about place, relationships and our relationship with our interior landscape. Terrance Hayes is a young man, one who was a college athlete (basketball player) and an artist and has landed as a poet who has a strong sense of musicality in his poems, humor, and telling his story, as a young black man growing up in the south, with sensitivity and deep felt awareness. I was very impressed with him as a poet and a thoughtful and emotionally whole man. Unfortunately, due to the limitations of my camera, or more likely the limitations of my knowledge of the camera, the photos I took didn’t turn out for this reading or the reading in the evening with Thomas Lux, Marilyn Hacker, Cornelius Eady and David Bottoms. And, very unfortunately, Dean Young wasn’t able to make it. He got stuck in an ice storm in Iowa. It was my first time hearing Eady & Bottoms, both of whom (as well as Hacker & Lux) were a delight to hear. It was an affirmation, with the incredible diversity in the work of these four prominent poets, that the form is always secondary to the hand and heart that craft the poem. Below is a poem by Cornelius Eady he read about his parents.

 Cornelius Eady (Photo by Howard Gotfryd)
 

I’m A Fool To Love You

Some folks will tell you the blues is a woman,
Some type of supernatural creature.
My mother would tell you, if she could,
About her life with my father,
A strange and sometimes cruel gentleman.
She would tell you about the choices
A young black woman faces.
Is falling in with some man
A deal with the devil
In blue terms, the tongue we use
When we don’t want nuance
To get in the way,
When we need to talk straight.
My mother chooses my father
After choosing a man
Who was, as we sing it,
Of no account.
This man made my father look good,
That’s how bad it was.
He made my father seem like an island
In the middle of a stormy sea,
He made my father look like a rock.
And is the blues the moment you realize
You exist in a stacked deck,
You look in a mirror at your young face,
The face my sister carries,
And you know it’s the only leverage
You’ve got.
Does this create a hurt that whispers
How you going to do?
Is the blues the moment
You shrug your shoulders
And agree, a girl without money
Is nothing, dust
To be pushed around by any old breeze.
Compared to this,
My father seems, briefly,
To be a fire escape.
This is the way the blues works
Its sorry wonders,
Makes trouble look like
A feather bed,
Makes the wrong man’s kisses
A healing.

From Autobiography of a Jukebox
Carnegie Mellon Poetry, Publishers 

I’ve only got a few minutes before I need to get going over to the conference for this second day of panels and readings and the bookfair that stretches into infinity. There’s a Poetry Extravaganza tonight with Thomas Lux, Dean Young, Cornelius Eddy, David Bottoms, Tree Swenson & Marilyn Hacker (filling in for Brigit Pegeen Kelley). But that’s later… Yesterday the weather was blustery and on the walk from the Sheraton to the Hilton it went from drizzle to downpour in one block, leaving me completely drenched, as my umbrella was almost torn from my hands by the wind. Nevertheless it was a great morning inside, where it was warm and comfortable.

I am sitting in on talks both about poetry and personal essay, crossing over into the latter territory is new for me, but because I’m looking to publish both it’s a good opportunity to poke my nose into what’s going on in that genre. There was even a panel discussion on poets who write nonfiction and the conflicting emotions that can arise from doing so. There was a really interesting panel on writing collaborative poems that was facilitated by Denise Duhamel (great poetry and great energy). Charles Harper Webb was also on this panel. He teaches at Cal State, Long Beach and I was in a workshop taught by him at Idylwild a couple of years ago–a great teacher and generous human being. By six pm, after a full day of sitting in those "seminar chairs," I was done for and headed back to the room to order Thai food and chill out with my roommate, Hilda, as we debriefed on our experiences of the day. It’s a lot for the brain to take in and, even though we missed the evening keynote address, we were both happy to eat some healthy food, take baths and get to bed early.

This morning the sun rose in brilliant colors and the sun is shining. Reading the paper I saw that there were tornadoes in parts of Georgia yesterday. Luckily, they bypassed Atlanta. There wasn’t a topic calling to me for the first session so I’m heading over around 10 to cruise the gigantic bookfair and then start at 10:30 with a panel on "Narrative Poetry." Before I go I’ve got to sit down and figure out a little bit more of what I’m doing with my new camera. One of the thrills of the day for me yesterday was figuring out how to operate the zoom. Today, I’ve got to get down the best way to take indoor shots. Some of the ones I took yesterday I had it on the right setting and some I didn’t. Technology strikes again! 

