Day 17: The density of dreams is made from________

Today's prompt got me thinking about the way dreams are made of the ideas we are afraid to think about while we are awake.  They are where we work out the under workings (or back-end) of our emotional lives.  This idea got me thinking about how if towns could dream their dreams would be like muddy rainstorms that carry a towns history from one place to different place and how that shift would haunt a town.  One of the most famous stories about Sebastopol is the naming of the town.  The story has been told and re-told 100 different times.  But, the gist of it is that two guys got into a fight and one man ran into the general store.  The other (blocked from entering the store by the store's owner) stood outside for hours waiting for the other man to emerge. Passersby called it a standoff like the one that was then being held in Sevatopol during the Crimean War.  This draft reflects on this story.

A Storm-Minded Town

The density of dreams is made of mud
and rain.  The storms that can wash through a small town
and clear it of dread.  Waters so deep
and swift they roar muddy loud from far off
woods.  So strong they roll stones effortlessly.
Then, leave them stuck in the mud of desire.

Dreams are built of new lumber: still sticky
with sap, still fat with water  What you build
in dreams retracts--shows cracks--places where wind
licks clean.  This town dreams its name again and
again.  When the two men stood face to face
on the main road, they were up to their knees
in mud.  The dream (that airy house) is what
happened after: one man running away
into the general store the other following
but stopped at the door by the shopkeeper.
"You ain't coming into my store" he'd said.
So, instead the man paced the muddy street.
For hours his feet rutted the deep mud.
Until passersby named it: the battle
of Sevastopol after the standoff
with stubborn British troops. And the name stuck.
Now, we hardly remember the battle
or details about the standoff between
two men.  A story with the density
of a dream still travels down mud-swollen
creeks of our town when it rains hard enough
when we're up to our knees in the mud of
it searching for lost stones, houses built of truth.

Day 16: Unfettered Joy

Today will be a short post.  No big project.  Just what I call a breather poem.  I wrote a short draft of a lyric about the joy of landscape here in Sonoma County. 

[We are writing these things so that our joy might be complete]
Unfettered joy is hard to tether down:
sunlight sifts through fans of redwood branches
rolling hillsides blazing in pink blossoms
tang of bay, smell of deep forest wet earth,
surprise of what rises from what is left.
Joy that carries on wind can rise again
and again. Joy stitches words in passing
clouds. Even in the leaden hour, dark spot
growing on the horizon, to become
history. Joy spreads itself thin as sea
to cover everything in the salt of truth.

Day 15: Crying in the Face of Rain

Today's prompt should have been titled, crying in the face of taxes!  But rain it is and after finishing my taxes today (GULP!) I dove into the prompt.  This morning my friend Martha Wade mentioned to me that she remembered how the fog really held onto the scent of flowers and seemed to intensify those scents.  I couldn't agree more.  Here where it is often foggy, one smells not only the sea, but also the smell of the lavender and rosemary plants the cover the hillside, or the earthy smell of redwood or tang of bay.  For the past few days I've been wanting to write about Luther Burbank's experimental garden which is located just up the road from my house in Sebastopol.  It's a lovely place where you can walk the paths and see some of Burbank's original trees and plants.  At the back is the Mother Tree.  The fruit tree where are graphs were tested.  This draft incorporates that tree and Burbank's gardens:

In the Face of Rain

A low fog will gather the aromas

of lavender, rosemary, whatever

lies blooming in its path. Whoever walks
by smells the specific potpourri of
place: sea and salt mingling with what grows.

When Luther Burbank arrived he declared
Sonoma County nature’s chosen spot
He sold the rights to the first Idaho
potato to fund his long journey out. But,
once arrived success took to the soil.

Visitors to his Experimental
Farm in Sebastopol weren’t encouraged
(due to threats of thievery). But Shasta daises
still grinned big toothy grins at the front gate.
And rows and rows of plants and trees glistened
still coated in rain in the morning sun.

Toward back, near Pleasant Hill cemetery
the Mother Tree loomed full and large, always
bearing fruit, always bearing another
graft or possibility. Under brace
her branches seem threatened even in
a light rain. Her arms extending over
the fence as if beckoning ghosts back from
the earth, back from the fog as it burns off
leaving only the potpourri of plants
some known, some yet to be dancing in the air.

Day 14: I have been____

Today the prompt took me on a journey.  I tried to follow in my mind the immigrant's path from Europe to Sebastopol.  What it felt to plant that first crop and taste that first Gravenstein Apple.  When I was leafing through the book I'm reading on the Gravenstein apple I came across a photograph of one of the first Sebastopol families the Roberts.  I had this family in mind as I imagined this journey.



On Gold Ridge

(for the Roberts family)


I have been on steamships crossing cold depths where the horizon slurs away to a blue blur of what is left behind.
I have been in seas of tall grass that sway with the song of wind.
I have been bumped and roughed slowly in a wagon for days that are longer than the sky.
I have been across great mountains that jag the sky.
I have been to where the edge of the world rests and the sea tries desperately to reclaim it.
I have been up and over hills of redwoods and oak, looking for clearble land.
I have been behind a donkey pulling a plow slow through cleared fields until hope forms.
I have been knee deep in that new dirt, in the scent of it and the stain of it.
I have tenderly nurtured the seedlings when the rain worried, when the wind ripped off the sea onto the newly cleared hills.
I have watched seedlings widen into trees.
I have been the man who sits on the wide porch waiting for things to grow and open as the stars sharpen and come into view.
I have seen the hint of pink buds peek through like perfect tongues.
I have seen the hillside ignite in pink blossoms.
I have nervously paced the wooden porch as clouds formed on the horizon.
I have cursed the rain.
I have propped branches.
I have walked the rows like a child unable to wait.
I have readied the bins and ladders.
I have slept out under the tree just to keep the deer off.
I have picked the first perfect fruit.
I have tasted all of the sunsets and sunrises, the limestone studded hillsides, the tang of fog and salt, the rot of bay and oak and redwood on my tongue and it was good. It tasted like hope.
I have picked the apples until I feel asleep underneath the very tree I had bared.
I have lost myself in that shade and earth.

Day 13: Pay Heed

Today's prompt was ominous.  I thought about it as I drove from Sebastopol to Napa on my commute to work.  It's a lovely commute, all country roads, one of which is Old Adobe which stretches across the foot of Sonoma Mountain and offers a gorgeous view of green rolling hills.  Today the shadows of the clouds in the sky were cast unto the green hills.  It was beautiful and troublesome at the same time.  I started to think about the fate of the apple industry.  About how to the apple farmers of 1920s and 1930s the industry seemed destined to continue to thrive.  How one can never see the future that looms.

Pay Heed

Shadows of clouds passing over green hills
reveal a barn undone by time where cows
linger during rain showers.  There was once
a Gravenstein apple tree that bore more
fruit than any other.  Here, on the ridge.
In the photograph the giant tree fans
out in a screen of leaves big as a house
behind the Arnold family: Minnie,
John, E.W., Meta and Vivian.
Pay heed the future looms in the sky –
spells out in the trees massive shadow
of leaves on the loose dirt below.
 

Day 12: Fowl Weather

Every month when I write a poem a day the wonderful poet who dreams up these daily prompts includes a chicken poem -- a prompt that somehow includes a reference to a chicken.  It's always heartening to get the chicken prompt.  This year the chicken prompt was subtle, but still fun.  Last night we had a bit of "fowl weather" - a massive rain storm that woke us in the middle of the night.  My family and I live in a big barn with a tin roof, so whenever it rains, we hear it vividly.  I love the sound of rain on a metal roof, even when it is a storm.  That sound was still in my head when I began to write today's poem.  In it I started thinking about the lives of three women in the apple industry.  A migrant worker with children, a beauty queen who stepped out of a giant apple at an Apple Show and an apple rancher's wife who works the fields by day and cares for the family by night.  Here is my draft:

Three Hybrid Women in the Apple Industry

“When I die, if I go to a place where there are apples, I’ll know it won’t be heaven.”

1. Winterstein

I remember how rain punctuated
the night in the tin-roofed barn where we slept.
How the wind howled through the drafty old barn.
How the children, still tired from picking
woke and howled too. In between—gossamer
frescos were painted in our dreaming minds:
sitting in the quiet shade undisturbed
without the weight of work, ahead, behind.
Before light comes, the rooster screams us awake.



2. Red Maiden’s Blush

At the 1915 Apple Show, tent
air thick with warm sweat, dust, rotting apples.
Luther Burbank stood elevated on
a packing crate. Ta-da! He said cracking
a foolish grin and waving a wooden
wand at a gigantic Gravenstein apple.
Then the apple opened, revealing two
half-moons of white flesh and painted on seeds,
and the young pretty girl who stepped out of
it bewildered for a moment, as if
she’d just awoken from a restful sleep,
before the smile spread across her tight lips,
before the applause poured over her.

3. Bonita

After the tractor cooled and dust settled
come in to house gone cold, stoke fire’s coals
peel and slice the windfalls thin, brown sugar
a lemon plucked yesterday from the bough.
Roll dough cold. Cover. Bake an hour. Gather
the children. Coax read words or written. Stir
pot hot on iron stove. Wash the earth from
crooked carrots and beets. Slice thin into
caste-iron skillet. Stir with yesterday’s
slaughtered chicken. Wash the young faces. Scold
the one’s who know better. Divvy chores: set,
serve eat, clear, wash, scour, hot steam boiled. Lay
the children down. Look for quiet enough.
Sit beside the glowing coals, song pouring
back into the fire what’s burned out.

Day 10: The Geography of____

Yesterday, we all had the opportunity to board and sail replicas of the tall ships that once entered Bodega Harbor.  As you can imagine, this experience was extraordinary!  Below is my draft where I try and imagine what it was like to get off one of those ships after months at sea.

Geography as Seen from the Tall Ships

Two hundred years ago from lull of dank
wet wood and passage, too many bodies
pressed together;  our clothes bleached and worn thin
from sun’s glare and wind’s incessant blowing.
From the sway that had pooled and gathered in
us like a brackish bilge until we were
unable to understand land, that line
of shore defining an end, then from it
the green hills pouring back into what we
were meant to discover.  From the weak legs
that strode from the small boat into icy
surf came uncertainty and doubt.  The weight
of cargo carried across then dragged off
the ship and over the grassy dunes
to the waiting wagons.  There were no maps.
Only ideas and a strange man standing by
the wagons. Still wet we gathered again
close, but far away from what we knew of
ourselves in the rough wood cabs.  Two rutted
tracks leading a dusty path out from months
of salt and sway, over the roll of hills.

Day 9: Here Lies the Thing I Most Desire

This project has been an incredible journey so far.  What an amazing thing to get to dig and dig into the history of the community I grew up in!  At it's root history means to ask.  The fragility and disparity of history is easiest to see in local history because you are so close to the source.  What is history but a lot of people telling stories.  I guess the writers job is to unwind a few of those yarns and look at them more closely before they fall apart.  Today's prompt brought me on an interesting journey.  I was researching the immigrants who founded the apple industry here in Sebastopol and came across an interesting story of what happened to Japanese-Americans living in Sebastopol when they were interned during World War II.  We are lucky to have an incredible Buddhist Temple in town named Enmanji (which means garden of fulfillment).  The temple was built by the Manchurian Railroad and displayed at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair.  After the fair the building was donated and shipped to our town.  There were many familys effected by the internment.  For some, neighbors harvested their fruit and paid the tax on their lands to keep them afloat (like the Furusho family), for others (like the original heirs of Fountaingrove the Nagasawa family) everything was lost.  For today's draft, I tried to think about what it would have been like being stuck at the desert internment camps, so far away, listening to stories of worries and fear and not knowing what to believe.

There Lies the Thing I Most Desire
            for the Furusho family

Dark oaks spun their crippled fingers over
the star-slurred sky the night our family left
our apple orchard for internment camp.
Now, we live in horse stalls where air is stiff
and void of fog.  I’ve paced these wooden planks
worrying futilely over the harvest
we left behind day and night but there is
no wind here strong enough to carry my
prayers back to our temple Enmanji.
Now its name, garden of fulfillment, stings,
like a face slap.  Letters from the Holte and
Williams boys promise to pick and sell our
fruit but trust is difficult to plow here
each stall where whispers root and spread their rot
wood to wood just as the oaks roots carry
fungus that left will kill your apple trees.

Day 8: Susurration

Today's prompt is the word susurration, which means to whisper. The word is from the Greek word for flute, which made me think of Ovid's account of Pan hearing the wind in the reeds then creating the flute to mimic this sound. It made me think about how tied to our water sources we are here in Sonoma County and how for early apple farmers ample water was what made their success possible. So I traced the path of one of our major creeks: Atascadero and found its source started at one of my favorite places in Sonoma County - English hill on Burnside road (also known as the three sisters by cyclists). From Burnside on a clear day you can see all the way to the ocean in one direction and all the way back to Sebastopol in the other. It's a beautiful perspective. Here is my draft of a poem for today:



Susurration

Tule sway in the wind carrying song
from creek bed to creek bed: Atascadero
born on English hill where the sea lingers
on the horizon like a forgotten
idea, flows back over Gold Ridge to town
then veers away toward Green Valley. And all
along that blue song moans, fog and limestone,
above then below the ground. From patchwork
hills the orchard leaves whisper reverently
back until there is a song spoken in
pale pink blossoms that rise from each trees’
green budded but dark, delicate fingers.

Day 7: Slightly Bereft

Today's prompt was: slightly bereft.  The word bereft comes from germanic roots meaning to rob (which is interesting given the history of the Gravenstein apple).  I spent most of the morning looking at photos of the Gravenstein Apple Show which took place in Sebastopol from 1910 - 1915. It was quite a grand affair and over 25,000 attended the show that first year.  The show featured sculptures of historic places (like Fort Ross) and apple growing scenes.  What I discovered was that the show was stopped in 191 due to the onset of World War I when Sebastopol began to ship off many of it's young men as well as supply the army with dried apples for soldiers overseas.  I began to think about how strange it must have been to ship out down the Petaluma river, following the same route of the apples your family had been sending out for years.  Here's my attempt at a poem for today's prompt:

After the 1915 Gravenstein Apple Show

“The Gravenstein Apple has, above all others, proved to be the money winner in Sonoma County.  It is a healthy vigorous tree.  It always bears a good crop, never over-bearing, as many varieties do; is of the best quality of all known apples”
      –Luther Burbank

After the logging, after the plowing,
the planting, the yield, most hills stood slightly
bereft but ever producing apples.
To celebrate the escalation of
apples sales, the Sebastopol Apple
Growers Union raised a tent across from
the train depot, began the Gravenstein
Apple Show in 1910.  Photos show
uniformed boys lined in neat rows, women
dressed in white floor-length dresses, entering
the sawdust floored tent.  Inside, the warm air
swelled with the tart picked apples arranged in
sculptures that set into form history
of the apple, the town.  Fictions or truths
built out of the bittersweet fruit yielded
gristmills, locomotives, a gold ridge farm.
even Gold, a Petaluma river
steamship that shipped the apples down the slough
to San Francisco Bay.  Until war closed
the fair and that same steamship was loaded
instead with the cargo of men and boys,
their arms still browned from the season’s harvest
their eyes looking back to the golden hills. 

