A Fes&val of Poetry Winter Poetry Jazz Slam Poets Recita&on Ask the Poet Art Wit Wisdom

Transcription

1 A Fes&val of Poetry Winter 2017 Poetry Jazz Slam Poets Recita&on Ask the Poet Art Wit Wisdom

2 This Love This love is a good as oil and honey to the throat, as linen to the body, as fine raiments to the gods, as incense to the worshippers as they enter in, as this lihle seal ring to my finger. It is like a ripe pear in a man s hand, it is like the dates we mix with wine, it is like the seeds the baker adds to bread. We will be together even when old age comes and all the days in between will be food set before us, dates and honey, bread and wine.

3 How This Works First Hour Recita&on A Poet, a work, a lihle background Recordings of the poet Poetry/Jazz Slam Second Hour Visi&ng Poet Reading and Discussion Q&A

4 Jan 9: Kim Addonizio is the author of six poetry collec&ons, two novels, two story collec&ons, and two books on wri&ng poetry. She has received fellowships from the NEA and Guggenheim Founda&on, two Pushcart Prizes, and was a Na&onal Book Award Finalist. Her latest books are Mortal Trash: Poems and a memoir-in-essays, Bukowski in a Sundress. Addonizio also has two word/music CDs: Swearing, Smoking, Drinking, & Kissing (with Susan Browne) and My Black Angel. Jan 23: Al Young Widely translated, Al Young is the author of 25 books. These include The Blues Don t Change, Heaven, and Something About the Blues, novels and essay collec&ons. Appointed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Young served as California s poet laureate from 2005 through Other honors include NEA, Fulbright, Guggenheim Fellowships, and the 2011 Thomas Wolfe Award. He is Dis&nguished Professor in the MFA in Wri&ng Program at California College of the Arts. Jan 30: Ma6hew Zapruder is the author most recently of Sun Bear, Copper Canyon, Why Poetry, a book of prose about poetry, is forthcoming from Ecco/Harper Collins in An Associate Professor and Director of the MFA Program in Crea&ve Wri&ng at Saint Mary s College of California, he is also Editor at Large at Wave Books, and Editor of the Poetry Column for the New York Times Magazine. He lives in Oakland, CA. Feb 6: Joan Baranow is Professor of English at Dominican University and director of the low-residency MFA program in Crea&ve Wri&ng. She is a Fellow of the Virginia Center for the Crea&ve Arts and member of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Her poetry has appeared in The GeFysburg Review, The Paris Review, Poetry East, JAMA, among others. Her book, Living Apart, was published by Plain View Press. She produced the PBS documentary Healing Words: Poetry & Medicine. The Time We Have is in post-produc&on. She is the winner of the Robinson Jeffers award. Feb 13: Michael McClure, the youngest of the Beat Genera&on poets, first read his poetry on the night in 1957 that Ginsberg read Howl. He is equally poet and playwrite and has authored 25 books -- novels, plays, essays, biography. He wrote the first version of Mercedes Benz which was popularized by Janis Joplin. A Flower Garland Buddhist. Father of humanitarian, Dr. Jane McClure and twice a grandfather. He lives in Oakland with his wife -- ar&st and sculptor Amy Evans McClure. Feb 27: Dawn McGuire is a neurologist/neuroscien&st and the author of four poetry collec&ons, including The Aphasia Café, winner of the 2013 Indie Award for Poetry, and American Dream with Exit Wound, forthcoming in May, She grew up in Eastern Kentucky and was educated at Princeton University, Union Theological Seminary, and the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. She lives in the Bay Area where she directs a free clinic for AIDS pa&ents and military veterans with neurological problems. Mar 6: Dean Rader Dean Rader s debut collec&on of poems, Works & Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize. Landscape Portrait Figure Form (2014) was named a Barnes & Noble Review Best Book of Poetry. He is the editor of 99 Poems for the 99 Percent: An Anthology of Poetry. Forthcoming in 2017 are a book of collabora&ve sonnets wrihen with Simone Muench, en&tled Suture (Black Lawrence Press) and Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry (Copper Canyon).

5 The prin&ng press has made poetry so silent that we ve forgohen the power of Poetry as oral messages. The sound of the streetsinger and the Salva&on Army Speaker are not to be scorned...

6 I Am Wai&ng hhps:// FeqquMpPs Page 54, Capsule 2

7 Lawrence Ferlinghen Prominent voice in the wide-open poetry movement of the 1950 s. Has wrihen poetry, transla&on, fic&on, theatre, art cri&cism, film narra&on, and essays. Voice that went against the literary elite s defini&on of art and the ar&st s role. b. 1919, Yonkers, son of Carlo Ferlinghen from province of Breacia. U. of North Carolina, US Navy as ship s commander. Columbia masters degree, Sorbonne doctorate. San Francisco. Taught French. Wrote art cri&cism. Founded City Lights Bookstore, first all-paperback bookshop. City Lights Publishing. Pocket Poets Series dissident voices: Ginsberg, etc. Arrest on obscenity charges. Famous trial brought na&onal ahen&on to the San Francisco Renaissance and Beat Poetry. Established legal first amendment precedent for the publica&on of controversial work of redeeming value. Pain&ngs exhibited world-wide. George Krevesky Gallery. Coney Island of the Mind s&ll the most popular book of poetry in the U.S. Translated into 9 languages. 1,000,000 copies in print.