More tomorrow… 

Denise Duhamel on Collaborative Poetry.

Charles Harper Webb on the Collaborative Poem

Panel Discussion on "Getting to the Heart of Syntax." 

It started with a trip to CompUSA to buy a monitor, a fancy, big, groovy monitor to hook up to my laptop. The day before I’d been to Best Buy and bought one there, but it didn’t have speakers and was too small, because I’ve got to have a widescreen to match the screen on my laptop. We (my tech guy, Jeff really did it all) set it up and plugged it in and it looked too plain, didn’t have any pizzazz, so we (Jeff, really) packed it all up and slipped it back in its box, re-hooked up the old one and there we left it until the morning when I got back in my car and returned it to Best Buy. From there I hopped on the freeway to Redondo Beach, because, as luck would have it, the Culver City Comp USA didn’t have the monitor I wanted, the one Jeff and I spent a good half-hour scouring the internet for, the one that had speakers and a 22 inch screen. It was ten in the morning so the traffic was good and I zipped along the 405 for the twelve miles, aware that on my left, the 405 south was crawling along, (due to a tanker overturning farther up the freeway, I heard on the radio).

After backtracking a couple of times on Hawthorne Blvd I pulled into the parking lot. The salesman at CompUSA snapped me up as I walked in the door and promptly checked his stock on the VX2235wm and confirmed they had six of them. He commandeered a rolling ladder that took him up to the tallest shelf in the place and pulled down my new monitor, asking me before it even hit the bottom of the shopping cart whether I wanted to purchase the Extended Warranty that CompUSA offered. Insurance, he said and explained how much of a hassle it would be if something went wrong with it and I had to return it to the manufacturer; packing it and shipping it to their service center, while with CompUSA, well, with them, I could just bring it in and they’d replace it, no questions asked, for the same model, or a newer model of comparable value—for two years, he said. After sharing with him my philosophy on insurance; that it was gambling, that it was all about the risk factor, I declined the offer. He heartily agreed with me that insurance was a racket, but wanted to point out it was only $49.99 for the protection plan, and that was for two years and he highly recommended it.

I took my monitor home in the trunk of the car, slid it into my office, didn’t open the box until after lunch, marveling at how sleek and Star Wars it looked, how it had such a presence sitting there on my desk, even if it wasn’t plugged in yet and no image was flitting across it’s pearly surface. I’ve been upgrading computers since the ‘80’s and every time a new piece of hardware lands on my desk, whether it is a mouse, a keyboard or a back-up drive, there’s a thrill that is akin to (I imagine) how the pioneers felt when they put a new wheel on the wagon or blade on the plow. My feeling is if you have to work with machines they should not only perform at a high level, but give you pleasure when you lay your eyes and hands on them. This monitor was all of that—promising many happy hours marveling at its attributes.

By now you must realize that not every fairy tale has a happy ending. And that, of course, goes for computer tales as well. What was to be a "simple install" was fraught with perplexing, mysterious and downright contentious “issues” between the laptop and the monitor. Although the laptop (a Japanese model) said it would support the monitor and could project the high resolution necessary to view images in a normal perspective—well, they were speaking different languages. Calls to ViewSonic (by Jeff, of course) didn’t help. Calls to Toshiba were close to worthless. Installing this driver and that driver, upgrading the BIOS (I have no idea what that means) had no effect at all. When set to the desired resolution the icons on the Desktop ran off the sides of the screen, simply disappearing into the ethers. We’ve (mostly Jeff, again) have tried everything, including considering a faith “computer” healer to simply realign the aura of this obviously recalcitrant laptop. Nothing we have done has brought a whit of change to the dysfunctional relationship these two pieces of equipment have with each other.

By the end of all this I was one fried and wigged out gal; eyes crossed and brain numbed to the point of zombie-ism. I had counted on this technology to ease my stress, to allow me more creative freedom and now, NOW, it seemed an insolvable “issue.” I went to bed early and hoped (as sometimes does happen) that the answer would come in a dream (to Jeff, of course, who would be able to understand it) and that in the morning, the sun would be shining, the birds singing and my laptop and monitor would have made up and decided to shed their differences and embrace—to co-operate and align themselves for my sake and for the sake of their kind. I believed it was possible. Miracles do happen. Yes, but when I woke up in the morning the sun was hidden by clouds and soon it began to rain. It hasn’t stopped all day. Jeff has gone skiing for a week and, as you can see, I’m typing away, looking right into the heart of my new monitor, finding that in spite of resolution “issues,” the words still find their way to the page. And, even though I didn’t get that protection plan I can return the monitor for a full refund within 21 days of purchase. I’m at 20 and counting.

