Art That Inspires, and is inspired by, poetry: two poems by James Bertolino

Space Hawk

Where the sphere of actuality
and the sphere of possibility turn
against each other, a winged creature

is flying through the Earth.
Broad rhythmic strokes
propel it through densities of stone

inward to the molten core.
Then, like a red-tailed hawk riding
a sudden thermal, it is buoyed outward,

erupting from the surface
into space, where it disappears
in a shimmer of exhilaration.

==

“Cosmic Bird” by Leo Osborne

This poem, which inspired a sculpture, is from my book Snail River—published in 1995 by the Quarterly Review of Literature Award Series, Princeton University. Leo Osborne created his sculpture in response to the poem, and it will be up for auction (together with a copy of the book with Leo’s drawing on the page with the poem), at the Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner, Washington. The event is scheduled for Saturday, June 16th—doors open and silent auction begins at 5 pm; live auction begins at 7:15 pm.

Osborne is a Guemes Island artist, and his sculpture reminds me that I wrote a poem inspired by a Philip McCracken painting––Phil is another long-time Guemes artist who, well before Leo arrived on Guemes, was well-known for his sculpture. Back when I first lived on the Island, it was in a rental house about three doors south of Phil and Anne McCracken’s house and art studio. That was the mid-eighties. One evening when I walked up the road to visit the McCrackens, I was enjoying the sound of frogs singing. I noticed that the frogs got louder as I approached the house. When I mentioned that phenomenon to Phil and Anne, they pointed to a small pond near the front door, and insisted that all frogs were quite welcome. Later Phil loaned me that painting titled “Frog Voices”—which, in a somewhat abstract manner, depicted the rising music of the frogs.

Frog Voices by Philip McCracken

I spent a number of evenings meditating on the painting. Then I wrote a poem which I titled “Frog Voices” in honor of the artwork it was interpreting. The McCrackens liked the poem very much, and Phil said he wanted me to keep his painting as a gift. The “Frog Voices” poem was soon to be published in my volume First Credo, 1986, which was the first of two books that were published in the Quarterly Review of Literature Contemporary Poetry Series.

Here is the poem:

Frog Voices

The swamp is silent.

Dawn’s slow voltage
reaches wild currant, and each twig,
each slim living rheostat
feeds light to the blossoms.

Then one by one open the gold
and green-flecked eyes of the frogs.

Over the distant Bering Sea,
over resting bowhead whales
and sea birds at roost,
a missile punctures the brilliance
of morning sky.

Shivering ponds of swamp water
harbor a grim reflection
as the projectile descends its chilling arc.

Suddenly the frogs begin.
Their voices rise,
feathery trebles, croaks and trills
all weaving a shield
of sound.

When the missile explodes
the blinding egg of fire is enclosed
by singing, then is repelled
into cold space
beyond the range
of song.

––For Philip McCracken

Poems by James Bertolino

 

Returning to the Poetry of Robert Sund

Disappearing Lake
poems by Robert Sund

Thanks to poet Tim McNulty, I own, and am enjoying, a new book published by Pleasure Boat Studio in New York. The title is Notes from Disappearing Lake, and the subtitle is The River Journals of Robert Sund, edited by Tim and Glenn Hughes.

I knew Robert (you’d be wrong to call him Bob) back when he was still sometimes staying at his cabin on an estuary of the Skagit River, near La Conner, Washington in an area known as Fishtown. These journal entries are pretty much poems, and Sund has been widely praised, and recognized by key publishers, for his poetry. He is probably best known for his volumes Bunch Grass, 1969, University of Washington Press, Ish River, 1983, North Point Press, and Poems From Ish River Country: Collected Poems and Translations, 2004, Shoemaker & Hoard––which I used as a textbook when I was Writer in Residence at Willamette University, 2005-06, in Salem, Oregon. Robert died at age 72 in 2001, and that comprehensive volume was published posthumously.