Day 6: Your obvious homage to your grandmother

Since my project thus far has been to write about the Gravenstein apple and the history of Sebastopol, I found today's daily writing prompt hard.  My grandmother never lived in Sebastopol and her only connection to Sebastopol is through myself and my parents.  But, my Grandmother has an interesting past.  She came to California from Oklahoma as a young girl in the dust bowl (she always told me she didn't think Steinbeck got it right when he wrote The Grapes of Wrath).  She was always eager to retell things the way they really were.  When she ended up in California she worked long hours at a peach cannery in Atwater.  During the 1920s many women worked long hours in food production plants.  And it was this thought brought me back to Sebastopol.  (There is always a road back, isn't there?)  After the apple industry took off, there were 100,000s of delicate apples to pack and ship across the United States.  It was women (like my grandmother) who worked long hours in these packing house jobs.  Here is my (not so obvious) homage to my grandmother's work and a little story she told me about reciting poems to stave off the boredom of such repetitive work.

Tending the Gold Ridge, 1920

Each day a new field was plowed and planted.
Each season production would swell.  Each fruit
handpicked into wooden crates, delivered
by wagon or truck to the packinghouse.
Then, the small, red-striped globes were placed
into shipping crates.  How tiring to
stand ten hours a day sorting good from bad.
It was women’s work.  Closed-doored, but
checkered with sunlight brought from high windows.
A dull, quiet work that could open or
close that quiet wilderness of mind.

Decades later, when their bodies had grown
old, when their minds strobbed memories—
that wilderness (however conquered) would
return.  In a few lines by Tennyson
about an old king who traveled far and
couldn’t return home: but every hour is saved.
How those words illuminate the musty smell
of the packing house, the ache of feet,
but also the ballet of young hands, the hum
of low voices staving off silence with
by repeating the few poems they knew by heart

Day 5: The accidental poem

Today, I looked into Nathaniel Griffith (the man who planted the first commercial Gravenstein apple orchard in Sonoma County on his Laguna Road property).  He was good friends with Luther Burbank (hence the trip out to For Ross I mentioned yesterday) and they often met to discuss altering the Gravenstein to extend it's season.  I've seen cuttings of the Winterstein, one of these variations of the Gravenstein that never really took off at Burbank's experimental farm in Sebastopol.  While I was researching Griffith though, I came across my "accidental poem".  Turns out, Griffith had three daughters, all of whom were extremely artistic.  One of these daughters, Grace, was an incredible painter.  Here are a few of her paintings I was able to find online.  What's interesting is how after the orchard was gone, after the farmhouse had burned down and their father had died, the girls (who had all had pretty successful careers as artists) returned to live on the property in their old age.  And if you look Grace's work, it appears in her artistic mind she never left.  Here is attempt at a draft for today:

The Accidental Pull

Griffith brought Burbank to his orchard on
the flat Laguna.  From his home the trees
spelled across the wide expanse in straight rows. 
Already, they were good servants –yielding
a ton of fruit each.  But the season was
short.  Burbank had ideas for winter fruits:
the Winterstein, still bittersweet tasting,
but with tougher skin to withstand the frosts.

The three girls could see the men on the porch
as they sat in the skirt of soft grass surrounding
the willow.  Spring had covered the grass
between rows of apple trees in yellow
mustard.  They made a game of following
the strokes of color – the low freckle of mustard,
the high powdery acacia, to the
solitary exclamations of
yellow iris crowing the front yard.  Years
later, after Burbank’s experimental
trees had failed.  After their father had died
and the green wooden farmhouse had burned down.

They would remember this inventory:
how that day the golden lines had burned in
them a tether to this land.  And each day
after they would try to pull themselves back.

Day 4: The cottonwood I lived in as a child was a comfort when I found out I couldn't fly

Fort Ross was the first white settlement on the Sonoma Coast and it is celebrating it's 200th aniversary this year.  It's also where many (including Luther Burbank) found the oldest specimen of the Gravenstein Apple tree.  In the early 1900s, they discovered a tree there that they suspected was over 100 years old.  I've been haunted by this fact, and the state Fort Ross would have been in when they visited Fort Ross to find the tree.  The Russian settlers were by then long gone (they left in 1849) and the buildings must have been run down.  The fort has been set aside as state land, but little had been done to preserve it at that time. It was just a bunch of rundown buildings stuck in a huge cattle ranch right on the Sonoma Coast.  There was one old house where (I believe) the cattle rancher and his family lived.  Today's poem which is written off the prompt: The cottonwood I lived in as a child was a comfort when I found out I couldn't fly.  As you might have guessed, I switched the tree to apple.  Here is my attempt at a draft.

Upon Finding the First Gravenstein Apple Tree
--Fort Ross, CA, 1912

By the time the two horticulturalists
Griffith and Burbank discovered the tree
it had been bearing fruit one-hundred years.
These days, few lived at the decrepit fort.
Only the cattle farmer, his family,
and the Pomo servants who cleaned and cooked.

It was a willowy boy who emerged
from the white clapboard house on the steep cliff,
who led them reverently down the thin worn
path to the tree.  A few red, shriveled globes
still clung to its bare branches.  Immediately,
the men were sure it was the specimen
they had been looking for and went to work.

