What an amazing weekend! I have to offer a big thank you to the Nevada County Arts Council for the organization of such a successful event. Coordinators Eliza Tudor and Julie Valin created stunning visuals and worked tirelessly marketing the literary gathering. On the days of the Festival, they seemed to be everywhere at once, creating an atmosphere of beauty and excitement and intimacy. Eliza held court and her lovely British accent and omnipotent calm presence made everyone feel at ease and welcome. Nevada City poet laureate Molly Fisk and author Judy Crowe supported the camaraderie and worked hard to make every aspect a success. There was a a wide, diverse range of readers and writers and storytellers, including NCAC Artists-in-Residence Ruth Chase, Michael Llewellyn, John Deaderick, and Nancy Schaeffer. A big thank you, also, to emcee Sands Hall, who moderated the event with grace and aplomb. And, as always, thank you to the community of Nevada County for tirelessly supporting the arts, poetry, and beauty. It was a great pleasure to be one of the presenters.
Thanks also to the Sierra Poetry Festival Committee: JoAnn Marie, Brett Hall Jones, Sands Hall, Rachel Howard, Kim Culbertson, Julie Valin, Chris Olander, Karen Terrey, Judy Crowe, Kirsten Casey, Hannah Casey.
I would like to share a backstage anecdote: Featured Festival reader, Los Angeles Poet Laureate Robin Coste Lewis, was amazing–eloquent and powerful. She also has a lifelong connection with local author Judy Crowe. Crowe’s daughter, Jean Marie, was Coste Lewis’s midwife about 15 years ago when the two were welcoming Coste Lewis’s child to the world. The planet gets smaller and smaller.
Gail and I shared the stage with and Molly and mother-and-daughter team Straight Out Scribes on Saturday and then conducted a well-attended workshop. We enjoyed working with everyone tremendously. Following is the information from the workshop handouts (as requested by the folks who couldn’t get their hands on one), a few poems, and a workshop review by fellow poet and good friend Gene Berson:
“I felt relief as you opened the workshop with Richard Hugo’s counsel not to give up on a poem, to stay with it until it revealed its personal transformative motive. I sensed the same relief in others throughout the room. You were returning poetry to us. After the spectacular and somewhat grand historical landscape explored by Robin Lewis, with all its linguistic virtuosity, although deeply felt and tenderly delivered, all the social and historical awareness she distilled and wove into her work, your words restored poetry to us, people sitting in a room.
It became available to us again. The wonderful thing about poetry is that no matter how difficult it is, it is easily available, technically. Pick up a pen. You don’t need a special camera, funding, permission. I recall my great uncle who was a painter, who went to art school in Paris and lived to ninety-one, saying to me, ‘You’re lucky. All you need is a pencil and paper. I’ve got all these paints, canvases, frames, and easels to lug around. And all I’m after is light! Which doesn’t weigh anything!’ We were both amused by his oversimplification. But we both realized there was something to it: all you need is to see. That’s the hard part. Your workshop addressed that—and then how to make what we see visible.
When you spoke of the difficulty of poetry, you also conveyed a sense that it was possible. The difficulty of seeing things with the double vision required to write a poem about one thing but really about another, is it enforces a practice of seeing beyond appearance, literality. I suppose this is why Jesus always spoke in parables, avoiding the literal answers, returning the questions to the questioners.
The workshop didn’t ignore the personal psychological confrontations necessary to realize a poem, the honest courage it requires to clarify what a poem is about. It was a call to our strongest selves. And the workshop encouraged those in the room, as if to say, this struggle to see and say is worth it. Stay with it. See. Describe. Struggle to find what’s at stake— wonderfully restorative advice. The real work, as Gary Snyder said.
Another thing I liked was the reminder that being a poet is hard because it goes against the grain of our filters, as your handouts point out. They are defensive, they are learned and they are blinding and they are wrong. To see beyond the maya of the world threatens political and social order, threatens personal habits of going along, all of which struggle to deny change. This must be what D.H. Lawrence meant when he said that there is always an element of danger in any new utterance.
In the mid-fifties, when Ginsberg asked rhetorically in his poem ‘America’ What price bananas? the devastating consequences on Central American cultures by United Fruit exploitation was out in the open—in an almost comic tone. It is the wise tone of the awake fool. It takes a fool to do anything against the cynicism your handout insists must be blocked in order to create a poem.
There is a kind of purity required to write a poem, a baptism or absolution of sorts, that washes away habits of seeing. Then the poem confronts you with how cowardly you have been, how you have lied, how you have fitted in. The poem now exists, with its new perceptions. Old excuses won’t hold up in the face of it. But it comes with new possibilities of acting.
These are some of the things I carried away from the workshop. I talked later with a few people about it and they also took away similar incisive encouragement. I want to say, also, both of your poems were mentioned and appreciated by people in conversations I had. Gail’s ‘whatchamacallit’ poem [to read the poem, “Wind,” follow the hyperlink to the latest issue of Sisyphus] was a knockout hit and the ‘haystacking’ poem stood out.”
Some Thoughts on Poets and Poetry
Galway Kinnell held that it was the job of poets to bear witness. “To me,” he said, “poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.”
Poetry comes from the Greek word, poiesis, and means a “making” or “creating.” The poet is considered a maker or a creator: a creator of emotional realities.
What is a poet? A poet is a seeker, a seer, a witness. In a way, we poets are our own audience. From Birmingham to Berkeley to Burma we discover one another, a common ground established between the pages of our books or online presence, a sharing that goes beyond the language of understanding of one another. For me, poetry is closer to the sense of smell than it is to the art of discourse. It is more a way of feeling with someone than talking to someone; a way of reclaiming a shared inner sense of the world.
It works like this: poetry is a kind of thinking that gets where it wants to go only by heading off at a slant to avoid being literal. The reason there is nothing as useless as yesterday’s news is that it has successfully fulfilled its function. The news, once told, is no longer news. For me, even as I am the poet writing my own poem, if I understand it too soon, I ruin it for myself. Poetry succeeds by putting on a mask in order to see itself, by glancing sidelong, by sneaking up on the subject matter, by surprise, by music, by sleight of hand, by illusion, by verbal magic!
For the writer as well as the reader, poetry operates through:
- A state of blocked cynicism.
- An unsystematic derangement of the senses.
- A willingness to see parts as wholes.
- An investment in pieces of things, or places, or people, raising that investment to the level of vision
The Art of Poetry
by Charles Entrekin
Once more, buddy, your last ride
has left you behind and nothing can be done.
You want someone to come, a silver angel,
to seize your hair and lift you from the earth.
But the weight of your two feet
presses against the ground. No one comes
to save you. It’s too cold to stand still
and too dark to run.
Once more, buddy, you write
to save yourself. Here’s the barn.
Here the horses are warm. Here, on a dark
night, between towns, between meals,
simply the heat of other animals is enough.
What’s at Stake in a Poem?
In every successful lyrical poem, there is something at stake that in some way is resolved by the end of the poem. (Lyrical poetry has come to be a general term for poetry that is susceptible to being sung, or chanted, or read aloud. In earliest times all poetry was, in essence, lyrical, i.e., accompanied by a lyre.)
What do I mean by “something at stake”? I mean that the poet should maintain an honest narrative thread that is resolved somewhere in the poem. There should occur a feeling of something completed by the end of the poem, of closure.
Not too long ago I read an article in an old issue of the New Yorker (10/09/2006) by Milan Kundera, “What Is a Novelist?” in which, as he compares the novelist to the poet, he says that, according to the philosopher Hegel, the content of the lyric poem is the poet herself. The poet gives voice to her inner world so that the reader can share the feelings, the states of mind, of the poet. That seems right to me.
Poems are nothing if not a sharing of an internal reality, an inner world, and a possible new way of seeing it. And this sharing is achieved through the skillful use of a learned craft that has been evolving for thousands of years, the craft of poetry: sound (lyric), rhyme, meter, symbol, simile, metaphor (dreams, as Robert Charles Wilson put it, are metaphors gone feral), dramatic tension, line breaks, perhaps storyline.
