Dodge Poetry Festival
I went to the Dodge Poetry Festival over the weekend. Here I am again, delaying the correcting of papers that goes along with teaching. I regret the time I don't have to write anymore. I feel like I am stealing time away like you steal precious jewelry from a Tiffany's vault.
Anyway, the Dodge was cool. The infusion of language and people has my head spinning. I like the fact so many poetry lovers still breath on this earth. There were the usual poets that I love: Mark Doty, Jim Daniels and Laure Anne Bosselaar, Lucille Clifton. But the biggest surprise was falling in "love" ok--so everyone uses this term loosely---with the poetry of Anne Waldman.
Yes, she was a friend of Ginsberg and named the MFA Program the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. But, something struck me about the passion with which she took the stage. There was no apology for the way she performed. She read a piece called Stereo which is from her book called Marriage. She rocked the house with her performance. ROCK N ROLL. Those beats must have been nothing short of hell raisers. And, as if that wasn't enough, she followed it up by "Rogue State", an anti war anti Bush poem.
She gives power in the feminine. The title of the pieces the poets were reading about is "How is Truth to Be Told". Well, she did address the war, but she also addressed how we get along in our everyday lives with "Stereo". So many times I think people believe poets to be so far removed for the circumstances of the minutes of the days. The simple things. I am glad I heard poets that give me faith that poetry is not an art for a certain few. (Like they would sometimes make us in the trenches poets believe)
GO ANNE WALDMAN!!! She used a lot of breath technique and what she learned from Buddhist mediation to shout her barbaric yawp from the rooftops of the world!!!! I am so empowered to want to read and have that kind of hope in the words I am writing.
Not only Anne Waldman, but also Joe Weil, Jack Wiler, and B.J Ward, Gretna Wilkinson, tsmalltown New Jersey poets, give me hope for the future. I am a smalltown chick and these folks speak like they know the neighborhood. These are the factory workers, the cheap beer drinkers, the folks struggling to find love in a world so consumed to swallow us. This weekend gives me strength to know literature is not for the chosen few who make it into the literature hall of fame.
Oh, do I detect outrage. I got my second rejection for Slipstream. This weekend I plan to send out two more sets of poems. The mailings have been slow because I feel bogged down with school. The semester is only one month in and already I want to be finished. I suppose that is not the mark of a truly motivated teacher. I wonder if I am a teacher; I wonder even more if I am a writer. I don't know if I even have what it takes to make a small press open their eyes. I am not the most confident in my art lately. I miss the support from the MA program. Thank God for my weekly writing group or I don't know what I'd do.
There are times when I desire to quit. But, there's this nagging voice inside that won't let the craziness stop spouting from the head to the page.
Comment away on the poem. I need the help. I still do want to post some famous and infamous poets...Jane Kenyon for the first I think....next time...
U Haul It Away, It's Yours
It's all about the auction couch,
one hundred dollars
and the ten U Haul calls, it took
to get the Viola's couch inside the door.
We lift one side in
then the other, so nothing is damaged.
Yes, I answer your
long drive in the car posed question
someday I do want kids.
I crave the poetry of baseball practices
of going over spelling and phonics,
of a man
who helps the blue collar day
become less sad.
The thing
that happens after
the radio's turned off
and we find lakes and countryside so beautiful
they should be illegal, or
at least give
our eyes a citation and a warning
not to glance again at the scenic overpass.
These weekends are like Norman Rockwell paintings
pleasant to look at, but something
I'm afraid won't stay
on my wall.
Oh, every one plays The American Bandstand of Companionship.
I give that friend a 78 but I really don't like
the last comment on my blog.
I can't be happy
with only mohair couches and
country rides and the patience
of the
"I would like more but I don't know" smiles.
After the auction,
I can't drive in the rain.
I was never good with water,
showers,
and long downpours just block the vision.
Those pellets of hydrogen and oxygen
bring flowers, bring babies
but no one ever
leaves a cradle outside
without an umbrella, or a mature adult.
I won't disappear like the moldy old couch smell.
I will stay around long after
the cargo van gets returned
and all my chairs are put back
in their place.
I glow in the virtue
of contemplating temptation
and settling for the etiquette of salons
where we sit on sofas
and discuss politics and history
Edwardian or Victorian art.
Some art has to have
a person's first name
to make the paint legitimate.
Sir and Madam Upper Crusted
sipping apertifs with
our white dresses and white suits,
Gatsby and Daisy lookalikes
no one can tell we're not new money
we're barely middle class.
We are lost socialists
who could have been Paris
who could have been Berlin
or any romantic version
early 20th Bohemians
who didn't know
they had a right to kiss during wartime.
We move my new purchase home.
We keep a ring and kids lit
in the candles we burn
on our coffee tables,
Those wax angels
flap flames every night
and keep us hot.