However important his volumes have been, those who know and love Robert Sund’s poetry tend to treasure his limited edition chapbooks, which include As Though The Word Blue Had Been Dropped Into The Water, 1986, and Why I Am Singing For The Dancer, 1999—both published in hand-set letterpress editions by Rusty North at Sagittarius Press in Port Townsend, WA. His chapbook Shack Medicine, first published in 1990 by California’s Tangram Press in a letterpress printing, then reprinted in 1992 by The Poets’s House Press, is my own favorite of the smaller collections, and offers poems that are the most similar to those in Notes From Disappearing Lake. I should note that I found and was inspired by Sund’s first book Bunch Grass during my initial year as a graduate student, which was at Washington State University. WSU is in Pullman, at the eastern edge of the Palouse wheat-growing region––which is where the poems are rooted. I took the good news of his poetry to my students and colleagues when I transferred to Cornell University in 1971 to work on an MFA degree.

Here then are some samples of the poems in the 2012 volume Notes from Disappearing Lake:

December, 1976

Some men
reap their harvest daily,
     like ducks
     swimming about the bay as
          tide descends,
     gobbling water plants
     with feathery heads
          down under
          ripply water,
     never realizing
     their ass is skyward &
          open to the wind.

This poem is a fine example of some of Sund’s key characteristics as a poet: his detailed daily observations about the world around him, and his sense of humor. Also, like the majority of poems in this book, the poem carries the date it was composed.

He honored and learned from the great Chinese poets, and learned traditional calligraphy to enhance his own poems. He often embellished his poems with tiny drawings of mountain and island landscapes. Notes from Disappearing Lake opens with a reproduction of the calligraphy of a poem titled “October 12, 1973,” and it is punctuated by an image of mountains and an island watercourse.

In this next poem he not only identifies the date, but the time of day. He must have felt that composing a poem that early in the morning, the hour should be noted:

April 24, 1977   4 A.M.

In the excited mind
          words fly.

The night is still, the water still ––
          & suddenly, in the mind

(as on the night river
          a beaver
breaks the silence)

the first ripple of a poem
swims almost invisible by the river bank.

Blades of grass standing in the river
          feel the waves rise and
                    pass through them.

Here Sund finds an appropriate metaphor for his own poetic process, which implies that not only does he draw his inspiration from the environment, that environment physically experiences his poems. It should also be noted that he employed the ampersand (&) rather than the word “and”––in the process endowing his poems (even in print) with an aspect of calligraphy, as well as the minimalist clarity of the Chinese poetry he loved.

I will complete this gesture of appreciation for one of Washington State’s great poets, who had the grand good fortune to have studied with Theodore Roethke while a student at the University of Washington, with this beautiful observation:

July 20, 1985

After a hot day
     cool night comes––
          dark out in the marsh
     dark on the island.
In the nightwind the
     young shoots of willow
          cry against the windowglass,
               as the branches
               bend and
               spring back.

Event: Reading at Village Books Tuesday, May 15, 2012, 7pm with Tim McNulty
(All poems in this post by Robert Sund, from Notes from Disappearing Lake)
—James Bertolino
(www.jamesbertolino.com)

 

Working with Ammons

A. R. Ammons

One of my life’s great opportunities was to study with the poet A.R. Ammons as an MFA student at Cornell University between 1971 and 1973. We students knew him as Archie. He received the first of two National Book Awards for his Collected Poems: 1951-1971 while I was there listening to everything he said, and the Yale University critic Harold Bloom was busy making him immortal by writing that “No contemporary poet in America is likelier to become a classic than A.R. Ammons.” His second National Book Award was for Garbage in 1993, after which he was awarded a MacArthur “Genius Fellowship.”

There were two pronouncements I remember as though Ammons had uttered them today: the first was what he said to me in his office: “If a poem isn’t going to add-up to anything, it must be interesting at every point.” While he seemed to be saying that my poems didn’t add-up, he was also describing an aesthetic method that I’ve used hundreds of times since. Later that semester he read aloud to the workshop this poem I had submitted for discussion:

The Storm has come again today,
it rages shrill pins.

I hear a pale child moaning alone
near the bottom rocks
of the field.

I feel the blowing wet
bruise her face.

When finished he observed: “I don’t see any way this poem by Mr. Bertolino could be better than it already is.” I felt pretty cocky after that, and rather enjoyed being glared at by the other MFA students. But I had to wonder why Ammons would make that remark in front of my classmates. I then spent much more time reading his poetry, and soon discovered his work effortlessly accomplished some of the elements I was striving for in my own poetry. Here’s a passage from one of Archie’s poems about poetry:

Poetics

not so much looking for the shape
as being available
to any shape that may be
summoning itself
through me
from the self not mine but ours.