8 Ferlinghen Pain&ngs

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10 9 See it was like this when we waltz into this place a couple of Papish cats is doing an Astec two-step And I says Dad let s cut but then this dame comes up behind me see and says You and me could really exist Wow I says Only next day she has bad teeth and really hates poetry

11 Apache Life Apache life in the Hill Country Texas State Historical Associa&on see, Apache Song p 66, Poems book 2

12 Apache Song Now you will feel no rain, for each of you will be a shelter to the other. Now you will feel no cold, for each of you will be warmth to the other. Now there is no loneliness for you; now there is no more loneliness. Now you are two bodies, but there is only one life before you. Go now to your dwelling place, to enter into your days together. And may your days be good and long on the earth.

13 Na&ve American Poetry Joy Harjo, Muskogee Creek poet, says, The literature of the aboriginal people of North America defines America. It is not exo&c. The concerns are par&cular, yet osen universal. Poetry Founda&on: (Na&ve American poetry) bears historical witness, demonstrate the strength of the Na&ve American spirit, argue crucial poli&cal and social issues, while illumina&ng a vibrant cultural heritage. Indian Poetry embraces song-texts primarily, but also prayers, incanta&ons, and passages from myths, legends and chronicles.

14 The Power of Words The power of words: Words are magic, the user can seize control. Sharp coercive phrases like Listen, Be s&ll, Drink my blood, are typical of the style known as the formula. These words are designed to bring about the ac&on they describe. Animals and objects are imbued with dis&nc&ve personifying spirits. The Indian poet is not thought of as the originator but the conveyer of the poem. The origin is thought to come from spirits, dreams, ancestors, or to simply emerge from the underworld. Rothenberg points out that the other side of Indian spirituality is a sanc&oned irreverence: sacred clowns, tricksters, whose absurdity and black humor compliment the sense of harmony and order. What is at stake here is the survival of a sense of balance.

15 The Killer (Cherokee) Careful: my knife drills your soul listen, whatever-your-name-is One of the wolf people listen I ll grind your saliva into the earth listen I ll cover your bones with black flint listen I ll cover your bones with feathers listen I ll cover your bones with rocks.

16 Apache Blessing May the sun bring you energy by day, May the moon sosly restore you by night, May the rain wash away your worries, May the breeze blow new strength into your being. May you walk gently through the world and know its beauty all the days of your life.

17 Kim Addonizio

18 Firescribbling Transtrommer, p 5

19 Book 2 p, 76

20 Dream Song 4 Filling her compact & delicious body with chicken páprika, she glanced at me twice. Fain&ng with interest, I hungered back and only the fact of her husband & four other people kept me from springing on her or falling at her lihle feet and crying You are the hohest one for years of night Henry s dazed eyes have enjoyed, Brilliance.' I advanced upon (despairing) my spumoni. Sir Bones: is stuffed, de world, wif feeding girls.

21 Black hair, complexion La&n, jewelled eyes downcast... The slob beside her feasts... What wonders is she sinng on, over there? The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars. Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry. Mr. Bones: there is.

22 Dream Song 14 Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. Aser all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, we ourselves flash and yearn, and moreover my mother told me as a boy (repea&ngly) Ever to confess you re bored means you have no Inner Resources. I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored. Peoples bore me, literature bores me, especially great literature, Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes as bad as Achilles, who loves people and valiant art, which bores me. And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag and somehow a dog has taken itself & its tail considerably away into mountains or sea or sky, leaving behind: me, wag.

23 The Curious Work of John Berryman Dream Songs is a post-modernist epic. It is the dreams of a character named Henry, a vaguely disguised stand-in for the poet himself, and is a mosaic of the mental life of its creator. Henry claims to have suffered many losses in his life and is trying to cure himself through the psychotherapy of wri&ng down his dreams, releasing all his long suppressed energies. It is art used for healing. The different songs are different stages in a long journey Postmodern literature is a form of literature which is marked, both stylis&cally and ideologically, by a reliance on such literary conven&ons as fragmenta&on, paradox, unreliable narrators, osen unrealis&c and downright impossible plots, games, parody, paranoia, dark humor and authorial self-reference.

24 Berryman was tortured by alcoholism, manic/depression and the ghost of his father. He had nightmares for seven years before wri&ng the Dream Songs. He uses allegory, baby talk, parody, dream language, the blather of a neuro&c outpouring of consciousness. He wanted each poem to be a damned serious humor and a gravity of maher with the gaiety of manner. His poetry was an effort to break away from the overintellectualized poetry of the day. The form of the poem varies but it is always one persona taking over from another, as in Henry and Mr. Bones. The poem almost shahers in front of you. In this way he uses the architecture of his words to imitate the disjointed nature of his own life. The lyric has assumed an intense purpose. As in all epics, the hero must go through many severe difficul&es before ahaining reconcilia&on with the life. In this case, the rescue is an internal adjustment that saves him. In his last Dream Song he finds himself in a wooden house that is made well.

