Macker: CoyoteAcid

 

In Praise of Robert Bly

 

One of the great American poets of my generation has passed. Those of us who came of age in the Sixties had a poetry hero in Robert Bly. By the time I was writing poetry in the San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, I'd found the Sixties lit mag of translations that had begun in the Fifties. And I was hooked. Leaping poetry. Itki made so much sense!

Then I went back and found old copies of The Fifties. I began to realize there was a vast world of poetry beyond our borders.  I had come from a seven-year seminary indoctrination. Thankfully, Brother Antoninus (William Everson) had led me into the sphere of influence of the San Francisco Renaissance poets: Kenneth Rexroth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Lew Welch, Lenore Kandel, Gary Snyder and later Jack Spicer -- to name the most prominent in my personal pantheon.

Snyder and Welch led me to the Beats -- Ginsberg, Kerouac, DiPrima. I was intrigued by Ginsberg performances. Loving his anti-war stance and incandescent presence. Kerouac in his poetry was a wild reservoir of jumping jive language. I was put off by DiPrima, though, who rolled her window up on Market St. when I tried to introduce myself, and I couldn't understand her poem in a Playboy knock-off, urging everyone to fill their bathtubs because the revolution was coming. There seemed to be a bit of the unexamined, self-destructive, self-inflated egotism among some of the Beats that rubbed my woo-woo skin the wrong way.

Bly introduced me to a very different style. I devoured Silence in a Snowy Field in the early Sixties. His deep image technique intrigued. That led me back to Pound and Williams and then George Oppen, who I had the good fortune to meet on Mt. Tamalpais. We became friends. His Imagist books made deep sense to me and imagery became central to my work. When Bly came out with The Light Around the Body with poems railing against the Vietnam War, I was on board. That the work won the National Book Award only cemented my admiration.

I fell completely in love with Bly's Tomas Tranströmer translations in 20 Poems. I carried that dog-eared chappie around everywhere. At an anti-nuclear conference in Chicago, I got to see him perform before students at Northwestern University. He used a dulcimer to accompany a poem or two -- endearing him to me as I was a closet aficionado of the dulcimer as well. And he demonstrated how simple hand movements accompanying a poem made for much more entrancing performance chops than merely reading the words on the page. Bly's brilliance had seeped into every pore of my lyric sensibilities -- opening distant worlds of poetry, teaching me to let poetry leap not just ride a set rhythm, exposing me to deep images and poems  of political activism that were more than mere cant. 

Finally, in the start of the Seventies Ferlinghetti's City Lights brought out The Teeth Mother Naked At Last, and itki blew my frigging head off. Here was a compendium of counter-cultural tropes I'd been embracing after years sequestered in the locked medieval tabernacle of a seminary. And itki was beautiful poetry, dazzling images, cultural anthropology. Christianity, America's democratic facade, the war that powered the economy -- everything lay exposed. "...the mad beast covered with European hair rushes / through the mesa bushes in Mendocino county..." and "...Let us drive cars / up / the light beams / to the stars..."

I wasn't so taken with Iron John. Itki was important.  But I had already embraced feminism by the time itki came out, and his trying to heal the wounded father in his life, in the life of so many men, while needed for the culture at large, wasn't what had me in itki's grip. But Bly's poetry and his earlier publications had taught me so much, I still held him in great reverence.  As life would have itki, my dear friend and brilliant poet Judyth Hill of New Mexico and now Colorado, had the wondrous fortune to actually study with him, to have him as mentor and friend. She has given me permission to share this marvelous poem of hers in praise of one of America's greatest poets of our times. 

 

Photo by Bruce Bisping of the Star Tribune

Ghazel Overheard

for Robert Bly

Ache of morning without you, ache

of the book I open seeking you, ache

of absence, ache of voice in my closest listening.

Snow falls in the fields of many grasses

where this October the fox hid, voyeur of pond.

Writing poems, you said, the same: a wild listening.

