Cascadian Prophets Podcast

I did not get a chance to write about my experience with the 12th Poetry Postcard Fest yesterday as I was leaving Ian, Jennifer and Gavia Boyden and their home on San Juan Island with my daughter Ella. We had been there to help Ian celebrate his NEA award to translate the poetry of Tibetan poet Tsering Woeser.

(Photo by Ian Boyden)

There were several noteworthy developments for me in this past fest. I abandoned epigraphs to start the poems and instead went with a seriality, or sequential effort. I recorded Sam Hamill a few years ago discussing this impulse, or approach, and just listened again to his words. Hear them here. As to the why of seriality/sequential, hear this. His thoughts are very much in sync with the spontaneous methods that I've alluded to many times before and helpful in understanding the APPF's emphasis on spontaneity.

Sam was a presence during this festival not just in this sequential method, but in the content as well. I mentioned him directly in 18 of my 45 poems and indirectly in a few more. I went to his books for inspiration and could even hear what I pegged to be his own voice coming into one of the poems. I put all of his words from two different books of poetry into wordclouds and wrote a poem based on that and others which used phrases derived from his wordclouds:

 

 

 

 

754. Sam's Rain Mask to Libby Maxey was a good example of Sam's influence coming in through wordclouds. Others coming through the poems included Corita Kent, Georgia O'Keeffe, Kenneth Rexroth. Ted Joans, Emanuel Swedenborg, Basho, Denise Levertov, Leonard Cohen, Ian, Jennifer and Gavia Boyden, Jack Kerouac, Van Morrison, Pat Metheny, Patricia Barber, Ed Varney, Gary Snyder, John Coltrane, Michael McClure, Langston Hughes, Merce Cunningham and Stanley DelGozo. I loved the postcards of his that came to me and Bhakti, as they were casual, authentic postcards that were very immediate and very much out of his own experience written to us. Not an attempt to write great literature, but to simply connect us with his huge heart. Thank you Stanley.

Ella Nelson, August 2018, American Camp, San Juan Island

As Amy Miller did in her fest this year, as reported in her 2018 wrap-up, I composed many poems in clumps and then sat-out a couple of days. You have to get the poems while the mood is right and also strike when there are no six year olds vying with the muse for attention.

Some things that DID get my attention during the "month" included specular reflectance, my older daughter Rebecca's engagement, the (sans U.S.) World Cup and, as always, the domestic terror of the Blue Angels.

That was early in the fest. Once I was clearly past the bar of my required 32 poems (we had an extra poet in the first few groups this year) I was liberated to take time and create collage cards, which was a very satisfying way to end the fest and send bonus cards to some friends and other poets handpicked from groups 2 through 4. I wish I could have done more. Examples include one EARLY collage poem that was a collage front and back. The back was made up of words taken from other sources, like a ransom note and did not arrive in one piece:

One collage went to Ina Roy-Faderman, the driving force behind the 56 Days of August: Poetry Postcards anthology:

The last one went to Aaron Kokorowski:

And then September came. Ugh. Moving "august" up into July seems just fine to me, but moving August into September does not. Maybe it's because September is my birth month. Maybe because I have backpacking to do, which I have done most Septembers since 1995. I don't know, but each year the Poetry Postcard Fest gets better. As Judy Jensen said:

Thanks to Paul and Lana for kicking off the August Poetry Postcard Festival and to Paul, for continuing to steward this creative endeavor from year to year. As a longtime participant, the fest has become a fixed part of the calendar, as established as Easter or Thanksgiving or Christmas. It’s been lovely to see old timers’ names from year to year, and new poets popping up each year. I appreciate all of your poems, postcards, and thoughts here in the Facebook Group and wish you the very best of luck with your poetry. Until next year— Judy Jensen

This is something postcarding during other times of year does not achieve. And an attempt to alleviate the confusion about starting a fest that has the word August in its name, but starts in July, I am considering that word, august, an adjective in this context and not a proper noun. That should solve things.

The countdown clock on the official fest page has been reset to July 4, 2019 at 12:01am PST. This means there are 305 days of the year that are NOT part of the fest, but the PoPo police are not stopping folks from continuing to send bonus cards in the "off-season." I intend to give late-senders some slack and write about cards I got before too long.

Paul E Nelson, August 2018, photo by Bhakti M. Watts.

Thursday and Friday, (5.10 & 5.11.2018) I will be the Methow Valley for events that involve the August Poetry Postcard Fest.  Fest registration starts in less than two months and this is the first fest we've facilitated since the release of 56 Days of August, the poetry postcard anthology.

Judy Kleinberg

Christine Kendall is a Methow Valley resident and veteran postcard fest participant. Working with the Methow Arts Alliance she's set up three events involving me and one other co-editor of 56 Days, Judy Kleinberg:

 

Tod Marshall

 

 

 

And after a day of workshopping at the local high school Friday, we will be part of a reading with Tod Marshall:

DATE: Friday, May 11, 5:30-7:30pm.

LOCATION: Trail’s End Bookstore in Winthrop, WA. CONTACT: Methow Arts, info (@) methowartsalliance (dot) org, 509-997-4004.

As of today I have written 728 postcard poems. I am participating in the 52/52 project, a spin-off from the August Poetry Postcard Fest conceived and produced by Kristin Cleage.

It will probably come up in the workshop, or at the high school workshop, but postcards, for me, are all about composing spontaneously and about seriality. I have been blessed in my poetry life to have access to the minds of master poets, via my radio career and the interviews I was doing for a syndicated radio show, through facilitating events for SPLAB and by being interested in this stance toward poem making. This past Sunday I had the good fortune to interview George Bowering and George Stanley in Vancouver, BC. Their new book is a "tumble book" meaning that one end the book is written by one George and the other by the other George. There is no back! And they talked about writing each other into their poems. Listen as they read poems (or parts of poems) from the new book, including two epistles: (text of two of the poems, here)

George Stanley

George Bowering and his blasphemous t-shirt

George Stanley reads a portion of "3", a poem from West Broadway :27. Click here to listen.

George Bowering reads "Letter to George Stanley." 1:19 Click here to listen.

George Stanley reads "Letter to George Bowering." 1:38. Click here to listen.

That these poets are masters, having taken the job of writing and the study of poetry quite seriously for almost 60 years is important. That they've been part of communities that have transformed the practice of composing poetry (the San Francisco Renaissance in George Stanley's case, TISH in George Bowering's) and very much understand the organic method, is also critical. After 60 years, some of the conclusions these two master poets have come to include the notion of spontaneity and the notion of seriality. How to address a subject that has great importance to you, but not worry about being definitive, but knowing that you can take further stabs at attempting to articulate (or transcribe from whatever outside source) exactly what is happening? Sam Hamill talked about a "provisional conclusion" and he understood the power of the serial method as well. I hope the folks in the Methow Valley get some sense of the power I intuit in spontaneous composition and serial form.

An August Poetry Postcard from 2015 featuring yet another photo of mine from 2014, this one from the Skokomish Rez, I love the allusion to the American Indian Movement and hope President Obama will finally pardon Leonard Peltier. But the poem is more about apprehending the moment, the eternal moment. Is it because I am getting older that this is more important to me? (For audio, click here.)

Poem #2 in the 2015 August Poetry Postcard Fest. (Audio here.)

Joanne Kyger

This is the first "official" poetry postcard of mine for 2015, year 9. I sent out one "practice card" to someone from last year's list, but THIS year I decided to use Joanne Kyger's new book On Time as a source of epigraphs. I am getting so much out of her work which owes much to Philip Whalen, whose biography I am also reading, slowly, this month. The combination of Buddhism, politics and snark are unparalleled in Kyger's work and, approaching 80, she has been at it for about 60 years. I bet she does not like being reminded of this but it's better than the alternative, right? It is not yet September, but this card was sent the on the first day of the fest, when the early registrants (Group 1) had signed up and gotten their list for this year's fest, so off we go to starting to post all of these.

https://paulenelson.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/506.-Curved-Projections.mp3

I was taking my corridor walk June 23, 2015, and was stunned by the reflection of the sun on wavelets of Lake Washington. I tried to get a decent video capture of the phenomenon (after looking at a Seagull I thought was a Blue Heron) and you get some idea from that. I remember Beaver Chief talking about how he called staring at water, whether it be a river or lake, as "Indian Meditation." A meditative moment, til the car comes and how loud it is! But the experience paved the way for a postcard. Since the 2015 list won't get started for another ten days or so (from the day I wrote the poem), I just went to last year's list. Was planning to use Joanne Kyger's work for my 2015 postcards (and still am) but could not find On Time, her new book, so used the next book I am reading, an old selected of Daphne Marlatt's. More on her before too long.

https://paulenelson.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/20150623_094422-.mp4

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Jimi Hendrix Stamp

WooHoo! The last 2014 August Poetry Postcard! (See all here.) And with only 221 days until the next call goes out. Hawthorn Presence uses an image I took on my cellphone of the house Denise Levertov lived in, images of my visit with Charles Potts in Walla Walla and one smudge from a Hawthorn berry I put in my pocket while Charles took Mer, Ella and I up to a ridge on the back 750 to see his horses and a 360 view that included Black Snake Ridge.

Hear it here.

Thanks for suffering through all these poems. I hope you'll consider participating in the 9th year of the postcard fest in Summer 2015. I'd love to publish a book with some of the best of these poems with poets from all over the world who've participated in one of these fests. Maybe in time for year ten in 2016?