Noir Genius: Weldon Kees and Jorge Luis Borges

Tomorrow, as night descends on Boyle Heights, I'll be reading a few poems by noir genius Weldon Kees (who should be more famous for his poetry rather than his presumed suicide). I'm a mere accessory to this crime. The key suspects are my fellow readers listed below:

What: Noir Genius: Weldon Kees and Jorge Luis Borges

Join Dana Gioia, Robert Mezey, Jamie FitzGerald, Mariano Zaro, and Lou Matthews for a discussion on the genius of Weldon Kees and Jorge Luis Borges.

When: Tuesday, Nov. 1, 7 - 8:30pm

Location: Mariachi Plaza, Mariachi Plaza Gold Line Station (1st / Boyle), near Libros Schmibros Bookshop and Lending Library (I believe this is outdoors so bring a jacket)

Another great opportunity to paint the town noir includes my friend, fiction writer Cheryl Klein, along with some other fantastic writers/performers:

What: Big Noir Open Reading—with Features

When: Sunday, Nov. 6, 3-5 p.m.

Who: Cheryl Klein, Pam Ward, Mike Sonksen

Where: Gemini Manor, 1341 N. Mariposa Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90027

I hope you'll join us at one or both of these events!

For more on Night and the City: L.A. Noir in Poetry, Fiction and Film, see the Los Angeles Poetry Festival brochure.

Insurmountable Challenges

Dreams over the past week have been full of insurmountable challenges. I was at the gym with some glamorous LA ladies. We were in the locker room getting ready to go, but one of the women had left her quadruplet babies behind. I volunteered to take them home with me. But then I had to face the reality--how was I going to manage quadruplets, along with my own baby girl? How was I going to fit all those car seats into my car?

Wasps

I was on the road overlooking Makapuu, except it was more a walking path than a road, and I found a rock that looked like Buddha on its convex side and was filled with crystal formations on the hollow innerside. Then there was a baby boy who had a frighteningly large wasp on his face--long yellow body with long white wings. The insect on the baby caused me panic, and soon the air was filled with them--wasps like bomber planes zooming around us.

April 17: She Walks in Beauty Reading in Seattle

Please join me this Sunday for a poetry reading I've curated on behalf of Poets & Writers. As a good friend of mine put it: It will be sweet and deep.

Details:
Poets & Writers, Barnes & Noble, and Hyperion/Voice celebrate National Poetry Month with a series of readings inspired by the new anthology She Walks in Beauty: A Woman's Journey Through Poems. The Seattle reading features a tremendous lineup with Kathleen Flenniken, Jourdan Imani Keith, Rebecca Loudon, Colleen J. McElroy, and Susan Rich.

April 17, 7 PM Barnes & Noble, 2675 Northeast University Village Street. For information about this and other related readings, visit pw.org/poetrymonth.

About the readers:

Kathleen Flenniken’s first book, Famous, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was named a Notable Book by the American Library Association and a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her second collection, Plume, has been selected by Linda Bierds for the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series, and will be published by University of Washington Press in Spring 2012. Flenniken teaches poetry with Writers in the Schools, Jack Straw, and other arts agencies, and she is a co-editor of Floating Bridge Press, a poetry press dedicated to Washington State Poets.

Jourdan Keith, a Hedgebrook alumna, is the City of Seattle ’s 2006-2007 Seattle Poet Populist Emeritus. Her awards include the City of Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs in 2010 for Coyote Autumn and 2004 for the play and solo performance of “The Uterine Files.” An excerpt from her memoir Coyote Autumn is included in the anthology Something to Declare (University of Wisconsin Press). She is the Founder and Director of Urban Wilderness Project, “restoring communities, culture and the environment” by leading storytelling, restoration and wilderness programs rooted in social change.
 
Rebecca Loudon's most recent collection of poetry is Cadaver Dogs from No Tell Books. She is currently working on Queer Wing-ed, an exploration of the inner life of artist Henry Darger. Queer Wing-ed will be published by Leafe Press in London and the United States. Rebecca is a professional musician and teaches violin lessons to children.

Colleen J. McElroy is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington. She was Editor-in-chief of the Seattle Review from 1995-2006. Her most recent collection of poems, Sleeping with the Moon (2007), received a 2008 PEN/Oakland National Literary Award. She is also a writer of creative non-fiction and her latest collections include: A Long Way from St. Louie (travel memoirs), and Over the Lip of the World: Among the Storytellers of Madagascar (finalist in the 2000 PEN USA Research-based Creative Nonfiction category). McElroy is the recipient of the Before Columbus American Book Award, two Fulbright Fellowships, two NEA Fellowships, a DuPont Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Fellowship. Her next collection, Here I Throw Down My Heart, is scheduled to be published by The University of Pittsburgh Press in 2012.

Susan Rich is the author of three collections of poetry, The Alchemist’s Kitchen (2010) a current finalist for ForeWord’s Poetry Book of the Year Award, Cures Include Travel (2006), and The Cartographer’s Tongue (2000) which won the PEN USA Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared in journals such as The Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review, and Poetry International.

Some Thoughts on Reading Poetry

I was so pleased last month when the book group I'm in voted to read its first collection of poems, The Mansion of Happiness by Robin Ekiss. I promised them I'd put together a few tips on how to read poetry, even though the idea of telling someone how to read poetry is a dangerous thing. So, I decided to write simply about how I approach the reading of poetry. And this is what I came up with:

Here are a few thoughts on reading poetry, which come from personal experience. I can't promise these comments will make reading poetry any better for you, but if you're feeling like you don't know where to begin, they might help you find a jumping off point.

1. I like to flip through the book without reading to see the shape of the poems ahead of me. Seeing whether the poems are long or short, dense or spare, evenly structured or scattered across the page helps me to mentally prepare for reading.

2. I also scan the table of contents, looking at how the book is structured (in parts, chapters, if there is a conceptual element to the structure). This also gives me a chance to see if there are any titles that attract me.

3. Poets put thought into what order their poems appear, but it doesn't mean that one has to read the collection as if it were a story - from beginning to end. It can be pleasurable, especially at first, to read at random.

4. I try not to get too hung up on understanding every poem. I know there will be poems that reward me right away and others that seem inaccessible, even troublesome, to deal with. It's okay to move on from the more difficult ones. I know I can always go back to them later when I have a better grasp of the work.

5. I've had the experience many times of reading a poem and not registering a thing. Then, on the second or third read or the next day or the next year, the meaning of the poem makes itself known to me. Our experience as readers is mysterious. For whatever reason (mood, fatigue, ADD), some poems won't open right away. It can take our subconscious mind time to make sense of all the elements. This is one of the keys of reading poetry - to take your time.

6. I have found pleasure in the slowness of reading poetry. Others might find the level of concentration and focus needed to get through a book of poems a drag, but to me the space of a poem is a respite from the mad swirl of everyday life. Each poem is like a spell or a sacrament. Spells work magic, and a sacrament is a means of divine grace.

7. In poetry, feeling, emotion, action and meaning are condensed into precise images, words, sounds, shapes and rhythms. When reading a collection, I let the poems and images pile up in my mind. It's only after a time that they begin to make sense in relation to one another, like constellations in the sky.

8. "...poems are endlessly interpretable. There is always something about them that evades the understanding, and I have tried to remain aware of that, as Paul Valéry has put it, 'The power of verse is derived from an indefinable harmony between what it says and what it is. Indefinable is essential to the definition.'" - Edward Hirsch, from How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry

Interstates Gallery Opening

Sporadic though this blog may be, I don't want it to just be a sporadic list of literary events I take part in, so I promise sometime after this post to include something non-Jamie-event-related. But for now...

I was invited by writer and curator Miah Jeffra to take part in a collaboration between visual artists and writers on the theme "Los Angeles." Each writer submitted a piece which was given to a visual artist, who then responded to the written work in their own way. I always love it when there is a crossover between artistic disciplines, so am excited to see the interplay between words and visual images.

When: Friday, March 26 at 7 p.m.
Where: TempoRoyale, 2619 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles
What: Exhibit and Reading

Robinson Jeffers: Poetry and Place

This weekend should be great and wonderful and long because it's already started and it's only Thursday. Since I suddenly have all this extra time and no freelance work (!!!), it will be a poetry weekend of revision, submission and reading.

On Saturday, October 10, at 4 p.m, at El Alisal/Lummis Home (200 E Ave 43, Los Angeles, CA 90031), I will be taking part in a tribute to the California poet Robinson Jeffers. The featured readers are Suzanne Lummis, Cecilia Woloch, Charles Harper Webb and actress Dale Raoul (who happens to play a part in the HBO series "True Blood"). The poets will read a combination of their own poems and the poems of Jeffers. I will read just one of each.


In 2006, when I visited the poet's home, Tor House, I experienced a kind of poetic baptism. I had not read anything by Jeffers, but I had a clear memory of seeing his long-lined poems in a book that Wanda Coleman showed to me (that he is one of her beloved poets might at first come as a surprise, but if you've ever heard her read, it's not so hard to make the connection). The visit to Tor House cured me of my ignorance.

We were received by a gentle man with a longish black beard, who guided us through the home, garden and up to the top of the stone tower the poet built for his wife, all the while reciting poems that Jeffers had written there.

Jeffers and his wife had dreamed of moving to the English coast, but WWI put those plans to rest. Instead, they chose the Carmel coast, where they would live until their dying day. Now the area around Tor House is packed to the gills with million dollar homes, but the integrity and simplicity of Tor House remains. It's possible to imagine what it must have been like for Jeffers and his wife Una to settle there--the wild beauty, rocky cliffs, ocean blasts, looming mountain and birds of prey he loved so well.

For Jeffers, the house was a labor of love. Everywhere in and around it you can sense his presence. The place has a feeling of being lived in, loved in and loved (and it was). Next to the main house stands Hawk Tower, which Jeffers single-handedly built for his wife. Throughout the home there are personal details: a special stone set into a doorway, a favorite line from a poem engraved onto a ceiling beam. Outside in the garden, we visited the grave of Haig, the family's beloved bulldog, after whom Jeffer's penned the heartbreaking, "The House-Dog's Grave."

Place and poetry. Poetry and place. These two are so often married.

For me, Jeffers is almost a mythic figure. He did what I dream of... I often wonder: Is there no place left like this? At times, his poetry can be heavy-handed, but the solidness of it and its seriousness, and its lack of frills, is often the touchstone I need as a poet to set me back on track. His is the kind of poetry you want to stay up late at night reading in bed with your lover while drinking red wine. It's gratifying to see that there is a sort of Jeffers Renaissance taking place (Jeffers was among the minority who were opposed to US participation in WWII, after which his popularity as a poet declined and never recovered). One indication of this renewed interest is that his poetry was selected to be part of the NEA's The Big Read (Saturday's reading is an offshoot of this project). Hopefully, anthologists everywhere will begin to include his work in their hunky books, where it rightly belongs.

On Saturday, I'm thinking of reading "Birds," since it's less famous and goes wild with alliterative music. But I'm also considering "To the Rock that will be a Cornerstone of the House," to which my poem has a thematic connection. Either way, it will be a great day at El Alisal, another stone structure that will recall the beauty of Jeffers' Tor House.