Odin slung from the Tree, Inanna, stripped of crown, jewels, dominion.

Falstaff and midnight's chimes, Jesu, Jesu, the green green of Ireland,

every loss and landscape play the music of listening.

Cezanne stood in one place, Mont Sainte-Chapelle in another,

connected by the portolan of seeing. We wrote every poem

because you were listening.

The elk herd is here today, wearing thick winter fur,

the small ones near their mothers. Nuthatches, chickadees,

flicker's flash of underwing orange, choral listening.

I only know to leave by losing everything.

I have a house, then I don't: words on the page, then

nothing. Do you hear me listening?

When the plaster cracked revealing the Golden Buddha,

we sat sesshin exactly the same as the day before.

This is our practice, over and over. We are listening.

Wagonload of hay, boxwood, Tranströmer, Antonio

Machado, Rilke. You left us so many gifts. I kept

your Giant mask, the beanstalk still (g)listening.

Yeats wrote Lake Isle of Innisfree on a London bus,

that's the secret, isn't it? Longing eclipses the distance from home to here,

you to us, poem to page. You just keep listening.

JUDYTH HILL

Kinship Panel Tonight

Pt. Reyes Bookstore Zoom Session

Kinship Book Club #2 

Wednesday, Jan. 12, 13022 (Western Slope Calendar)

I know a number of people wanted to tune into to tonight's panel discussion but weren't sure how to register, so here's the URL to get you there (you might have to copy and insert in browser on some machines)

Here's what Gavin Van Horn, one of the co-editors of the Kinship series, has suggested will be our format. "After introductions, I will offer some framing. What's the kinship series all about? For volume 2, why did the series focus on 'Place' as critical for kinship/kinning? etc."

• Lisa Maria Madera
• Enrique Salmon
• Lilian Pearce
• Aaron Abeyta
• Diane Wilson
• Devon Pena
• Art Goodtimes
• Curt Meine 

The order of the evening zoom will be roughly as follows (times shown are PST -- those of you in MST (Denver) change 6 pm. times to 7 pm times):

1) 6:00-6:05pm – Stephen Sparks of Pt. Reyes Books welcomes

2) 6:05-6:15pm – Gavin offers some framing

3) 6:15-6:45pm – Book's writers and poets introductions and readings

4) 6:45-7:00pm+ – A conversation shaped by audience questions

Come join in and help shape the discussion.

KINSHIP Book Club: PLACE

Gary Lincoff Memorial Tour at Chile's Torres del Paine National Park

 

The Center for Humans and Nature will team up with Pt. Reyes Books to host a zoom discussion among editors and contributors to the second volume of their 5-volume book, Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations  this Wednesday, January 12th at  7 p.m. MST (Denver). 

https://www.ptreyesbooks.com/event/kinship-book-club-vol-2

 Participants in the first Kinship Book Club discussion Dec. 8th, 13021 (Western Slope Calendar)

Confirmed speakers for this second session are editor Gavin Van Horn of the Center, as well as participants Indigenous writer and executive director Diane Wilson of the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance; Indigenous writer and anthropologist Dr. Enrique Salmon of California State University (East Bay); president of the Acequia Institute and writer Dr. Devon Pena of the University of Washington; writer and researcher Dr. Lilian Pearce of the Australian Research Council; writer and award-winning conservation biologist Dr. Curt Meine from Wisconsin; Ecuadorian-American writer, educator and storyteller Dr. Lisa María Madera who lives in Quito; poet, former professor and current mayor Aaron Abeyta of Antonito in the San Luis Valley; and poet & former Green county commissioner Art Goodtimes of the San Miguel Watershed in Colorado.

Registration required.

Lone Cone, the place where I live -- as in my book Looking South to Lone Cone 

(Photo by Chris Bonebrake)

I'll be reading a new performance version of my poem of place "Reinhabitation" which appears in the the second volume, Place, of Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations.

