Robert Peake pointed to a berkley webcast event of Li-Young Lee about 45 minutes long. (The UC Berkeley site has more —Holloway series and lunch poems)

Lee is such a delight to hear. Part of it is his bashful modesty, the way he is Clark Kent until he lets the words take him and us to where the beauty is. I love his goals of life of keeping himself like Joni Mitchell does to that tender painful place, like inside the blue of welding meet metal. He tries to maintain constant contact with the cosmic energies, the profound, the underlying, the holy.

And to think that only by wandering a Dodge Festival pulled in by a Ken-doll of a reader who packed in an enormous crowd, just as he ended the second half of his last poem, sitting because there were suddenly cleared seats, only this way did I happen across Li-Young Lee taking the podium next. Such happenstance uncovering such sustaining wealth of words.

I saw Coleman Barks at Dodge that year too. Since then I’ve read 3 translations of Rumi beyond his. On Sunday he comes to this writer’s festival and I can get a fresh take. He brings Rumi in integration with who he is. Each translation shifts. In English Bark’s has energy and humor and earthiness and that booming projecting voice warms the words so. He aims for the transcendant grounded in the concrete real. This is a common thread between him, Lee and Powe.

BW Powe spoke yesterday at the Writer’s Festival. I had anticipated that with pleasure too since having read his book on the men of Canada who are unique critical thinkers (The Solitary Outlaw). I hadn’t realized that he not only spoke poetically with passion and deep thought, but also did poetry directly. He has a book from Guernica, The Unsaid Passing.

His focus last night was on Canada, and his exploration of what the word and geography and people means, in what he calls his Leaves of Grass, A Canada of Light. Although I took note (and notes), it’s a lot to process.

His way of envisioning himself and the way to peace, and the cultural norm of Canada are based in patience and dialogue, waiting out the blips. He believes ethnic tensions are passing and that Canada is a test model of forming a country through words. Dialogue and debate, consideration and waiting. Genesis over Armageddon, evolution over revolution. The way he thinks as he spoke reminds me of the pondering of Li-Young Lee as well. I mentioned quotes from Lee’s book the Alabasaster Jar last year. There’s a grief but no pity, no mourning, no pain in a way. There’s a sombreness but it has a luster like holy because it is grounded in a tenderness of love and hope.

Similarily, Powe speaks of these being challenging times with a lot of reason for grief but resists the “subversion of hope” and “subversion of joy”. One must let your heart be unprotected, dream new dreams, staying back from the demon of uniformity, stay inside hope.

Powe sees national identity as being the very process of us discovering who we are, each question yielding questions, further mysteries. He sees the basic questions of what is it to be Canadian is the same as the eternal questions: Who are you? Where are you going? Where are you coming from? These are the essential human questions asked of the Sphinx. The answers are From Light, Towards Light, Made of Light.

His book elaborates on that. I have a feeling it would be an absorbing read.

We have a model of dialogue which allows us to step away from the ideas of “pious clarity” oversimplication. Too much nationalism is rooted in ethnicity and too much ethnic nationalism is divisive to nationalism, a self-annihilating force. To continue sensationalism, confrontationalism won’t get us anywhere. The very nature of being Canadian is a lack of iconic heroes. It’s our strength to not be monolithic. Just this week, that was on my mind in a debate about RCMP and how Canada is missing Heroes, like the U.S. has. Our lack of closure is as close as we come to a national trait.

Will it work for peace and for perpetuity or is it bound to clog or break into war? He quoted Pierre Trudeau when he said of this social experiment, I will not hang myself if it ends but I will work to do what I can so it does not end.

A week of poetry festival is a little bit of paradise come early.

To add extra whip cream to the week of sundaes, I got my Comstock Review in the mail too. It’s the 20th Anniversary Awards issue no less.

How in the world will I get anything else done with my attention so captivated by all this poetry?

At the festival, all these book titles to peruse, getting high on the deckle-cut edges, glossy matte embossed font and bindings, the ideas presented, cross-connection findings, all the social. Then the main events — the interviews. There was the interview with George Murray and his memorable way to describe how you know when satire works, the wince first then laugh. And poetry live. It’s always so different live. I don’t know why it always surprises me that it does.

Past Poet Laureate, George Bowering, in person is far different than I expected. Far more entertaining. I don’t know who or where I read or what I read of his to get my vague impression but it’s been nudged shoved upwards considerably. Now I want his latest book. (Appetite, whatever will we do with you.)

Here’s a picture of one bit, the poet panel in the cabaret hosted and structured by Stephen Brockwell, with George Bowering and George Murray of Bookninja.com (who I have one book of but now I want his sonnets or was it these*) and rob mclennan who for the sake of uniformity, can be renamed George as well. Wouldn’t that be curious. (And yes I will be compelled to buy the “>rest of his books too.)

*Note to self: must figure out what I want. My appetite is bigger than my bank account. As big of constraint might be how much I can absorb. But life is long. And the only press is internal. Well, and the AP of course.