They began picking the shriveled globes, and breaking
off cuttings to bring back to Burbank’s farm. 
Without words the boy flung himself into
the tree’s wide crotch then shimmied his body
out to the edge where he could see the cold
deep waters that frothed the bay below. 

He became so much a part of the tree
the men, busy in their work, mindful of the long journey back
to town forgot he was there.  When he said,
“This is the tree where I learned to fly” His
breath folded, effortlessly into the
rough wind that flapped their canvas pants like sails.

-------------------------------------------------------------

Late breaking addition (thanks to Mari L'Esperance who graciuosly sent me the picture and made my day).  Here is an actual photo of a gravenstein apple tree at Fort Ross (the photo was taken in 2008).

Day 3: A Tiny Love Poem

The prompt for today was to write a tiny love poem.  I'm still stuck on the discovery I made yesterday -- that Gravenstein Apples (the apples that Sebastopol, the town I'm from and am currently writing about) are originally from Schleswig (what is now Northern Germany).  They were brought there from Italy by Prince Carl von Ahlefeldt then planted in orchards around the castle.  A century later, some of the Gravensteins were brought to Fort Ross (near Jenner) and were later introduced to the Sebastopol area where they took off as a crop.  So, my love poem is about apples and an old cemetery near where I live called Pleasant Hill.  Here is my draft.  This project is turning out to be so much fun.  I think it's going to be hard to doing else but write poems all month! 

Pleasant Hill Cemetery, Sebastopol, CA
The old gravestones are tiny granite-tongued
love poems covering the dead who now
mix with the soil they once plowed and planted.

And all around the air-bound apple blossoms
still powder the air with possibility.

The arthritic trees that surround in straight
dirt rows are still fruit bearing. These days
children steal their delicate branches with
little cost (no more beatings from farmers
who saw what each blossom would become).

The children pluck the tiny white blossoms, carry
them carefully in their palms to the creek
where the blossoms float: white, barren fairies
in the still, black limestone bedded pool.

Day 2: Facing NaPoWriMo with a Plan

This year I'm facing my thirty day writing stint with a plan.  It seems to help to have a topic to fall back on when you take on a long-term writing project.   I've taken on writing about the history of Sebastopol, the small town where I grew up and currently live.  My first poem was about the early history of Sebastopol.  My second, traced the history of the Gravenstein Apple.  If you are looking for a prompt for today, here is the one I wrote off of:

Day 2 Prompt: Ossuary - a place or receptacle for the bones of the dead.

Happy Writing!

Poem-a-day Begins Today

Happy National Poetry Month!

For the past two years I've written a poem a day throughout the month of April in celebration of National Poetry Month.  It's an amazing experience.  Today I'm writing a poem from a prompt given to me by Molly Fisk and Lisa Cihlar "How will I find you without a map?"  So, I better stop blogging and start writing!  If you are interested in joining us just post a comment with your contact information below and I'll email you the details.  Good luck! 

You can also sign up to receive a poem a day in your email inbox here.   It's a lovely way to read poetry every day even after National Poetry Month has ended.
And don't forget to leave a comment on my blog post about The Big Poetry Giveaway!  You can win a book by the poet Amy Lowell or an anthology my work was featured in called What Redwoods Know. 

The Big Poetry Giveaway Has Begun Again!

It's that time of year again - National Poetry Month.  A time when many of us poets get frenzied and start doing crazy things like writing a poem a day, handing out poems to random passersby and giving away books of poetry.  This year, I'll be doing all three!  More on the poem-a-day project and poem in your pocket efforts later.  Today's post is about The Big Poetry Giveaway.  Kelli Russell Agodon over at her blog The Book of Kells has been organizing this giveaway for the past three years.  Last year I gave away a copy of my chapbook Inheritance and a copy of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons.  This year, I'll be giving away a copy of the wonderful anthology I'm a part of, What the Redwoods Know  along with a book of poems by Amy Lowell.  

As many of you know, Amy Lowell has been an important part of my journey to becoming a poet.  I wrote my dissertation on her influence on modern lyric poetry.  I'd be happy to give away a copy of Lowell's Selected poems edited by the lovely poet Honor Moore in hopes of getting more people to read Lowell.  In case you haven't read Amy Lowell's work, below is one of her short lyric poems from Two Speak Together.


July, Midnight
 
Fireflies flicker in the tops of trees,
Flicker in the lower branches,
Skim along the ground.
Over the moon-white lilies
Is a flashing and ceasing of small, lemon-green stars.
As you lean against me,
Moon-white,
The air all about you
Is slit, and pricked, and pointed with sparkles of lemon-green flame
Starting out of a background of vague, blue trees.

What Redwoods Know was an extraordinary book project I was a part of this past summer.  As many of you might know many of our state parks in California are facing permanent closure.  In response to this terrible threat, the Sonoma County poet Katherine Hastings organized hikes for poets in Annadel, Sugarloaf and Jack London State Park.  On these hikes we wrote and spoke about the places we were in.  This anthology is a result of the creative work that came out of these hikes.  Below is one of my poems which is included in the book.  It's about Jack London State Park -- the place where I discovered I was a writer on a six grade field trip many years ago. 

At Wolf House

This time, I walk directly to the back steps. 
No circuitous journey.  No wide gaze
accumulating the destruction of this place.
This time, in full light, I meet the gaze of your ghost.

And the world drops away leaving only
flies orbiting, a tether of bird song, distant, tenuous,
a heat that rises from the earth like a promise.

O fairy ring of Redwoods sprung from fiery tongue,
open the blue box of heaven you gate with green fingers. 

There are two wills at work here:
that which will destroy and that which will stubbornly remain. 
Stone ruins rise, half-shadowed and covered in moss. 
A few iron girders propped to hold up walls.

But the breath of wind, that velvet tongue, licks the place clean as bone. 
Spirit and story are what keep the fire-washed stones in place,
that keep the stones lifted off tongues.  What reflects back isn’t recordable:
it grows in you—seeds to places unknown. 

If you are interested in entering to win a copy of Amy Lowell's Selected Poems, or a copy of What the Redwoods Know, all you have to do is write a comment below that contains your contact information.  On April 30th, I'll randomly draw a name out of a hat and send the books to you!  Good luck!

Poetry Invades the State Capital

This past weekend, I attended the state championships of Poetry Out Loud.  Poetry Out Loud is a poetry recitation contest started by poet Dana Gioia when he was chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.  Dana was at this years' state competition.  He inspired the students (and coaches and family) with both the history and vision of the program. 

Dana Gioia, Brynna Thigpen and myself

My student, Brynna Thigpen, won our Sonoma County competition and was representing our county in the state competition.  I've been a poet-coach in the Poetry Out Loud program for several years now, but I had never seen the competitions above the county level until this past weekend.  It was extraordinary.  Thirty-three county champions descended upon the state capital, reciting poetry in a competition to find a state champion.  Hearing 15-18 year-olds expertly recite poetry from poets as diverse as Shakespeare and Billy Collins in the Senate Chambers was phenomenal.  To compete at this level students must spend hours memorizing and close-reading the poems they recite.  It was such a joy to think in every state the same competition is occurring.  That across America, over 500,000 students have had the opportunity to choose a poem that speaks to them, to memorize it, to deeply understand it and to perform their poems in front of an audience.  My student didn't win the state finals, but she worked hard and did very well.  And in the end, she told me that through the process she had developed a love for poetry that she felt would last a lifetime.  What could be better than that?

California Poets in the Schools - French Garden Fundraiser April 21, 2:30 - 4:30

Many of you know that I've been teaching poetry in the schools for the past decade or so.  It's an amazing experience to say the least.  This year I taught Sapphic Fragments to students who were writing in English as a second language and was (as I always am) floored by how brilliantly my students wove their voices between ancient Greek fragments and their own modern words. 

Purple flowers divided in earth.
Salt sea, flowery fields, magical, magical world.
All stars.  Roses bloom.  Your tender heart.
Sweet apples on a tree.  Sweet apples on the boughs.
Dark purple-brown butterflies fly in the sunny-shiny sun.
---Estefania, 3rd grade

California Poets in the Schools is the organization that I work for.  And, as with just about everything else in California, the organization's funding has been drastically cut.  In order to allow us to continue to teach in schools that cannot afford to hire us as poet-teachers we've obtained some grant money, but are holding fundraisers in order to match that money.  Long story short, we are having a benefit at French Garden to raise money in order to support teacher poetry in the schools.  If you live in Sonoma County, please come join us!  Students, including our Sonoma County Poet Out Loud champion Brynna Thigpen, will be performing their poetry.  Delicious snacks will be served and there will be an excellent silent auction.

For those of you far away (who aren't struggling for funding yourselves) please consider sending in a tax deductible donation.  You can make checks payable to: California Poets in the Schools (CPITS) and send them to my attention at: 201 Wagnon Rd., Sebastopol, CA 95472

See below for a full description of the event.  Hope to see you there!
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FRENCH GARDEN POETRY, VOICES OF YOUTH

Fundraiser for California Poets in the Schools 

On Saturday, April 21, French Garden Restaurant in Sebastopol presents poetry through the eyes and from the voices of youth. The program will last from 2:30 to 4:30, with hors d’oeuvres, coffee, sodas and sparkling water provided by the restaurant, and the entertainment by Sonoma County students, ranging from 2^nd grade through high school.

Among the student presenters will be finalists from the Sonoma County Poetry Out Loud Competitions. These students are the crème of their high school crop, having memorized some of the greatest poems written in English and won school-wide competitions in a spelling bee style contest.

Other student presenters will be elementary and middle school youngsters who have written outstanding poems of their own, with the assistance of their dedicated poet-teachers from California Poets in the Schools (CPITS.) CPITS is one of the oldest and largest artist-in-residence programs in the United States. With the guidance of the poet-teacher and the inspiration of great poems from the past, students often write work wise far beyond their years, as in this 2^ndgrader’s poem from Graton’s Oak Grove School:

The Great Bird

           

A bird, all life on the tips of its wings.

If it flaps its wings, a giant earthquake

cracks the earth in two.

Where is this great bird?

I will search in the sky and deep into the earth.

I pray this bird will soon be upon me.

I am old and gray from looking.

But I search for this wonderful bird

until the end of time.

I am still full of hope.