REINHABITATION

                                         -for Peter Berg & Judy Goldhaft

I spent the first night alone

in the abandoned house

dropping acid

to see what I could see

outside myself

And I've spent the past

forty years inside

this acre of irrigated wetlands

learning itki's quandaries

How poplars gnawed down

to the roots by deer

grow stronger

Survive the drought

that kills the cherrytree

How native lacewings

encouraged in their spidery nests

love to feed on Canada thistle

And how some weeds harvested

before flowering and soaked

in drums of pond water makes

the stinkiest best compost tea

Each spring. Each fall

Wind before the clouds

whipping at the roofs

tossing gusts and ghastly turns

A neighbor crushed in her truck cab

by a snapped cottonwood on the highway

I've even learned

the litany of locals who called

this place home

Mex Snyder. Caroline Young

Ed & Grandma Foster

Planting rhubarb. Tending goats

And now paid for twice

Cloud Acre's been mine to husband

Siberian elms. Coyote willow

Forty-nine varieties of

heirloom spuds grown to seed

Two once-small children

Two grown and long gone children

Flocks of geese. Red-winged blackbirds

The occasional Great Blue Heron

Listening to this one place

Itki's names, itki's moods, itki's whispers

Listening has taught me more

about earth kinning

& the land's deepening wisdoms

than any text

art goodtimes

union of mountain poets

vincent st. john local / colorado plateau /aztlan

cloud acre brigade (ret.) / san francisco

13022

Another Western Slope jueju

TO VOTE

 Mount    Tam    just     a-memory

Lone    Cone    disappeared    in-clouds

"The-incredible    whiteness    of-winter" 

Is    amor-fati     just    code    for-acceptance

of-the-given  •  Could    neoliberalism    just    be

a-trickledown    symptom    of-Joycean    triune

rebellion-from    home    country    creed

The-scraped   ice   of-the-snowplows   echoes   

along-the-highway's    uncomfortable    truths

Why    extend    the-franchise    to-the-hoi-polloi

say    the-one    percent     born    of-privilege

We're    a-nation-state    where    privilege   changes

screens    like    bitcoin    anyway  •  A   free-for-all    capital

market    frenzy    where     class    is-bought    sold    

inherited    or     randomly    pre-selected    out-of-the-blue

Even    the-middle-class    apes     the-haves  •  Just

tolerates    the-have-nots  •  "Only    a-percentage

of-the-eligible    vote    anyway,"    sneers    McRedeye    

shoveling    their-driveway  •  "Let's

make    itki    a-privilege    of-the-few 

who    care"

NOTA BENE: 

“Ki” is a grammatical neologism Indigenous science writer Robin Wall Kimmerer advocates using in place of “it”, “its”, “it’s” or “itself” to help correct English’s objectification of the world. As a pre-school teacher I learned that we learn by going through the known to the unknown. So instead of substituting “ki”, I’ve chosen to add the Indigenous neologism to our neutral English pronoun as a suffix, changing the way we speak of things in English from inanimate to animate, “itki.”  The neologist term is harvested from the last syllable of a longer word in Potawatomi for an “earth being.” That syllable, “ki”, is itkiself a Bodéwadmimwen suffix meaning “from the living earth.” 

Western Slope Jueju

 Here's a new poem in a new style "Western Slope Jueju" loosely based on the traditional Chinese jueju and the  Sinophonic poetics/Yingelishi of Jonathan Stallings  at the University of Oklahoma. 

The abstract painting, "Backcountry Winter" by Karen Scharer of Pueblo (used with her permission) is one of the featured works at  the Slate Gray Gallery at 209 E. Colorado Ave., Suite B, in Telluride, Colorado. The show runs from January 6th through January 31st. For more info, call  970.728.3777

Calderazzo: The One Year Anniversary

of the Trump Insurrection deserves this telling poem 

by my good friend & professor emeritus  John Calderazzo

of the Fort Collins area here in Colorado: