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!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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?

Writing it Real - Shirley Jackson's Memoir Life Among the Savages

I am completely enjoying reading Shirley Jackson's memoir about motherhood entitled, Life Among the Savages.  Thanks to Ayelet Waldman who recommended the text as a "real" account of parenthood (aka the good, the bad, and the ugly about what it is like to raise young children). Jackson (who most famously wrote the chilling, highly anthologized short story, "The Lottery") is writing about parenting her three small children in rural Vermont (after just having left New York City) in the early 1950s.  Jackson's tales may have been written over half a century ago, but her accounts of her oldest son's terrible first weeks of Kindergarten, her daughters cast of imaginary friends, could have been written yesterday.  If you are looking for a well-written, hilarious read about what it is really like to be a parent, I highly recommend this book.

There is much to be learned about how collaborative technologies can change the way we teach and interact with literature

There is much to be learned about how collaborative technologies can change the way we teach and interact with literature. As a recent Ph.D. with ten years experience working at a Fortune 100 technology company, I know how powerful collaborative technologies can be; however, rarely do you see the right technologies facilitating collaboration within the creative writing and literature classroom and beyond. Students who are constantly updating and checking their Facebook status page will not engage in a discussion driven by a text-heavy PowerPoint slide deck delivered in a darkly lit room. But how will they engage? Do we need to constantly entertain the tweeting youth in order to keep them engaged in the Higher education classroom? Does every college student learn in exactly the same way? No, and no. Technology (especially collaborative technology) evolves because people adapt it to solve problems. My approach to integrating collaborative technology into my creative writing and literature classrooms is to encourage collaboration, expand the modalities used to reach a larger breadth of students, and to open the doors of the classroom to the greater community.
What can we learn from Facebook and Twitter about teaching a poem?
A great deal, some examples are:

• The Wisdom of the Crowd – students constantly interact with content on the web. Why not create a learning environment where students can comment on, rate, share and recommend poems?

• Ambient intimacy - Typical students have 100s of Facebook friends but only respond and interact with a core group. They do, however, glean information about many more friends through ambient intimacy. Ambient intimacy is the indirect relationship achieved by reading and following someone’s microblog posts. Why not encourage students to follow key microbloggers and bloggers who are experts on the topics you are covering in the course? Who knows what they may learn by following these threads?

• Microblogging as a creative tool – writing Twaiku, or poems written in the 140 character-limit form of microblogging can teach students about the power found in brevity. How about requiring 140 character responses to specific poems?
The Collaborative Classroom
Collaborative technologies extend our reach in the classroom by allowing us to create an online community where students can feel empowered to interact with content. Not every student will understand a poem by H.D. by reading it on the page, but by including a video clip and an audio file or by encouraging students to comment on poems and interact with their peers about a poem, more students may come to understand H.D.’s work. The other area where students can be empowered in the Web 2.0 space is in collaborative research. In many American survey courses students listen to one-way lectures and skim through an anthology, with little interaction with the work. But I believe topics like American literature can be opened up especially in the online classroom. By encouraging students to engage and empowering them to do so. How did American literature come to be American literature? How did Alice Walker stumble upon Zora Neale Hurston’s work? Serendipity. By looking for what was not yet there. By introducing students to online databases and resources and teaching them how to access this information and encouraging them to believe that the American canon is a living thing, ever changing, and that they, too, can discover great works of art they feel empowered to look and read more closely.
Video/TelePresence
There are technologies available today where video quality is so high that the person viewed appears real, as if she were sitting across the table for you. Think about the possibilities these technologies could offer up to students? Speakers from around the world could visit the classroom, sharing their knowledge and interacting with the students.