QUINN HORAK, 2^nd Grade

Oak Grove School, Sonoma County

Ellen Dougalss, Classroom Teacher

Phyllis Meshulam, Poet Teacher

The French Garden Restaurant is located at 8050 Bodega Ave., Sebastopol. For more information, call (707) 486-7450 to speak with Phyllis Meshulam, Sonoma County area coordinator of CPITS, or 707- 824-2030 to reach the restaurant.

            Come to Sebastopol for the Apple Blossom Parade, and stay to hear poetry!!

This event is free to the students, $5 for their parents, and for others, a recommended donation of $10 - $50. Sonoma County Poets in the Schools is the recipient of a competitive California Arts Council grant for $3,500, but it must be matched dollar for dollar with local money. 100% of all proceeds from the afternoon’s event will go to matching this grant.

A silent auction will be taking place concurrently.

New Review of my Book, Inheritance

One more quick post! Moira Richards reviewed my chapbook Inheritance over at the Fiddler Crab Review.  Check it out here:  http://fiddlercrabreview.blogspot.com/2012/03/inheritance-by-iris-jamahl-dunkle.html

Poems Written in Computer Code

I just found a call for work for code poems - or poems written in computer code.  As a former web developer, this type of writing fascinates me.  Computer code when you re-contextualize as a poetic tool, can be expansive, can open up new meaning to words.  When I think about the possibilities that exist in regards to using computer code (such as Perl, XML, HTML and Javascript) to expand language, I am reminded of what Gertrude Stein says she was thinking about when she wrote Tender Buttons.  She claims she was trying to give language back the elasticity and energy it had before the dictionary tied words down to direct meaning.  Perhaps, computer code will offer us another opening or opportunity to invigorate language?  I hope so!  Below, is a link to my attempt at a code poem.  It includes HTML, Perl, XML and Javascript. 
http://www.raftmagazineonline.com/Raft01/Dunkle/Dunkle.html

AWP 2012

You know you have been at AWP too long when you think you see Dinty Moore at the hotel bar – no, not the hotel bar where the conference hotel, but at another hotel bar on your long journey back home from the world where everyone is a writer to the real life you find yourself immersed in on a daily basis.  I, for one, thoroughly enjoy the emersion that AWP offers.  From the time I stepped off the plane in Chicago, I was braided up in situations and conversations with writers from across the US.  A travel writer guided me to the subway and we rolled slowly into Chicago from O’Hare.  Then, the windy city opened up before me.  I ate deep dish pizza, dodged winds that screeched like red tailed hawks., but otherwise was happily encased in the the Hilton hotel. 

What does it mean to be islanded in a sea of writers?  Today, just before I made the rash decision to bail out early and catch a cab to my airport hotel, I sat across the room from Alice Notely while she drank a cup of coffee.  Call me a stalker, but, sitting there exhausted, I was filled with glee just to be sitting across from one of my favorite poets.  Sure, I’d seen her panel and had her sign the new books I’d bought.  I’d blabbered like a groupie about how once, so many years ago, I’d been a 24 year-old grad student sitting across from her in her Paris apartment asking her questions for an interview I’d later publish in our school lit mag.  She graciously said she remembered, then smiled and turned to the next in line.  But, sitting there just a day later, I felt it all rushing back.  The joy and awe it is to be a young writer and to bump up against the humanity of your favorite writers.  And that's just what AWP offers.  That, and the laberinthian book fair. 

On Saturday, I had the distinct honor of being on a panel with three poets I admire:  Phyllis Meshulam, Gywnn O'Gara and Tobey Kaplan.  We spoke about the joy of teaching poetry recitation to high school students through Poetry Out Loud.  Later this month, we'll be heading to Sacramento to hear our county winner compete at the state level.  She'll be reciting "The Room" by Conrad Aiken, a difficult, but wonderful poem (see below).  My talk was on how teaching students the art of close reading enables them to better connect with and therefore recite their poems. 

One of the highlights of the conference was hearing my former teacher Jean Valentine speak about the recently deceased, Eleanor Ross Taylor.  Taylor was an extradinary poet and Jean was an extraordinary teacher.  (More on this panel later...)

Okay, now it's back to real life.  The laundry, picking up the kids from school, but isn't it lovely that always in the background I'll have memories of this past weekend reeling in my mind?

The Room By Conrad Aiken

Through that window — all else being extinct

Except itself and me — I saw the struggle

Of darkness against darkness. Within the room

It turned and turned, dived downward. Then I saw

How order might — if chaos wished — become:

And saw the darkness crush upon itself,

Contracting powerfully; it was as if

It killed itself: slowly: and with much pain.

Pain. The scene was pain, and nothing but pain.

What else, when chaos draws all forces inward

To shape a single leaf? . . .

For the leaf came,

Alone and shining in the empty room;

After a while the twig shot downward from it;

And from the twig a bough; and then the trunk,

Massive and coarse; and last the one black root.

The black root cracked the walls. Boughs burst the window:

The great tree took possession.

Tree of trees!

Remember (when time comes) how chaos died

To shape the shining leaf. Then turn, have courage,

Wrap arms and roots together, be convulsed

With grief, and bring back chaos out of shape.

I will be watching then as I watch now.

I will praise darkness now, but then the leaf.