For me, there is also something about this act of sharing that is, in part, a process of self- discovery. It is a locating of a “self that sees,”a witness. In my own poems there is an inner “self,” a muse, that rises up from the pool of my subconscious mind, from my leaf mold memory, that allows me to find the exact right sound or word I need to make the poem work. And this discovery of a “self that sees” is a joy that fills and sustains me and remains one of the major reasons I write poetry. It’s also one of the ways I am able to discover my inner self, my guiding self, my historical self. I lose track of who I am when I get too far away from poetry.
I think Wallace Stevens was making a similar point in “The Idea of Order at Key West”:
She was the single artificer of the world
in which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
whatever self it had, became the self
that was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
as we beheld her striding there alone,knew that there never was a world for her
except the one she sang and, singing, made.
What is at stake in a poem? It’s the poet’s penetrating presentation of something being discovered, something being uncovered from the poet’s own emotional pool of intelligence: an emotional reality which, if the poem does its work, can be understood, shared, and felt. What’s at stake in a poem? A revelation rising out of the poet’s discovery of a reality uncovered by his “seeing self.”
Spring and Fall:
To a Young Child
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
Missoula Spring
Charles Entrekin
I have become
one of my own poems.
This morning, the covered streets
opened black in melting snow.
I was wrong.
Winter gone, a flower
opens in me, a song, words
crawl in my veins,
a carnation of the brain,
a dogwood.
Blue Whales
Gail Entrekin
Blue whales are out there somewhere,
six thousand of the hundreds of thousands
that once roamed the planet’s seas.
Now separated from each other
by thousands of miles, they moan their loneliness
four octaves below middle C, so low, so slow,
we humans cannot even hear. But on our ocean liners
and in our lighthouse kitchens, the cutlery jangles on the table,
the glass pane vibrates in its frame, and we know
something nearby is crying out in need.
Two thousand miles away, they can be heard
and answered, the loudest sound made by a living thing,
and we don’t know what it says, but only that,
speeded up ten times, what we hear is a long, blue,
unearthly note, a gurgle so deep
we slip down into our own lostness,
grateful that they are carrying for us
something bigger than we could hold.
Hay Stacker
Charles Entrekin
Too small to lift a pitch fork full from
below, I would climb up top and catch each throw,
mid-air, then guide and drop the load in one motion,
until the wagon would hold no more.
Then coming out of the dust from the back four acres
I’d be atop the hay, barely able to breathe in the heat,
yet lying back in the wet of my own sweat, almost complete.
And when we passed beneath the big pear tree
there in the middle of my grandfather’s pasture,
I knew how it would be:
I would stick out my hand and
take the pear straight out of the air,
without effort; it would come to me
because it belonged to me.
I hadn’t yet guessed how things could go wrong,
or how it might be to be left alone, or that one
could lose badly and go down at the end
like my mother, shaking and defeated.
I was, in that moment, simply there
watching my cousins and uncles in the distance, shimmering
in the hot air like mirages in black rubber boots,
with pitch forks in hand,
and when I took my first dusty bite,
it was like my first
sinking deep into a woman’s body,
almost overwhelming, and I could feel
the pear’s juice sinking into me
as I lay there in the hay-scented air, adrift
and becoming everything around me,
until suddenly I laughed out loud
without knowing
what the laughter was about
as it poured out of me
at the top of the tree-high stack
while the future waited,
and I was carried on the harvest to the barn.
Some Craft Concerns to be Applied after the Fact of the Poem
- Avoid linear sentence syntax. Shift frame of reference whenever possible. Try to create the illusion of seeing things from many angles at once, in a compressed time and space.
- Use alliteration for the music of the line, especially in short or flat lines.
- Run sentences or phrases over into next lines for surprise and to indicate speed and immediacy.
- Work images into the poem as though they were part of an apparently flat statement. Make the image work as a surprise:
the way time sits in your mouth
like cold sunshine and doors
wink open around you.
- Use concealed rhymes, rhyming end words in the middle of the next line, asynchronous rhymes. Use the anticipated and unexpected rhyme. Make it accountable to the ear, not a rhyme scheme.
- Never worry about what’s being said until after it’s been said. As Richard Hugo once said, “Those who worry about morality probably ought to.”