25 Some Thoughts on Berryman from Cri&cs A commanding figure in what had come to be known as confessional poetry, for its seemingly raw autobiographical excava&on of alcohol and drugs, adultery and divorce, madness and hospitaliza&on the generic life of a genera&on, as Berryman s friend Robert Lowell called it. Alcohol and adultery are osen thought to have been John Berryman s muses. But his real and abiding muse was American spoken English. I am a monoglot of English, he said. With The Dream Songs, published in 1969, the supposed con&nental divide between the Beats on the West Coast and the academic poets on the East closed in. Like Whitman in Song of Myself, the model that he always acknowledged for The Dream Songs, Berryman was engaged in an ongoing and intoxica&ng language experiment,

26 Confessional Poetry Confessional poetry is poetry of self-revela&on. Brought to light in the 1950s and 60s by poets like Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and W.D. Snodgrass, confessional poetry serves to reveal an author s repressed anguish or deepest emo&ons through verses about the most personal of subjects. Although feelings and emo&ons have long been considered a core thema&c element of poetry, the risqué content conveyed in confessional poetry sets it far apart from more tradi&onal genres. All the world like a woolen lover once did seem on Henry s side. Then came a departure. Thereaser nothing fell out as it might or ought. I don t see how Henry, pried open for all the world to see, survived.

27 With the dris of years, many of the names of Berryman s celebrated friends, rahled off confidently in lines that recall the accusatory opening of Howl, have lapsed into obscurity: I m cross with god who has wrecked this genera&on. First he seized Ted, then Richard, Randall, and now Delmore. In between he gorged on Sylvia Plath. That was a first rate haul. He les alive fools I could number like a kitchen knife but Lowell he did not touch. One might say about this group of confessional poets, as Berryman wrote in his gorgeous suite of poems for Delmore Schwartz, that he and his once lustrous contemporaries are s&ll wai&ng for fame to descend / with a scarlet mantle & tell us who we were. Berryman s phrasing here echoes Mallarmé s famous sonnet about Poe s tomb, with its predic&on that eternity would eventually change Poe back into Himself, separa&ng the greatness of the poet s achievement from the lurid legends that had come to surround him.

28 Berryman the life Born John Smith in McAllester, Oklahoma, When he was 12 his father shot himself outside John s window, an event that haunted him throughout his life and appears frequently in his poetry. Thought much I then on perforated daddy, daddy boxed in & let down with strong straps, when I my friends homes visited, with fathers universal & intact. Took stepfather s name, moved to MassachuseHs and New York. Graduated Columbia and then Cambridge. First of three marriages First book of poems, The Dispossessed, Taught at Harvard, Princeton, and U. Minnesota. Famous for Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and Dream Songs which won him the Pulitzer Prize. He was awarded the Na&onal Book Award for his 308 Dream Songs. He ended his life in 1972 by jumping off the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis in the dead of winter.

29 The Death of John Berryman by William Dickey Henry went over the bridge first; he always did. Then Mr. Interlocutor and Mr. Bonds, then the blackface minstrels with their tambourines. You have to empty out all of the contents before the person himself dies. The beard went over the edge, and Stephen Crane, and the never-competed scholarly work on Shakespeare, and faculty wives, and a sheaf of recovery wards white-&led in the blue shadow of the lihle hours.

30 He loosened his neck&e and the recurrent dream of walking out under water to the des&ned island. His mother went over in pearls; his father went over. His real father went over, whoever his father was. He thought to go over with someone, hand in hand with perhaps Mistress Bradstreet, but someone always preceded him. The news of his death preceded him. It hit the water with a flat splash and the target twanged. When there was nothing to see or hear with, the silent traffic of bystanders wrapped in snow, his only body let itself loose, turned and waved before it went over to what it never could understand as being the human shore.

31 He Resigns Age, and the deaths, and the ghosts. Her having gone away in spirit from me. Hosts of regrets come & find me empty. I don t feel this will change. I don t want any thing or person, familiar or strange. I don t think I will sing any more just now; or ever. I must start to sit with a blind brow above an empty heart.

32 Book 2 p.67

33 Song For A Lady On the day of breasts and small hips the window pocked with bad rain, rain coming on like a minister, we coupled, so sane and insane. We lay like spoons while the sinister rain dropped like flies on our lips and our glad eyes and our small hips. "The room is so cold with rain," you said and you, feminine you, with your flower said novenas to my ankles and elbows. You are a na&onal product and power. Oh my swan, my drudge, my dear wooly rose, even a notary would notarize our bed as you knead me and I rise like bread.

34 Sexton, her life Anne Sexton was born in Newton, MassachuseHs and raised in Weston. The daughter of a successful businessman, Sexton s childhood was materially comfortable but not happy. Her rela&onships with her parents were difficult, perhaps even abusive. Sexton s closest confidante was her maiden greataunt. She ahended boarding school and aser gradua&on enrolled in Garland Junior College for one year. Sexton later described Garland as a finishing school. At age 19, she married Alfred Kayo Sexton II. While Kayo was serving in Korea, Anne became a fashion model. In 1953, she gave birth to her first child and in 1955, her second. Sexton suffered from post-partum depression, and aser the birth of her first daughter she suffered her first breakdown and was admihed to a neuropsychiatric hospital. Other ins&tu&onaliza&ons followed. Sexton struggled with depression for the remainder of her life. She commihed suicide at age 46. Pulitzer Prize 1967 for her book Live or Die.