He always had a marvelous way of putting things, and often found very simple shapes to embody dazzling ideas. Those shapes were often found close at hand, and mostly from the natural world. It’s hard to imagine a poem by any poet that could more effectively portray a metaphysical concept than this one:

Reflective

I found a
weed
that had a

mirror in it
and that
mirror

looked in at
a mirror
in

me that
had a
weed in it.

In Ammons’ poem “Small Song,” wind plays a key role: as a phenomenon that acts on, then is revealed by reeds. The reeds first are subject to the wind, then have a kind of power over the wind.

Small Song

The reeds give
way to the

wind and give
the wind away

In this last poem, the wind enables the daisies to more fully experience their own loss as the yellow petals leave their stems and are gone.

Loss

When the sun
falls behind the sumac
thicket the
wild
yellow daisies
in diffuse evening shade
lose their
rigorous attention
and
half-wild with loss
turn
any way the wind does
and lift their
petals up
to float
off their stems
and go.

How could any attentive reader fail to feel how sad, but beautiful, it is when something as attentive as these wild things lose their focus and dissipate. Haven’t we all given ourselves over to a power not our own? Haven’t we experienced loss?

James Bertolino

—James Bertolino
A.R. Ammons’ sample poems can be found in
Collected Poems: 1951-1971.

 

The Poet As Art: Terry Martin and Casey Fuller, and a workshop, too

The Poet As Art presents

A Poetry Reading featuring poets Terry Martin (from Spokane)
and Casey Fuller (from Portland, OR)

featuring Terry Martin and Casey Fuller

When: Friday,February 24th, 7:00 pm
Where: Lucia Douglas Gallery (1415 13th St. in Fairhaven)
This event is free and open to the public. Donations always welcome.

Terry Martin and Casey Fuller write about womanhood and manhood, and reflect on the childhood experiences that lead to those states. Seattle’s Open Books calls Fuller’s poems “sharp-edged, yet tender,” and Lucinda Roy says of Martin’s poems, “the sublime is housed within the domestic: kitchens are cathedrals, and the ‘geometry’ of rituals sustained by women teach us how to sing … about what we dare to love and what dares to love us back.”

ALSO:
A Poetry Writing Workshop with poet James Bertolino
Images On The Edge: a poetry writing workshop where we will develop images that will energize your poems, and create a lasting impact for the reader or listener. We will examine what kind of language is most effective for a given image, and utilize sound repetition and echo to make the image irresistible. Each workshop participant should expect to go home with three new poems.

James Bertolino

When: Saturday, February 25th, 1:00 to 4:30 p.m.
Where: Egress Studio
Registration fee: $45
To register, call: (360)398-7870 or email Jim at jim@jamesbertolino.com
Please mail fee to:
Whatcom Poetery Series
5581 Noon Road
Bellingham WA 98226

About Terry Martin
After teaching middle and high school English Language Arts for a number of years, Terry Martin earned a M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Oregon. She has been an English

Terry Martin

Professor at Central Washington University since 1986, teaching undergraduate and graduate English courses. She is the recipient of CWU’s Distinguished Professor Teaching Award and Central’s Presidential Leadership Award. In 2003, Martin was honored by the CASE/Carnegie Foundation as Washington Professor of the Year—a national teaching award given to recognize extraordinary commitment and contribution to undergraduate education. An avid reader and writer, she has published over 250 poems, essays, and articles and has edited both journals and anthologies. Her first book of poems, Wishboats, won the Judges’ Choice Award at Bumbershoot Book Fair in 2000. Her most recent book of poetry, The Secret Language of Women, was published by Blue Begonia Press in 2006. Hiker, river-watcher, and lover of the arts, she lives with her partner in Yakima, Washington.

About Casey Fuller
In 2011, Casey Fuller won the Washington State-wide Floating Bridge Chapbook Award for his poetry collection, A Fort Made of Doors. In 2010, he won the Jeanne Lohmann Poetry Prize. In 2009, the city of Olympia awarded him the Here Today art grant. He

Casey Fuller

received his MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University in 2008. His poems have appeared in Crab Creek Review, Switched-On Gutenberg, A River and Sound Review, Palabra, and other publications.
Fuller has lived in the Northwest for 33 years. He was born in Olympia, Washington, where he was educated at pubic schools, and studied literature and cognitive science at The Evergreen State College. He has worked as an auto detailer, burrito roller, fruit vendor, note taker, office worker and, most recently, as a forklift driver in a warehouse where he wrote poems during his breaks. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife Katrina, and two cats, Monty and Garcia Lorca.

###

 

Announcing New Publications by Egress Studio Press, a Pre-Preview

I’m very proud to announce that Egress Studio Press is publishing two more Pacific Northwest poets. Vashon Island poet Ann Spiers’ chapbook is titled What Rain Does. The other publication is Her Story of Fire by Bellingham poet Richard Widerkehr. Look for them in the next week or two.

As soon as I finish printing them, Jim Bertolino and I will score, fold, cut, and sew the books. It’s a fairly relaxing pastime. When the poets finally have copies in their hands, I’ll post more information about the poems, the poets, where to purchase the books, and what they look like.

These are the first Egress Studio Press poetry books to be created completely in the studio: from layout to printing to assembly. I’m pretty excited about that. For now, I have to get back to the last edits before Jim and I start constructing the books.

 

Hiroshima Poems

We are lucky enough to say we have a pal named Garland Richmond, who taught German at Emory University for 37 years, and served as Dean of Student Academic Affairs. He was so valued by the university they named a research award after him! Garland is currently President of Bellingham’s Whatcom Chorale board of directors, and of course contributes his great voice to their programs. His skills as translator were used effectively in translating an entire Chorale program from German into English.

Here’s a beautiful and tragic poem Garland translated from the German with the care we’ve come to expect of him.

Hiroshima
—Maria Luise Kaschnitz
(Translated by Garland Richmond)

The man who threw death down on Hiroshima
Joined a cloister, rings the bells there now.
The man who threw death down on Hiroshima
Jumped in a noose from a stool
And strangled himself.
The man who threw death down on Hiroshima
Went out of his mind, fends off ghosts,
Hundreds of thousands, who come at him nightly,
Resurrected from the dust just for him.

None of that is true.
Not long ago I saw him
In the garden of his house in the suburbs.
The hedges were still young and the rose bushes delicate,
Things don’t grow fast enough for him to hide
In the forest of forgetting. Plain to see was
The naked suburban house, the young wife
Standing beside it in her flowered dress,
Holding the little girl’s hand,
The boy, sitting on the man’s back,
Swinging the whip over his head.
He himself was recognizable
On all fours on the plot of grass, his face
Contorted in laughter, because the photographer
Stood behind the hedge, the eye of the world.

Blueprint by James Bertolino, a broadside. Click on the poem for a larger version.

The poem’s early rhythm and repetition are haunting, and add a kind of urgency to the poem. The second stanza is a simple commentary, with any bitterness justified by what went before. But we still can feel the poet’s fist raised and shaking in the air.

I think one of Garland’s favorite poems may be “Blueprint” by James Bertolino, which is included in Jim’s book Finding Water, Holding Stone. Garland has twice identified New Yorker covers which used the poem’s imagery without crediting the source (he’s such a kidder). I recently made a broadside of this poem to send to Garland as a way of saying “Thank you.” He is a generous soul, active in our community, and very passionate about art, music and literature.

—posted by Anita K. Boyle and James Bertolino

 

Poetry, Music and Art Collaborate

It’s May already. Tomorrow June begins, marked with a solar eclipse. But this post is about a couple of events Jim and I attended on the Olympic Peninsula during March and April. When I mention the Olympic Peninsula, I mean to include all the little peninsulas that make up the grand Olympic side of Washington.

First, on March 12, Jim and I attended the Jazz Canvas event in Poulsbo with Andy and Lana Ayers. This venue is in the Knowles’ art studio. The jazz trombonist J. Kyle Gregory performed with the house band while the artist Leigh Knowles Metteer worked on a painting inspired by the evening’s music. Great music! And the artist was lively and even invited an audience member to add some creative elements to the painting. As the evening came to a close, the painting was finished and was raffled off. So someone went home with a nice piece of art, and we all left with our culture passions satisfied for the moment. This event happens almost every month, so check out the website www.jazzcanvasonline.com for more information.

Then, on April 8, Jim and I went to Vaughn for another similar event, again with our good friends Lana and Andy.

James Bertolino reads his poems to the Vaughn audience

There was an artist painting and a musician playing, but this time, Jim and I were invited to read poetry, too. It was a wonderful evening, full of a substantial amount of excellent vittles, from lox to brie to wine to whatever your heart desired. The musician was Cheryl Wheeler from the East Coast. The audience was approximately fifty people jammed nicely into the ample living room, and behind the guest musicians and poets was a view of small inlet of Puget Sound. A hummingbird feeder hung from the eaves, busy with the little birds.

Above me there is a hummingbird feeder

Cheryl was funny and entertaining as she sang original work, and a few covers. Jim’s reading was delightful. And I also enjoyed reading there, with such an attentive audience and the beautiful landscape. The artist is local, and I apologize for not including her name here. But she, on the spot, drew portraits of all three of the guest artists. A very colorful and lively evening. A few days after we got back home, I received a very nice email from a friend of ours, Lisa Schmidt, who included a poem she wrote inspired by the evening, which I’m sharing here:

Spring Collage

Just above your voice,
inside your words,
a hummingbird
sips nectar.

From up here
glass-pressed red sunset
sweetens the bay’s brine
and stains alder fibers
condensing the history of water
into my own blank page.

You speak the language
of red-winged blackbirds, of doves,
and the darkness
that started it all
falls silent
with the lion.

This hummingbird’s a mother.
She returns to nourish
her young with spiders
and nectar.
Cocooned in soft fibers
mended with webs
that would entangle,
they wait out the night
to suckle honey blossoms –

Eggshells preserved
with dragonfly.

—Lisa Schmidt

Lisa is a fine poet whose poems I’ve enjoyed since the first time I heard her read at the Auburn Arts Festival. I especially love inspiring others and being inspired by others. It’s a kind of splendid impromptu collaboration. Speaking of inspiration, Chris Jarmick will be the next guest poet on June 2. The photos on this blog post were taken by our host, Jerry Libstaff.

—

 

Blue River Writers Gathering

I was exceedingly fortunate to have been present for the Blue River Writers Gathering at the Andrews Experimental Forest in the mountains east of Eugene, Oregon. Sponsored by Oregon State University’s Spring Creek Project, writers came from around the Northwest, as far north as Sitka, Alaska, and as far east as Ithaca, New York. We spent a three-day weekend (Friday, September 24th to Sunday, September 26th) talking to each other, hiking in the old growth, learning about the on-going environmental study of the forest (which I believe is in its sixth decade), and writing. Our group of 24 writers included scientists, non-fiction and fiction writers, as well as poets—each of them established in their genre. Our group discussions were characterized by brilliant, passionate discourse about the role of writers in an era of planetary trauma. All of us had opportunities to share our work. We ate wonderfully catered meals together, and enjoyed daily happy hours with wine, beer and hors d’oeuvres.

Some of the ideas and information we discussed included the importance of writers portraying the world around us in language that readers will find seductive, beautiful or arresting, and the fact that old growth in the Andrews Experimental Forest has been largely spared the ravages of invasive insects due to the rich and diverse population of spiders! I characterize that phenomenon as The Golden Age of Arachnid Culture.

by Charles Goodrich

Charles Goodrich did a terrific job of organizing the Blue River Writers Gathering. Key thinkers at the gathering were philosopher/author Kathleen Dean Moore, David Oates, Ellen Waterston, Sarah van Gelder, who was the keynote speaker, and the always eloquent Tim McNulty. Since returning to Bellingham, I have received a marvelous volume of poems by Ellen Waterston, called Between Desert Seasons, whose poems are set in the high desert region of Bend, Oregon. Ellen is Director of The Nature of Words: Central Oregon’s Premier Literary Event, which will run this year from November 3rd through 7th in Bend.

Here is a list of the books I came home with:
• Going to Seed: Dispatches from the Garden, a volume of poetry by Charles Goodrich
• Sitka: A Home in the Wild, with text by Carolyn Servid and photographs by Dan Evans
• Unfurl, Kite, and Veer, Bill Yake’s gorgeous new volume of poetry
• What We Love Will Save Us, a volume of pungent essays by David Oates
• Looking for Parts, a CD of poems by Clem Starck
• The Crooked River Rises, essays by Ellen Waterston
• Temporary Bunk, poems by Lori Anderson Moseman
• The Summer, 2010 water issue of Yes! magazine, Executive Editor Sarah van Gelder
• and a U.S. Department of Agriculture publication titled Invertebrates of the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, Western Cascade Range, Oregon, given to me by Andrews Forest scientist Fred Swanson.

The Blue River Writers Gathering is convened every other year, and I hope I’ll have the opportunity to participate in the next one.
—James Bertolino

 

Flood Song by Sherwin Bitsui, 2009, Copper Canyon Press

Sherwin Bitsui isn’t exactly a Pacific Northwest poet, but he read with Sherman Alexie at Elliott Bay Books in August. He also has a connection with James Bertolino. As a judge for the American Book Award this year, Jim chose Flood Song, which is Sherwin Bitsui’s second book and comes from Copper Canyon Press of Port Townsend. So he does have ties to the northwest.

American Book Award winner

Here’s what Jim says about Sherwin Bitsui’s work:

Sherwin Bitsui’s book Flood Song can be experienced as a constantly shifting single poem, or as a rich gathering of individual poems. There are no set borders between the physical details of his world and his capacious imagination, just as his language both deeply honors and leaps beyond his Native American culture. Bitsui’s vision encompasses many versions of beauty. I’m grateful this book exists, and that’s why I chose it for a 2010 American Book Award.
—James Bertolino

I enjoyed reading Flood Song last week. Bitsui’s poems contain what many might consider traditional imagery, color and spirituality. But his poems go further, taking the traditional out of its comfortable contexts, and dropping it into a disconcerting contemporary environment. There is a matter-of-fact, beautifully rendered rage in the poems that transfers to you, the “innocent” reader, until you become, at the very least, a little alarmed. Jim is right when he mentions the constant shifts of the poems. First, you’re given a solid footing, but then “There is no sign of the trail leading out.” Every poem, and almost every line, uses specific, clear language from our natural and contemporary worlds, which is then mixed with varying degrees of violence. For instance, one poem’s first line begins: “It is here that they scoop gr…,” but the poem isn’t talking about grain; that line ends with “[gr]anite stones from your chest.” Ouch. Here’s another more subtle example that comes from about the middle of one of the groups of untitled poems in the book:
—
Scraping rough with smooth,
      the mind pillboxes the scent of cactus wren
         and wraps it with strands of neon vapor.

Dinetah*—scratched out
from the eye with juniper bark—
hunches with engine sweat
curling out of its collar,
its owner—a leash without a hand—
bleeds gasoline
     when lathered with a blur of red bricks.
—
When you’re through reading this poem, you get it, even though you may not understand all the details. Take another look, and it’s possible to understand the details, too. If you read one of Bitsui’s poems as if it were arithmetic, you might come away breathless. By the time you get to the end of a poem, the accumulation of cultural references, nuance and plain speaking, have the effect of leaving one out of breath, or with that strange feeling of semi-asphyxiation. And what about that verb “pillboxes?” What happens in these poems is the same thing that happens when a fist-sized snowball rolls to the bottom of a hill… there is an increase in mass that is wonderful to watch, yet has terrible uncontrollable thrust. The cultural references are sometime obvious, sometimes not, but Bitsui often refers to both the contemporary and the historical at the same time, which is something that can make a lot of sense in poetry. A great novel creates a suspenseful experience, where the reader just can’t wait to get at the next chapter. In Bitsui’s poems, this exhilarating suspense is so condensed, it happens between words. The enjoyment of reading Bitsui’s Flood Song, isn’t just between the lines.

For more information about Sherwin Bitsui, go to his website: www.bitsui.com.

* Dinétah is the homeland of the Navajo.