Fall colors. Nice patterns like in Persian art. More to come.

Geraldine R Dodge Poetry Festival

Just got back from the Geraldine R Dodge Poetry Festival. As usual it
was superb. (Actually I thnk it wasn't as good as last time...) I recommend everyone go though. Trouble is, it won't happen for another two years.

Got there Saturday morning in time for the end of Celebrating Rumi's
799th birthday with Coleman Barks and Robert Bly who were backed by
the Paul Winter Consort. Some gems from that: (some are misquoted by
me):

Coleman mused, 'The dawn: What all human beings want'...

Rumi - 'There is a field, I'll meet you there'....
http://www.mowensculpture.com/poetry.html#Poem32
Check out the many other short (Coleman Barks translated) Rumi poems
on that page too.)

Rumi -
"I am so small I can barely be seen.
How can this great love be inside me?

Look at your eyes. They are small,
but they see enormous things."
http://www.nlight.org/A%20Sampling%20of%20Rumi's%20Poems.htm

There were many sessions on Allen Ginsberg. I sat under the Gazebo
Sat and Sun and listened to and read some myself. On Sat it started
off with

Hum Bom
http://www.caterina.net/paw/archives/000071.html

Howl was read through twice. I read one part, the extremely graphic
homosexual sex part. (I was the next reader in the circle and that part was next.)
I also heard some graphic homosexual sex described in someone else's poems at a later session and thought, we don't really need to hear about this. Honesty is one thing but we've heard this before. Do we need to hear it again?. It's better a private thing. Enjoy it on your own, whatever your sexuality. Someone touched on that as well. Talking about the government trying to find out what people did in the dark, which was funny.

Howl
http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poem=0&poet=6613&num=21

The footnotes to Howl
http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=6613&poem=30496

Others included:

A Supermarket in California
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/supermarket.html
(I heard it at least three times this weekend making it the most
popular poem heard at the festival.)

America,
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/america.html

Diane Wolkstein: Told the story of Inanna, a Persian creation myth,
wonderfully.

Ko Un: A Korean poet. Haiku-like short pieces. Some funny. One
paraphrased: A baby dragonfly rests on a ? leaf. The whole world
surrounds it, watching. (?)

Taslima Nasreen read the most depressing poems/prose about the
horrendous treatment of women in Bangladesh/India. Very depressing.

The Poets of New Jersey reminded me that not all poetry is good
poetry. Some less than inspiring stuff there. B J Ward read some
stuff. I'd seen him at a Rockland County Jazz Society event a few
years ago. His stuff was better than most of the others but not that interesting.

Ekiwah Adler Belendez was very impressive. At 18, he is someone to
look out for in the future.

I had never seen Brian Turner before but was impressed although I was
not sure what his political bent was other than all war is hell. He
did remind the crowd that we will have to prepare ourselves for more
violence at home at some point.

I only saw Kurtis Lamkin at the evening session. He was perhaps not
the most eloquent but was certainly spirited. I wish I'd caught the
session he did on jazz with Sekou. He did a very interesting piece on
language. How children go from making unitelligeable sounds to
communicating and how we then lose the desire to speak the truth,
hiding our feelings.

Sekou Sundiata was very impressive. I recommend seeing him if you get
the chance. He did a piece on his reaction to Sept 11.

Anne Waldman: A force of nature.

She read Selections from Marriage (There is supposedly video of that here

http://www.freespeech.org/ramfiles/waldman.ram but I can't get it to
work.)

She also did an amazing rant in two parts with the first part being a
take on a more familiar piece/song (title?) and then "Rogue State"
where she becomes possessed, by the spirit of the poem or possessed
like you'd see in a voodoo ceremony or The Exorcist. The poet that
followed echoed my sentiments when she said she was having a hard
time getting Anne's voice out of her head. I would LOVE to see that
piece air somewhere, either from the festival or another performance
of it.

Here is one version of Rogue State (at U of Penn), much more subdued
than what we heard.
http://www.sonicyouth.com/prmp3/Rogue_State.mp3

Here she is reading Global Positioning (at U of Penn) .
http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Waldman/KWH4-15-03/Waldman-Anne_Global-Positioning_UPenn_4-15-03.mp3

More sound files of her at U of Penn here:
http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Waldman/KWH4-15-03/

I think it was Jorie Graham who said that we needed to counteract
Anne's reading with something boring like some dead English poet's
rhyming poetry. Unfortunately, Andrew Motion followed her. He is the
British Poet Laureate. Self-depreciatingly, he joked in his
opening that he might be thought of by some as a dead British poet
but that he would read a really dead English poet. I thought was
tactless of whoever said that with Andrew coming up. Jorie was
beautifully soft spoken but her poetry wasn't memorable.

The next morning, I saw more Coleman Barks and Robert Bly reading

Rumi and telling about their trip to Iran. (They had mentioned going
to Afghanistan the day before. Sent by the State Dept! The rep told
Coleman to not say anything bad about W. They had their meeting with
academics in the morning and in the afternoon told Nasrudin jokes, Nasrudin being the stereotypical wise fool. One joke: Nasrudin heard that most accidents happen close to home so he moved away. That kind of thing. Would apply rednecks or any other stereotypical character we are used to making fun of.) See more here: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Nasrudin

When asked about how these poems should be sung, Coleman offered that
Shape note singing was a pretty good way to do them. He had had a
dream where he and Joseph Campbell were sitting on his mother's bed
(He wondered what the significance of that was...), and Joseph said
that in Heaven we do that all the time (sing Rumi/Emily Dickinson to
Shape Note songs.)

This is all one big yes. Very inspiring. You miss it when you get
home and are not hearing it anymore.

At one point someone said poetry is (something to the effect of) the
one truth. It sounded reasonable when she said it but later I
thought, no, science is the one true thing in this world. Poetry
certainly tries to name the unnameable but it too falls short. It
does cover some areas other fields cannot touch and for that I like
it but it isn't the one truth.

Someone, Sunday, read Allen Ginsberg poem Kaddish Part1: "...Death is
that remedy all singers dream of"... Maybe. Is that what song leads
to?

People at the Gazebo read Stanley Kunitz's The Layers twice (and I
think another poet read it in the main tent, so I guess it is a tie
with Ginsberg's A Supermarket in California.)

Describing the little epiphanies is what interest me in poetry. This
weekend is full of them. Very addictive and inspiring. When Taha
Muhammad Ali said "the flowers bend down and sparrows (flew?)", it
was describing the feeling you have when someone you love reassures
you that they love you. You could say that in prose but the poetic is
so much more powerful although the meaning can be lost by using
metaphors.

Anne Waldman read, amongst other things on Sunday, Skin, Meat, Bones.
(read at U of Penn below)
http://mediamogul.seas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Waldman/Battery/Waldman-Anne_02_Skin-Meat-Bones_Battery_1978.mp3

Sprachsong?: Pieces of "Pieces of An Hour" (for John Cage) at U of Penn:
http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Waldman/Alchemical-Elegy/Waldman-Anne_06_Pieces-of-an-Hour_Alchemical-Elegy_2001.mp3

I enjoyed Linda Paston's Minor Surgery:
http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~dalryaug/poems/index.shtml?98/103198.shtml
She and this piece were entirely low key. Used common phrases. When I
hear poems like this I wonder if common sense would rate as poetics
if rearranged just so. Still, I liked it.

Mark Doty's reading on Sunday was more memorable to me at this hour
than what I heard on Saturday night. He had a longer session and read
more interesting stuff.

Billy Collins repeated several poems I heard him read at the 2004
festival. Why did he repeat so many?

The Revenant
http://www.bestcigarette.us/2004/09/the_revenant.html

Dharma
http://plagiarist.com/poetry/7844/

Litany (look down the page for it)
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/foundation/release_100604.html

The Lanyard
http://www.bestcigarette.us/2004/09/the_lanyard.html
I do love this poem and want to give a copy to my mother but it
didn't do much for me this time around.

One I hadn't heard last time or at least don't remember. Japan
http://www.contemporarypoetry.com/dialect/poetry/collinsjapan.htm

Someone at the festival mentioned this Nelson Mandela quote: "It is
our light, not our darkness, that frightens us." This festival makes
you renew the light in yourself.

I look forward to it two years from now... Sigh.