35 Anne Sexton In treatment, her therapist encouraged her to write and in 1957 Sexton joined wri&ng groups in Boston that eventually led her to friendships and rela&onships with the poets Maxine Kumin, Robert Lowell, George Starbuck, and Sylvia Plath. As Sexton told Beatrice Berg, her wri&ng began, in fact, as therapy: My analyst told me to write between our sessions about what I was feeling and thinking and dreaming. During sessions with Anne Sexton he used hypnosis and sodium pentothal to recover supposedly repressed memories. During this process, he allegedly used sugges&on to uncover memories of having been abused by her father. If anything influenced me it was W. D. Snodgrass Heart s Needle... It so changed me, and undoubtedly it must have influenced my poetry. At the same &me everyone said, You can t write this way. It s too personal; it s confessional; you can t write this, Anne, and everyone was discouraging me. But then I saw Snodgrass doing what I was doing, and it kind of gave me permission. Heart s Needle explores a father s struggle to remain a father to his daughter who is separated from him by her parents divorce. His daughter s presence during visita&on as well as her absence is like a needle in the heart because both intensify his sense of loss.

36 Sexton s Work Themes of her poetry include her long bahle against depression and mania, suicidal tendencies, and various in&mate details from her private life, including her rela&onships with her husband and children. Sexton is seen as the modern model of the confessional poet. Maxine Kumin described Sexton's work: "She wrote openly about menstrua&on, abor&on, masturba&on, incest, adultery, and drug addic&on at a &me when the proprie&es embraced none of these as proper topics for poetry. "Star&ng as a rela&vely conven&onal writer, she learned to roughen up her line.... to use it as an instrument against the 'politesse' of language, poli&cs, religion, and sex." The Awful Rowing Toward God. The &tle came from her mee&ng with a Roman Catholic priest who, although unwilling to administer last rites, told her "God is in your typewriter." This gave the poet the desire and willpower to con&nue living and wri&ng. Some&mes she made ahempts to reach outside the realm of her own life for poe&c themes. TransformaWons (1971) is a revisionary re-telling of Grimm's Fairy Tales. Gave rise to the term Revisioning.

37 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs No maher what life you lead the virgin is a lovely number: cheeks as fragile as cigarehe paper, arms and legs made of Limoges, lips like Vin Du Rhône, rolling her china-blue doll eyes open and shut. Open to say, Good Day Mama, and shut for the thrust of the unicorn. She is unsoiled. She is as white as a bonefish. Once there was a lovely virgin called Snow White. Say she was thirteen. Her stepmother, a beauty in her own right, though eaten, of course, by age, would hear of no beauty surpassing her own. Beauty is a simple passion, but, oh my friends, in the end you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes. The stepmother had a mirror to which she referred-- something like the weather forecast-- a mirror that proclaimed the one beauty of the land. She would ask, Looking glass upon the wall, who is fairest of us all? And the mirror would reply, You are the fairest of us all. Pride pumped in her like poison.

38 Suddenly one day the mirror replied, Queen, you are full fair, &s true, but Snow White is fairer than you. Un&l that moment Snow White had been no more important than a dust mouse under the bed. But now the queen saw brown spots on her hand and four whiskers over her lip so she condemned Snow White to be hacked to death. Bring me her heart, she said to the hunter, and I will salt it and eat it. The hunter, however, let his prisoner go and brought a boar s heart back to the castle. The queen chewed it up like a cube steak. Now I am fairest, she said, lapping her slim white fingers. Snow White walked in the wildwood for weeks and weeks. At each turn there were twenty doorways and at each stood a hungry wolf, his tongue lolling out like a worm. The birds called out lewdly, talking like pink parrots, and the snakes hung down in loops, each a noose for her sweet white neck. On the seventh week she came to the seventh mountain and there she found the dwarf house. It was as droll as a honeymoon cohage and completely equipped with seven beds, seven chairs, seven forks and seven chamber pots. Snow White ate seven chicken livers and lay down, at last, to sleep.

39 The dwarfs, those lihle hot dogs, walked three &mes around Snow White, the sleeping virgin. They were wise and wahled like small czars. Yes. It s a good omen, they said, and will bring us luck. They stood on &ptoes to watch Snow White wake up. She told them about the mirror and the killer-queen and they asked her to stay and keep house. Beware of your stepmother, they said. Soon she will know you are here. While we are away in the mines during the day, you must not open the door. Looking glass upon the wall... The mirror told and so the queen dressed herself in rags and went out like a peddler to trap Snow White. She went across seven mountains. She came to the dwarf house and Snow White opened the door and bought a bit of lacing. The queen fastened it &ghtly around her bodice, as &ght as an Ace bandage, so &ght that Snow White swooned. She lay on the floor, a plucked daisy. When the dwarfs came home they undid the lace and she revived miraculously. She was as full of life as soda pop. Beware of your stepmother, they said. She will try once more.

40 Looking glass upon the wall... Once more the mirror told and once more the queen dressed in rags and once more Snow White opened the door. This &me she bought a poison comb, a curved eight-inch scorpion, and put it in her hair and swooned again. The dwarfs returned and took out the comb and she revived miraculously. She opened her eyes as wide as Orphan Annie. Beware, beware, they said, but the mirror told, the queen came, Snow White, the dumb bunny, opened the door and she bit into a poison apple and fell down for the final &me. When the dwarfs returned they undid her bodice, they looked for a comb, but it did no good. Though they washed her with wine and rubbed her with buher it was to no avail. She lay as s&ll as a gold piece. The seven dwarfs could not bring themselves to bury her in the black ground so they made a glass coffin and set it upon the seventh mountain so that all who passed by could peek in upon her beauty. A prince came one June day and would not budge. He stayed so long his hair turned green and s&ll he would not leave. The dwarfs took pity upon him and gave him the glass Snow White-- its doll s eyes shut forever-- to keep in his far-off castle. As the prince s men carried the coffin they stumbled and dropped it and the chunk of apple flew out of her throat and she woke up miraculously.

41 And thus Snow White became the prince s bride. The wicked queen was invited to the wedding feast and when she arrived there were red-hot iron shoes, in the manner of red-hot roller skates, clamped upon her feet. First your toes will smoke and then your heels will turn black and you will fry upward like a frog, she was told. And so she danced un&l she was dead, a subterranean figure, her tongue flicking in and out like a gas jet. Meanwhile Snow White held court, rolling her china-blue doll eyes open and shut and some&mes referring to her mirror as women do.

42

43 The Guest p. 32

44 Falling and Flying Book 2 p, 77

45 The Lost Hotels of Paris The Lord gives everything and charges by taking it back. What a bargain. Like being young for a while. We are allowed to visit the hearts of women, to go into their bodies so we feel no longer alone. We are permihed roman&c love with its bounty and half-life of two years. It is right to mourn for the small hotels of Paris that used to be when we used to be. My mansard looking down on Notre Dame every morning is gone and me listening to the bell at night.

46 Venice is no more. The best Greek islands have drowned in accelera&on. But it s the having not the keeping that is the treasure. Ginsberg came to my house one asernoon and said he was giving up poetry because it told lies, that language distorts. I agreed, but asked what we have that gets it right even that much. We look up at the stars and they are not there. We see the memory of when they were, once upon a &me. And that too is more than enough.

47

48 Having and Keeping She takes off her clothes without reserva&on. The territories of her body sing the sweet harmonies that are par&cular to her. How the cave of her navel, the valleys between ribs know to love each other. If I am lucky I will be allowed to enter the heart of this woman and wrap her body around me before sorrow returns, and she has moved on to someone else. The moment with this woman, if it happened, is gone. Things are not what they were. The hot wind off a Texas prairie, a family touring Colorado in a green and beige nineteen-fisy-three Chevy wagon might have happened too. One cannot be sure. Having is different from keeping.

49 My daughter sends an from Connec&cut. She is happy about the music the grandchildren are making. The beauty of what I hear has les their voices and they are off washing dishes or doing homework. What I am listening to is a memory of where they were when they made this music. I look across my deck to the arrangement of branches against the senng sun. The woodpecker s red tus glints perfectly in the fading light. What I see has changed even before the woodpecker flies away. I cannot keep where he was or anything else about him. But if these things happened, even in approxima&on to what I believe, then I have been given this music, the vaca&on, the hot wind off the prairie and maybe even the woman. It is enough to think so. -- David WaHs

50 Jack Gilbert (From The Poetry Founda&on): When Jack Gilbert won the Yale Younger Poets prize in 1962 for Views of Jeopardy, he ahained a kind of allure usually foreign to poets. His photo was featured in Esquire, Vogue, and Glamour, and his book was osen stolen from the library. A Guggenheim Fellowship enabled him to go to Europe; he spent much of the ensuing two decades living modestly abroad. Although the literary world embraced him early in his career, he was something of a self-imposed exile: flunking out of high school; congrega&ng with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Spicer in San Francisco but never really wri&ng like a Beat poet; living in Europe and wri&ng American poetry inspired by Pound and Eliot.

51 A self-described serious roman&c, Gilbert had a rela&onship with poet Linda Gregg, and was later married to sculptor Michiko Nogami, who died aser 11 years of marriage. Many of his poems are about these rela&onships and losses. Refusing Heaven won the Na&onal Book Cri&cs Circle Award, and Gilbert s work has also received a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry and a grant from the Na&onal Endowment for the Arts. His second book of poetry, Monolithos (1982), won the Stanley Kunitz Prize and the American Poetry Review Prize. Despite these awards, some cri&cs have ignored or dismissed Gilbert. Gilbert pointed to the spareness of his work: I am by nature drawn to exigence, compression, selec&on, he wrote. One of the special pleasures in poetry for me is accomplishing a lot with the least means possible. Publishing only four books since he began wri&ng over 50 years ago reinforces for his readers Gilbert s love of economy. In a 2006 interview on NPR, he reflected on his rela&vely sparse list of publica&ons: It s not a business with me.... I m not a professional of poetry, I m a farmer of poetry.

52 (From The Academy of American Poets) On February 18, 1925, Jack Gilbert was born in PiHsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was educated in PiHsburgh and San Francisco, where he later par&cipated in Jack Spicer s famous Poetry as Magic Workshop at San Francisco State College in About Gilbert s work, the poet James Dickey said, He takes himself away to a place more inward than is safe to go; from that awful silence and &ghtening, he returns to us poems of savage compassion. Gilbert died on November 13, 2012 in Berkeley, California aser a long bahle with Alzheimer s. He was 87.

53 A Brief for the Defense Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies are not starving someplace, they are starving somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils. But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants. Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not be made so fine. The Bengal &ger would not be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women at the fountain are laughing together between the suffering they have known and the awfulness in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody in the village is very sick. There is laughter every day in the terrible streets of CalcuHa, and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.

54 If we deny our happiness, resist our sa&sfac&on, we lessen the importance of their depriva&on. We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injus&ce the only measure of our ahen&on is to praise the Devil. If the locomo&ve of the Lord runs us down, we should give thanks that the end had magnitude. We must admit there will be music despite everything. We stand at the prow again of a small ship anchored late at night in the &ny port looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront is three shuhered cafés and one naked light burning. To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth all the years of sorrow that are to come.

55 (From The Ghost Inside, by Sarah Manguso) I don t want to be at peace, Jack Gilbert pronounced shortly aser his 80th birthday. Yet he has spent much of his life on remote Greek islands, on a houseboat in Kashmir, on a western MassachuseHs farm, and in the remote outskirts of Sausalito, California, either alone or in the company of one other. He has never owned a home and has driven a car only twice. A sensible person might even say he s sought a peace separate from the arena of the career poets and maybe even separate from that of the career adult. But the unique kernel of Gilbert s poetry is its fearless explora&on of the adult heart. It takes a moment to have a fling or write one good line, but sustaining authen&c emo&onal par&cipa&on, as Gilbert has in his life as a poet, is terrifying and hard, and is prac&cally a lost art. Mechanical form doesn t really maher to me.... Some poets [write within a form] with extraordinary desness. But I don t understand why.... It s like trea&ng poetry as though it s learning how to balance brooms on your head.... It s like people who think sexuality is fun. Sure, it s fun, but it s a way of genng someplace, not just running to the corner for a lihle spasm. Despite rela&onships that had all the signs of in&macy with Gianna Gelmen, Linda Gregg, and Michiko Nogami Gilbert found the women he knew unknowable. Gilbert wrote: I relish the physical surface of a woman, but I am importantly haunted by the ghost inside.

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57 This is Just to Say by William Carlos Williams

58 Book 2 p. 69 A Flower No More Than Itself

59 Elegance All that is uncared for. Les alone in the s&llness in that pure silence married to the s&llness of nature. A door off its hinges, shade and shadows in an empty room. Leaks for light. Raw where the &n roof rusted through. The rustle of weeds in their different kinds of air in the mornings, year aser year. A pecan tree, and the house made out of mud bricks. Accurate and unexpected beauty, rahling and singing. If not to the sun, then to nothing and to no one. hhps:// g/poems-and-poets/ poems/detail/50122

60 Linda Gregg Born in New York, poet Linda Gregg was raised in Marin County, California. She received both a BA and an MA from San Francisco State University. Gregg has published several collec&ons of poetry, including Too Bright to See (1981); Alma (1985); Things and Flesh (1999), finalist for the Kingsley Tuss Award for Poetry; and All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems, a Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of 2008 and winner of the Poetry Society of America s William Carlos Williams Award. Gregg s lyrical poetry is osen admired for its ability to discuss grief, desire, and longing with electrifying crassmanship and poise. Poet W.S. Merwin has praised Gregg s poems, observing, They are original in the way that really mahers: they speak clearly of their source. They are inseparable from the surprising, unrolling, evenul, pure current of their language, and they convey at once the pain of individual loss, a steady and uherly personal radiance. Gregg has taught at the University of Iowa, the University of California, Berkeley, and Princeton University. She lives in New

61 The Breakup In 1981 Linda Gregg published her first poetry collec&on, Too Bright To See a remarkable debut in its own right. But it was made even more memorable by the raw and forthright poems directly and indirectly referencing her eight year marriage/rela&onship with poet Jack Gilbert and his infideli&es. The book has many surprises but one stands out the most. In spite of not pulling her punches in her poems about Jack she dedicated her book to him: For Jack Gilbert. It Was Like Being Alive Twice. The Defeated. I had warm pumpernickel bread, cheese and chicken. It was sunny outside. I miss you. My head is Wred. John was nice this morning. Already what I remember most of the happiness of seeing you. Having tea. Falling asleep. Waking up with you there awake in the kitchen. It was like being alive twice. I ll try to tell you befer when I am stronger. What does the moth think when the skin begins to split? Is the air an astonishing pain? I keep seeing the arms bent. The legs smashed up against the breasts, with her sex showing. The weak hands clenched. I see the sad, unused face. Then she starts to stand up in the opening out. I know ground and trees. I know air. But then everything else stops because I don t know what happened a`er that.

62 and from Gilbert s Poems Divorce Woke up suddenly thinking I heard crying. Rushed through the dark house. Stopped, remembering. Stood looking out at the bright moonlight on concrete. Rarely are we shown glimpses this real inside the mysteriousness of marriage. A Year Later (for Linda Gregg) From this distance they are unimportant standing by the sea. She is weeping, wearing a white dress, and the marriage is almost over, a`er eight years. All around is the flat uninhabited side of the island. The water is blue in the morning air. They did not know this would happen when they came, just the two of them and the silence. A purity that looked like beauty and was too difficult for people. (from Richard Osler s blog)

63 The Lamb It was a picture I had aser the war. A bombed English church. I was too young to know the word English or war, but I knew the picture. The ruined city s&ll seemed noble. The cathedral with its roof blown off was not less godly. The church was the same plus rain and sky. Birds flew in and out of the holes God s fist made in the walls. All our desire for love or children is treated like rags by the enemy. I knew so much and sang anyway. Like a bird who will sing un&l it is brought down. When they take away the trees, the child picks up a s&ck and says, this is a tree, this the house and the family. As we might. Through a door of what had been a house, into the field of rubble, walks a single lamb, &l&ng its head, curious, unafraid, hungry.

64

65 Texts for the Jazz/Poetry Performance

66 Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll Twas brilig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe. Beware the Jabberwock, my son the jaws that bite, the claws that catch Beware the jubjub bird and shun the frumious Bandersnatch He took his vorpal sword in hand; Long &me the manxome foe he sought So rested he by the tumtum tree and stood awhile in thought And as in uffish thought he stood, the Jabberwock with eyes of flame Came whiffling through the tulgey wood and burbled as it came.

67 One two one two and through and through the vorpal blade went snicker snack. He les it dead and with its head he went galumphing back And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? Come to my arms my beamish boy O frabjous day! Callooh Callay He chortled in his joy Twas brilig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe.

68 Morning Poem by David Wa6s (harvey ellis) now you remember what the sun looked like - sos, no glare a peek of cloud to dris by just at the right &me. now you remember rain, its cold éclair for your morning breakfast. what will you do with this knowledge in its gela&n capsule? what of sleep and the biher alarm? when does the world turn slowly enough? when the chance to get enough rest

69 Not Here by Lorna Dee Cervantes Not here, she says, and diverts the stream. Not here, she whispers and converts the lunar waves. Not here, she sings and prevents the clots of summer from sehling on her skin. Not here, she murmurs, and currents desire into &de pools. Not here, she startles in the thicket and looks away. Not here, she confronts my gaze like a deer in the bristling meadow, and returns to feed.

70 WaiXng for Icarus Muriel Rukeyser He said he would be back and we d drink wine together He said that everything would be beher than before He said we were on the edge of a new rela&on He said he would never again cringe before his father He said he would invent full &me He said he loved me, that going into me He said was like going into the world and the sky He said the buckles were very firm He said the wax was the best wax He said wait for me here on the beach He said just don t cry

71 I remember the gulls and the waves I remember the islands going dark on the sea I remember the girls laughing I remember they said he only wanted to get away from me I remember mother said inventors like poets are a trashy lot I remember she told me that those who try out inven&ons are worse I remember that she added that women who love such are the worst of all I have been wai&ng all day or perhaps longer I would have liked to try out those wings myself It would have been beher than this.

72 Counterman by Paul Violi Whatll it be? Roast beef on rye, with tomato and mayo Whaddaya want on it? A swipe of mayo. Pepper but no salt. You got it. You want lefuce on that? No. Just tomato and mayo. Tomato and mayo. You got it. Salt and pepper? No salt, just a lihle pepper. You got it. No salt. You want tomato.? Yes. Tomato. No lehuce. No lefuce. You got it. No salt, right? Right. No salt. You got it. Pickle? No, no pickle. Just tomato and mayo. And pepper. Yes, a lihle pepper Right. A lifle pepper. No pickle. Right. No pickle. You got it. Next!

73 Roast beef on whole wheat, please, with lehuce, mayonnaise and a center slice of beefsteak tomato. The lehuce splayed, if you will, in a Beaux Arts deriva&ve of classical acanthus, and the roast beef, thinly sliced, folded In a mul&-foil arrangement that eschews Bragdonian pretensions or any idea of divine geometric projec&on For that maher, but simply provides a senng for the tomato to form a medallion with a dab of mayonnaise as a fleuron. And as eclec&c as this may sound if the mayonnaise can also be applied along the crust in a Vitruvian scroll and as a festoon below the medallion, That would be swell You mean like in the Cathedral St. Pierre in Geneva? Yes, but the swag more like the one below the rosehe] at the Royal Palace in Amsterdam. You got it. Next!

74 In the fish century BC Buddhist Barbie by Denise Duhamel Gatama the Indian philosopher Teaches all is emp&ness And there is no self in the fish century BC In the twenty-first century, Barbie agrees But wonders how a man with such a belly Can pose smiling and without a shirt

75 The End of Dreams by Floyd Skloot He wakens knowing this to be the day his hopeless singing voice at last will sound exactly like the young Robert Goulet. It is the day for him to touch the ground as only noble Fred Astaire has done before, and only once, and with someone perfect in his arms. He will be able to accompany himself on the grand piano by sight, bass hand and treble hand like swallows in flight, each magic hand nimble and light as the air that trembles with the music he will make at the end of all his dreams.