This is by no means an exhaustive list but rather a drop in the bucket. Technology is not something that should be thought of an additional peripheral tool that can/can’t be added to enhance a class. It should be thought of as part of the organic experience of the learning environment, especially within the humanities. The question isn’t what technology can I use to enhance this lesson? It’s more symbiotic - how does this lesson evolve using technology/ how do we evolve this technology to enhance teaching? How can we re-think how we think about texts by using technology? It’s also important not to use technology just to use technology. All technologies are not equal and will not solve the same problems. I’m looking forward to future research in this area – how to evolve how we think about using technologies in the Creative writing classroom not as a means to draw more students to our classrooms but as a means to teach better.

Maximize the Surface Area Where Serendipity Can Happen - Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco

Of course there were no sessions dedicated to the connected/collaborative classroom at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last week, but a number of the keynote speakers had inspirational messages that could easily be applied to the use and application of Web 2.0 technology in higher education learning.   

One key point was the switch to thinking about Web 2.0 technologies as technologies that are driven by and evolve based on people and how they use these technologies.  Most of the big advances that have happened in the New Media space have happened because people have invented new ways to use existing technologies in new and interesting ways (ways that the developers of these technologies never dreamt of) to maximize the surface area where serendipity can happen. 

In the higher education space it seems like we could learn a lot from our own students...how do they currently use social media to consume/interact with content?  Also, how do we move away from the "all or nothing" philosophy?  What is we were to allow students to interact with content in multiple mediums?  There is a time and place for video, microblogging, podcasts, as well as regular, face-to-face interactive lectures...how do we learn as educators how to choose the right medium for the content we are teaching?  And how do we accommodate the different types of learners in our classroom by providing content in multiply mediums.
Interesting Keynotes from Web 2.0 Web Expo to check out -

• June Cohen of Ted Talks - Ideas Worth Spreading
• Ge Wang of Stanford University - Breaking Barriers with Sound

30 Days / 30 Poems

I've just finished writing a poem a day during the entire month of April thanks to the daily prompts provided by readwritepoem.org. I don't know what will come of all of this writing (or how much of it is salvageable) but the practice of daily writing was truly amazing. Hmmm...maybe I should do this more than one month out of the year?

100 Tips, Tools, and Resources for Teaching Students About Social Media

100 Tips, Tools, and Resources for Teaching Students About Social Media

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Thirst

I've been reading Amy Lowell's most famous biography lately (by S. Foster Damon). It's fascinating. It's so interspersed with excerpts from her letters that it's almost as if Amy is telling the story herself. I've been thinking a lot about Lowell's intense sense of place and how her home permeated so much of her work. Lowell grew up in a house named Sevenels, just outside of Boston, then stayed in the home (after renovating it) after her parents died. So, her sense of place was deeply rooted. Her childhood, her adulthood, were both intertwined and lay rooted in the soil of her family home.

She had a unique way of taking anything she learned about - but especially the classics - and planting it in Boston. She was never formally educated in the classics. But she read them voraciously throughout her life. Perhaps her lack of formal education, the fact that she came across these poets eye-to-eye as a poet, made her feel more comfortable renovating their themes and motifs into the new, modern landscape of America. She called Sappho "a burning birch tree" and replaced Arcadian meadows with the flora and fauna of the sunken garden of her estate in Boston. I think this aspect makes her a very American poet. And I think that the audacity of her poems (paired with the sheer honesty and confessional quality of them) was greatly influential on the writers in the generation that would follow her.

I think one of the loveliest versions of Lowell's Boston-Grecian themes is found in ΔΙΨΑ (Thirst) from A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass (1912):

Look, Dear, how bright the moonlight is to-night!
See where it casts the shadow of that tree
Far out upon the grass. And every gust
Of light night wind comes laden with the scent
Of opening flowers which never bloom by day:
Night-scented stocks, and four-o'clocks, and that
Pale yellow disk, upreared on its tall stalk,
The evening primrose, comrade of the stars.
It seems as though the garden which you love
Were like a swinging censer, its incense
Floating before us as a reverent act
To sanctify and bless our night of love.
Tell me once more you love me, that 't is you
Yes, really you, I touch, so, with my hand;
And tell me it is by your own free will
That you are here, and that you like to be
Just here, with me, under this sailing pine...