National Novel Writing Month

As most of you know, this month is National Novel Writing Month (or Nanowrimo) and this year, I've decided to join in.  I know, I know.  I'm not a fiction writer.  I'm a poet.  But ever since I left Pennsylvania, I haven't been able to shake the story of the town of Pithole, an oil boom town from the late 1860s.  The history of the town and the characters who lived there have been under my skin for the past six months.  I've written endless poems about them (a whole book of them if you can believe) but still can't shake the characters.  So,  I'm trying to write myself out of Pithole with a novel.  Or, rather, something which will be more like a novella.  So far, I've written just under 5000 words and I'm still going strong. 

What Sappho and Online Learning Have in Common

Last week, I had the pleasure of teaching a f2f workshop on online learning in Clarion, PA.  The class was made up of about 20 professors who teach women's studies courses across Pennsylvania.  It was a great workshop!  One of the topics we spoke about what how when you teach online, you need to think like Sappho.  Don't be stifled by technology as it is.  Instead, reinvent it!  In one of Sappho's most famous fragments, fragment 31, she writes the following:
That man seems to me peer of gods, who sits in thy presence, and hears close to him thy sweet speech

In this poem, she compares the man who gets to sit next to the women she loves to a god.  Now, in Greek poetry before Sappho (most famously in Homer) the only people who were compared to Gods were war heroes.  But, Sappho wasn't talking about war, she was talking about love and she needed a way to embody the emotion she was writing about it.  So, she thought differently and reinvented an existing motif.

When we think about how to use technology to enhance our online classes, we have to think the same way. Not, what is the technology and how is it best used.  Rather, how can I reinvent this technology in order to best use it in my class.

And the lucky winners are ...

Thanks to everyone who participated in my National Poetry Month free book give away.  I used the random number generator at random.org to choose a winner of the contest and the lucky winner is comment #5 O.P.W. Fredericks.  Congratulations! 

I'm happy to report that I wrote a poem a day throughout April.  Yeah!  Below are links to two of my new poems published on Thin Air magazine's blog: The Ring and Interrupted Geographies. 

Hope everyone had a wonderful National Poetry Month!

The Big Poetry Giveaway! 2011

This month, I will be participating in two wonderful events in honor of National Poetry Month -

• NaPoWriMo - where I will write a poem a day, every day for 30 days (more about this soon...) and,
• The Big Poetry Giveaway! 2011 - where I will give a copy of my chapbook Inheritance AND a copy of Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein.  The Big Poetry Giveaway is organized by Kelli Russell Agodon (see http://ofkells.blogspot.com/2011/03/big-poetry-giveaway-2011.html for more information).
  
  If you would like me to send you a copy of both my book and Gertrude Stein's book (for free!) just post a comment on my blog with your name and contact information.  At the end of April, I will randomly choose one name and send off a copy of both books in the mail.  For more information about Gertrude Stein's book and my book, please see below. Good luck! 

Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms from 1914.  In this book Stein reinvigorates words. One of my all time favorite books of poetry
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My book, Inheritance was published by Finishing Line Press in June 2010. It is a sonnet sequence of American sonnets.

My Door Poem - a Spoof on the Greek/Roman Form, Paraclausithyron

I'm happy to say my new poem, "Door Poem Between the Self and the Heart" was just published on The Open Doors Poetry Zine.  My poem is a spoof of the Roman form where lovers were kept out of the bed chambers of their beloved and instead wrote poems to door that seperated them.  The Latin Love elegists were big on the Paraclausithyron which literally translated means, ""beside closed door".  My poem plays on this theme changing the conversation in the poem to be between a pre-discovered self and a another self on the other side of the door. 

New Poems Featured at Raft

Three of my new poems (inclusing audio files) are featured on the new online literary magazine Raft. These are poems where I was experimenting with form - two poems that use adapted computer code (javascript, perl and a little splash of xml) to write lyrics.  Another poem, "Dear Real Life" is an exploded sonnet - a sonnet that speaks in two voices written in two columns. 

November is Poem a Day Month too!

Beginning November 1, I will be participating in another poem-a-day excercise throughout the month thanks to the lovely California poet, Molly Fisk. There is something so powerful about a daily writing practice (it's how my book Inheritance  came about! Writing a poem a day riding the subway into and out of Manhattan from Brooklyn.)  I'm looking forward to whatever comes about!

What the Titanic can teach us about teaching writing

Ocean Explorer Robert Ballard's Ted Talk inspired me recently.  During the beginning of his talk he asserts that everything he needed to know in order to do his job well he did not learn in college.  Science was changing so fast while he was in college that by the time his Professors taught him theories he already knew what he was learning was obsolete.  But instead of challenging the teachers he lied on his tests in order to get an A.  Ballard's point made me think about the steep learning curve we face teaching students how to write using a multitude of mediums the workforce today.  Once we become adept at micro blogging and have successfully developed curriculum to teach students how to use twitter as a communications vehicle in the real world will it be obsolete? Maybe, who knows! Since it's almost impossible to keep up with all of the new mediums, seems like we should leave ourselves open to our students' expertise in using collaborative technology in order to keep up with the curve.  What would Ballard's teacher's have learned had he been taught in a more collaborative environment?