76 It feels simple and right to draw in all the air he can, to grow s&ll then soar. Now they all stand around his bed, in tears, and he sees the pure light that means the &me has come for him to sound the first note, take the first step, and let go.

77

78 Rumi Quatrains

79 September 2 by Wendell Berry p 81, Book 2

80 They Sit Together on the Porch They sit together on the porch, the dark Almost fallen, the house behind them dark. Their supper done with, they have washed and dried The dishes only two plates now, two glasses, Two knives, two forks, two spoons small work for two. She sits with her hands folded in her lap, At rest. He smokes his pipe. They do not speak, And when they speak at last it is to say What each one knows the other knows. They have One mind between them, now, that finally For all its knowing will not exactly know Which one goes first through the dark doorway, bidding Goodnight, and which sits on a while alone.

81 Wendell Berry Poet, novelist, and environmentalist Wendell Berry lives on a farm in Port Royal, Kentucky near his birthplace, where he has maintained a farm for over 40 years. Mistrusul of technology, he holds deep reverence for the land and is a staunch defender of agrarian values. He is the author of over 40 books of poetry, fic&on, and essays. His poetry celebrates the holiness of life and everyday miracles osen taken for granted. His message is that humans must learn to live in harmony with the natural rhythms of the earth or perish. The UnseFling of America: Culture and Agriculture, which analyzes the many failures of modern, mechanized life, is one of the key texts of the environmental movement, but Berry, a poli&cal maverick, has cri&cized environmentalists as well as those involved with big businesses and land development. In his opinion, many environmentalists place too much emphasis on wild lands without acknowledging the importance of agriculture to our society. Berry strongly believes that small-scale farming is essen&al to healthy local economies, and that strong local economies are essen&al to the survival of the species and the well-being of the planet. The Poetry Founda&on

82 The Porch over the River In the dusk of the river, the wind gone, the trees grow s&ll the beau&ful poise of lightness, the heavy world pushing toward it. Beyond, on the face of the water, lies the reflec&on of another tree, inverted, pulsing with the short strokes of waves the wind has stopped driving. In a &me when men no longer can imagine the lives of their sons this is s&ll the world the world of my &me, the grind

83 of engines marking the country like an audible map, the high dark marked by the flight of men, lights stranger than stars. The phoebes cross and re-cross the openings, alert for what may s&ll be earned from the light. The whippoorwills begin, and the frogs. And the dark falls, again, as it must. The look of the world withdraws into the vein of memory. The mirrored tree, darkening, s&rs with the water s inward life. What has made it so? a quietness in it no ques&on can be asked in. The last light gathers on the face of the river. Now comes the sound of wings it has grown too dark to see.

84 Lake Echo, Dear C D Wright p 73

85 C D Wright The Poetry Founda&on C.D. Wright was born in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, the daughter of a judge and a court reporter. She published over a dozen books, Wright s wri&ng has been described as experimental, Southern, socially conscious, and ellip&cal; as a volume of selected poems, Steal Away demonstrates how Wright has not cleaved to any one voice or form but con&nues to evolve her style. As poet and cri&c Joel Brouwer asserts, Wright belongs to a school of exactly one, and Wright herself pointed out the contradic&ons inherent in her work: I m country but sophis&cated. I m par&cular and concrete, but I m probing another plane.... There are many &mes when I want to hammer the head. Other &mes I want to sleep on the hammer. Poetry is a necessity of life," Wright has said. It is a func&on of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free, and declare them so.

86 Gloss for Floa&ng Trees Catamenia menses, from the root meaning monthly Saurian genus of rep&les including lizards, crocks San serif a lehering type without serif, or without width or flourish Sough a moaning sound like wind in the trees Treacle molasses or cloying sen&mentality Sphagnum plant genus including peat moss Phonemes dis&nct units of sound that dis&nguish words or languages one from another. True to bring an object to its exact shape, as in to turn a board into a post -- This poem is going to push you!!!

87 Floa&ng Trees a bed is les open to a mirror a mirror gazes long and hard at a bed light fingers the house with its own acous&cs one of them writes this down one has paper bed of swollen creeks and theories and coils bed of eyes and leaky pens much of the night the air touches arms arms extend themselves to air their torsos turning toward a roll of sound: thunder night of coon scat and vandalized headstones night of deep kisses and catamenia

88 his face by this light: saurian hers: ash like the &ssue of a hornets nest one scans the aisle of firs the faint blue line of them one looks out: sans serif Didn t I hear you tell them you were born on a train what begins with a sough and ends with a groan groan in which the tongue s true color is revealed the comb s sough and the denim s undeniable rub the chair s stripped back and muddied rung color of stone soup and garden gloves color of meal and treacle and sphagnum

89 hangers clinging to their coat a sos white bulb to its string the footprints inside us iterate the footprints outside the scratched words return to their sleeves the dresses of monday through friday swallow the long hips of weekends a face is studied like a key for the mystery of what it once opened I didn t mean to wake you angel brains

90 ink of eyes and veins and phonemes the ink completes the feeling a mirror silently facing a door door with no lock no lock the room he brings into you the room befalls you like the fir trees he trues her she nears him like the firs if one vanishes one stays if one stays the other will or will not vanish otherwise my beau&ful green fly otherwise not a leaf s&rs hhps://

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