Having been held over for live poetry from recorded videos, such as PoetryVlog it’s rather like tomatoes coming into season again after a season when the most scent and flavor comes from the stems of the ripened-on-vine ones. There have been poetry live readings lately of course but the density of poetry is different in every sense.

—

It’s an odd sensation to open books I know I’ve opened before and got from them before, basically that here is previous-tree with scratchings on it with ink and remember being vexed or blank-eyed and then a few years later open the same pages and “get it”.

It’s quite odd. I wonder if it’s like being a toddler who can reach a shelf now. Except what was at crawling eye level isn’t accessible in the same way.

I want to just widen my palate but find I shift instead. I get restless. I have made a new arbitrary rule (or is that redundant) for poetry. I will no longer give a few second’s flick of my eyes for any poem entitled cloud or sparrow. The chance of something good coming from there is just too low.

But I want to like every poem, the way I want every person I like to love each other.

Remember those cream horns? When I was small every week I’d hope for a treat of one and some months I did. I’d lick all the big sugar crystals off and feel the puff pastry apart layer by layer, savoring the sweetened cream. I had one a few years ago as an adult and it was saccharine and the pastry made a fat slick on my tongue. Of course when I was small, grapefruit and oranges and brussels sprouts were unbearably sour and white sauce was blank bland compared to those sugar crystals that pop on your tongue. I want to appreciate the cream horn and the citrus. One follows one’s bliss out onto a tightrope sometimes.

Which probably makes no sense and is entirely too editorial. And didn’t I say I had too much to do? No? I should have. Time for other things.

Long-time ago fellow from IWW Poetry-W poet friend, Scott Speck wrote a poem about me.

And over at the Bear Parade is online chapbooks? a pdf published magazine?

Not sure what it is but Matthew Rohrer‘s poem is characteristically quirky, fragmentary of the surreal meeting the daily, or for a second sample, this from Touch my Omelet by Michael Earl Craig.

They don’t corral the reader into a requisite response. As any man (say one in Bali who cleans a hall and brings home pay and eats his meal savoring textures while his mind goes to the angle of light, the tasks behind and ahead) is to the Christ and Anti-Christ, Faithful and Minister, so are these to Slam Poetry or Page Poetry or Visual and Sound Poetry.

P.S. For those who follow my statistics, I did my quarterly update of writing rate data, now in year 14. Egad.

Bridge Prompt and bridge photo and resulting tanka of solitude by riverbank in the privacy that fog affords,

mist by the water
inside soft arch
walled in by fog
I own all the air
I can see

Diana introduced me to William Stafford poems. [ed. Note: Funnily enough I thought I hadn’t heard of him but exploring more I found that at some point I sat with his book of poetry The Way it Is and didn’t appreciate what I was reading. I don’t know that I would yet but it might be interesting to revisit having the sense of his life and intent.]
His poem, When I met my muse isn’t promising much to me with its title but recanned as a wooing poem, wow.

I felt the ceiling arch, and
knew that nails up there took a new grip
on whatever they touched. “I am your own
way of looking at things,” she said. “When
you allow me to live with you, every
glance at the world around you will be
a sort of salvation.” And I took her hand.

I love the nails squeaking out of the rafters trying to hold the cottage together as the ceiling threatens to blow off from the blast of inspiration. How spectacular is that. He’s got some wonderful rhythms in his poems:

Look: no one ever promised for sure
that we would sing. We have decided
to moan. In a strange dance that
we don’t understand till we do it, we
have to carry on. [via]