They're tired of
working the guardian all night shift
blowing the fire out
before we do.
Anyway, the Dodge was cool. The infusion of language and people has my head spinning. I like the fact so many poetry lovers still breath on this earth. There were the usual poets that I love: Mark Doty, Jim Daniels and Laure Anne Bosselaar, Lucille Clifton. But the biggest surprise was falling in "love" ok--so everyone uses this term loosely---with the poetry of Anne Waldman.
Yes, she was a friend of Ginsberg and named the MFA Program the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. But, something struck me about the passion with which she took the stage. There was no apology for the way she performed. She read a piece called Stereo which is from her book called Marriage. She rocked the house with her performance. ROCK N ROLL. Those beats must have been nothing short of hell raisers. And, as if that wasn't enough, she followed it up by "Rogue State", an anti war anti Bush poem.
She gives power in the feminine. The title of the pieces the poets were reading about is "How is Truth to Be Told". Well, she did address the war, but she also addressed how we get along in our everyday lives with "Stereo". So many times I think people believe poets to be so far removed for the circumstances of the minutes of the days. The simple things. I am glad I heard poets that give me faith that poetry is not an art for a certain few. (Like they would sometimes make us in the trenches poets believe)
GO ANNE WALDMAN!!! She used a lot of breath technique and what she learned from Buddhist mediation to shout her barbaric yawp from the rooftops of the world!!!! I am so empowered to want to read and have that kind of hope in the words I am writing.
Not only Anne Waldman, but also Joe Weil, Jack Wiler, and B.J Ward, Gretna Wilkinson, tsmalltown New Jersey poets, give me hope for the future. I am a smalltown chick and these folks speak like they know the neighborhood. These are the factory workers, the cheap beer drinkers, the folks struggling to find love in a world so consumed to swallow us. This weekend gives me strength to know literature is not for the chosen few who make it into the literature hall of fame.
Oh, do I detect outrage. I got my second rejection for Slipstream. This weekend I plan to send out two more sets of poems. The mailings have been slow because I feel bogged down with school. The semester is only one month in and already I want to be finished. I suppose that is not the mark of a truly motivated teacher. I wonder if I am a teacher; I wonder even more if I am a writer. I don't know if I even have what it takes to make a small press open their eyes. I am not the most confident in my art lately. I miss the support from the MA program. Thank God for my weekly writing group or I don't know what I'd do.
There are times when I desire to quit. But, there's this nagging voice inside that won't let the craziness stop spouting from the head to the page.
Comment away on the poem. I need the help. I still do want to post some famous and infamous poets...Jane Kenyon for the first I think....next time...
U Haul It Away, It's Yours
It's all about the auction couch,
one hundred dollars
and the ten U Haul calls, it took
to get the Viola's couch inside the door.
We lift one side in
then the other, so nothing is damaged.
Yes, I answer your
long drive in the car posed question
someday I do want kids.
I crave the poetry of baseball practices
of going over spelling and phonics,
of a man
who helps the blue collar day
become less sad.
The thing
that happens after
the radio's turned off
and we find lakes and countryside so beautiful
they should be illegal, or
at least give
our eyes a citation and a warning
not to glance again at the scenic overpass.
These weekends are like Norman Rockwell paintings
pleasant to look at, but something
I'm afraid won't stay
on my wall.
Oh, every one plays The American Bandstand of Companionship.
I give that friend a 78 but I really don't like
the last comment on my blog.
I can't be happy
with only mohair couches and
country rides and the patience
of the
"I would like more but I don't know" smiles.
After the auction,
I can't drive in the rain.
I was never good with water,
showers,
and long downpours just block the vision.
Those pellets of hydrogen and oxygen
bring flowers, bring babies
but no one ever
leaves a cradle outside
without an umbrella, or a mature adult.
I won't disappear like the moldy old couch smell.
I will stay around long after
the cargo van gets returned
and all my chairs are put back
in their place.
I glow in the virtue
of contemplating temptation
and settling for the etiquette of salons
where we sit on sofas
and discuss politics and history
Edwardian or Victorian art.
Some art has to have
a person's first name
to make the paint legitimate.
Sir and Madam Upper Crusted
sipping apertifs with
our white dresses and white suits,
Gatsby and Daisy lookalikes
no one can tell we're not new money
we're barely middle class.
We are lost socialists
who could have been Paris
who could have been Berlin
or any romantic version
early 20th Bohemians
who didn't know
they had a right to kiss during wartime.
We move my new purchase home.
We keep a ring and kids lit
in the candles we burn
on our coffee tables,
Those wax angels
flap flames every night
and keep us hot.
They're tired of
working the guardian all night shift
blowing the fire out
before we do.
posted by Jennifer at 4:32 PM
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