Here’s a fun poem that somewhat expresses the frustration (nay, exasperation) I was feeling yesterday:

POEM

"It’s only me knocking on the door
of your heart" whined the radio
while I bawled feverishly, eating
an orange, salting it up a little.

A gelatin light squeezed windows
I had watched all night at, bored,
lordy was I bored. I thought maybe
some bombers would fly over or

something. No, I was really nuts,
miserable. I called Jan and John
and Al and Waldemar and Grace and then
got scared, hung up, screamed!

and couldn’t get out a window
because I’d locked them all, because
I’m six flights up. And it’s been a
terribly cold winter, radio’s been broke.

Frank O’Hara
Poems Retrieved
Grey Fox Press

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

******** 

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

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

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

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

Archaic Torso of Apollo

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

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

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

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

Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Stephen Mitchell

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

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

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

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

Quotes from Western Wind:

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

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

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

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

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. 

Not only did my husband bring me roses, he arranged them, tied bows around the vase, took a photo and gave me that, as well. They look a little disheveled, like they’re jockeying for position, while their stems slide along the bottom of the vase, causing them to tilt, scrunch or hang awkwardly out the side. I feel a little like this myself on a day-to-day basis trying to corral the items strewn across and piled upon my desk, tend to the phone calls, errands and chores that accumulate expoentially if I don’t line them up and knock them down regularly. Inevitably when I slack off, well, that’s when my feet start sliding, a deep fog rolls into my frontal lobe and the ascending piles begin to rock and then slither helter-skelter across the desktop or onto the floor, crashing down upon the smooth surfaces of my mental order. But, all good analogies have to end somewhere and unlike these roses, this disarray does not smell sweet to the nose, brush the cheek softly or light up a room with color. Telephone bills (no one just has "a" telephone bill anymore), grocery lists starting with beets and ending with toothpaste, and insurance claim forms to be submitted, rarely inspire poems, (although I can’t say they never have) and any tears shed over them will be surely be ones of frustration, not the sweet tenderness that rose petals evoke when strewn upon a path.

It’s been a week and they are still in their vase, having never fully opened, rusting around the edges and the water in the vase has gone murky. I will leave Monday for Florida and don’t have the heart to toss them. I’ll leave that to my husband. He brought them into our world. He can usher them out.

Here are a couple of "rose" poems taken off the web at Poets.org. (To see publications by these poets click on their names.)

Go, lovely rose!
by Edmund Waller

Go, lovely rose!
Tell her that wastes her time and me
  
That now she knows,
When I resemble her to thee,
How sweet and fair she seems to be.

    Tell her that’s young,
And shuns to have her graces spied,
    That hadst thou sprung
In deserts, where no men abide,
Thou must have uncommended died.

    Small is the worth
Of beauty from the light retired;
    Bid her come forth,
Suffer herself to be desired,
And not blush so to be admired.

    Then die! that she
The common fate of all things rare
    May read in thee;
How small a part of time they share
That are so wondrous sweet and fair!

********

The Separate Rose: I
by Pablo Neruda
Translated by William O’Daly

Today is that day, the day that carried
a desperate light that since has died.
Don’t let the squatters know:
let’s keep it all between us,
day, between your bell
and my secret.

Today is dead winter in the forgotten land
that comes to visit me, with a cross on the map
and a volcano in the snow, to return to me,
to return again the water
fallen on the roof of my childhood.
Today when the sun began with its shafts
to tell the story, so clear, so old,
the slanting rain fell like a sword,
the rain my hard heart welcomes.

You, my love, still asleep in August,
my queen, my woman, my vastness, my geography
kiss of mud, the carbon-coated zither,
you, vestment of my persistent song,
today you are reborn again and with the sky’s
black water confuse me and compel me:
I must renew my bones in your kingdom,
I must still uncloud my earthly duties.

This week I included this audio recording in the Poetry Evolution E-letter. It is from Poetry Speaks: Elise Paschen & Rebekah Presson Mosby, Editors, Published by Sourcebooks, Inc. 

Silken Tent by Robert Frost