I seem to have an attraction these days to messages that are telling me everything is adaption, impulse, improv. It seems the 17 poems at that site are the wee-est of samples. He eventually published 57 volumes of poetry(!!)
I like how he’s always thinking. He has a quietness to his ponderings, picking his way forward without concern with density.
Reading his words, I gloss over grammatical words as fillers we don’t attend to, hurrying the stories when maybe I should slow down and sit a while with some ice tea.
It’s ironic, is it, that if one doesn’t write as one would speak, one writes more densely but then spaces the words out on the page to get back that optimal spacing again for the brain to parse. Same poundage of tree pulp results either style, but the message is broader if connections are more nebulous. More isn’t said but more can be inferred in a less narrative style. There isn’t as much guarding the cards to one’s chest. More can leak around.
PoemHunter has a couple more poems by Stafford, including Allegiances which also has embedded that optimism and belief that a truth exists. In a fundamental way he reinforces to himself that cycles and patterns exist. Perhaps that is due to religious faith, cultural or personal. Perhaps it’s a reflection of being born in the early 1900s without radio and tv to be buffers and distractors from the cycles of weather. He’s an observer.
I wonder how much impact culture has on desire for poetic innovation. Is there a relationship between being a child of that era and having been brought up with faith in patterns and being brought up in the shadow of two world wars and Vietnam and discouragement of even the rules of engagement for war and civility being broken. The basic faith in patterns wavers not only in cultural cynicism but effecting poetic form so that what feels natural and right is different than for, say Stafford’s generation.
Although he wrote his memoirs relatively young, he had done a lot of living before he produced poems. He wrote his first collection of poems in 1963. He died 30 years after that (not from related causes).
Although he is plainspoken and has a large volume of output, he is no naive writer unaware of what process he is in, cranking out similar veined work. He was poet laureate of Oregon. He was a career poet. He was conscious enough of the process to write Crossing Unmarked Snow: Further Views on the Writer’s Vocation.
His son, Kim, has written a memoir remembering his life as well, Early Morning, Remembering My Father who describes his life as a conscious choice. As a conscientious objector to war, to the point of interment, he always wanted to put forward the quiet voice of reconciliation, the importance of silence and calm.
This is not a sharp engagement but it is a setting the rules he will play by, rejecting the raucous demands for war, for peace, for attention, modelling the de-escalation he wants. The main art is not the poem or poetry. The main art is the life as he seems to suggest in the quote from Writer’s Vocation. One has to get under not the best way to express a good poem but what movement this poem adds to the writer’s life. What does it come out of and where does it push the person towards.
Understanding Stafford’s work is incomplete to look only inside his work. It is built for the context of other people vying for excitement, innovation, aggression, jazzed, razzed and razing to build something over the erased pastoral landscape.
What he ends up with is refined to an extreme degree so that it hard to find an open door for an entry point. To enter, one has to reset expectations, simmer down from restless to rest. He’s not going to pull and provoke you along, although he does have spectacular lines and phrases. His poetry is to walk beside the reader.
Not surprisingly the Wikipedia entry compares him to Robert Frost. He’s got the plain speech, prosaic slowness of instructive narrative of daily rural life in a secure world. A balm of calm.
I suppose Silliman would list him with Stafford’s friend Robert Bly on the index of School of Quietude. By Kellog’s measure of poetic field, Stafford would be on the traditional end of the axis, not innovative end, but would he be more oriented to self or community? Since he has something of a lay preacher-feel, and it’s poetry as a public act, and he sought to be part of poetic community, I would say he’s in that quadrant. Although he talks about his day in personal terms, it is not raw emotional confession by any means. It is close to oratory but instead of inciting hell and brimstone or appeals to heaven he’s grounding. As in Allegiances,

we ordinary beings can cling to the earth and love
where we are, sturdy for common things.

This is like Mary Oliver in some ways. Reiterating everything is as it should be. There’s no mourning, only morning dawning and dawning. There’s something like a biblical rhythm. It’s like one of the poems of The Spoken Word Revolution Redux (from sourcebooks). Stafford contended and contented himself in timeless aspects. This poem excerpted below aims to loop two points in time and assumes things are not as they should be. There’s more of an anger and helplessness and different voltage of power. Marty McConnell writes Saint Catherine of Siena to Mary-Kate Olsen in a speech rhythm, this has the pop, press, and none of the smoothing of edge to elegance. Its aims are different and its sense of time being different. (excerpt)

what god stole your hunger? who demands this reduction
to vertebrae? it’s a specific reason, a case worth losing,
nobody can hear you with fingers or sticks in your throat,
nobody loves in the bathroom, everyone’s in the kitchen
again, this is my body, broken for you, take and eat
the appearance of bones is not a miracle of the flesh.
(take and eat) what do your visions insists? who
marries you in the dream, Christ slipping a ring
on my thin second finger, I was six when he first
came for me, my shorn hair all over the floor, gold
for gold / who insists on this full-body stigmata,
woman, how long have you been paying this penance?

It powerfully twists the intent of the original text to be able to see the words freshly. It rethinks the idea of stigmata and religious patterns versus personal. We still have the sense of order and biblical and spoken running through culturally. We still have ties to the immediate and concrete but other tethers to ritual that isn’t tangible.
Stafford has the sense of the mystic as in Atavism. In a way it invokes more spirituality than a dialogue with a saint. Perhaps it is because it is direct immersion in god thru nature and that itself is impacting reveal and pace.

aisles of
shadow lead away; a branch waves;
a pencil of sunlight slowly travels its
path. A withheld presence almost
speaks, but then retreats, rustles
a patch of brush. You can feel
the centuries ripple generations
of wandering, discovering, being lost
and found,

He is never lost without being found. There is no forward with the opposite left to chance or choice. The return must be made explicit. Things must be balanced.
There is a feeling out forwards, wandering the forest in the structure of the poem. Although the presentation is a block, lines are jagged yet there is the sense of regularity. It is comparable to walking a forest, not the open flat sidewalk but where each step judges angle of incline, no path exists, but as you take each step new openings become clear in the organic randomness with continuity of muted colors, constant tone and shapes. There are no surprises and yet there is distance travelled and motion.
Does it matter that is is the soother, not the breast, the poem, not the forest? Would it matter if this were re-aestheticized to be avant guard? Eventually hunger will send one past the emulation to the creation.