GHAZAL

Like marriage, it’s murder with finesse. 

An auto dismantling yard. 

Last night’s storm blew in a fish. 

I never thought of that place between my legs, 

a place where men try to crawl back into.

A warm inlet, an indentation along the creek 

where the salmon come to spawn.

A friend once told me he couldn’t wait, 

so they coupled in the rain, shoulder 

to shoulder with the dead, 

as the townfolk of Cape Cod passed by. 

Ghost shrimp pack the mudflats in Home Bay, 

and crawl out during the full moon. 

At the Hesemeyer’s garage at dawn, 

a row of glazed chickens patiently 

wait for their bronze legs 

to be glued on, so they can be shipped to market. 

Fog lifts momentarily, and the Palisades poke through. 

As we hobble up the slope, I am reminded of home. 

The guttural snore of trucks 

over Mount St. Helena shatters the silence. 

January, 1982 added 2020

Napa workshop with Michael, or Philip Dow? 

Write a ghazal, five separate couplets to make a complete poem.

Letter to the Editor, Helen Ingersoll CPITS at Analy HS

PINNACLES

Pinnacles shrouded in mist-filled trees, 

A lonely call echoes off cliffs, 

leaves suckling on fog. 

I no longer dream of sun and sky, 

water floats through the trees 

and I can taste darkness on my tongue.

1/11/1982

Backroads freewrite

Mirrored relief of backroads running at right angles to the sun. Flat sky, storm on the horizon. Twin white lines (a vanishing point) of filament telegraphing into the distance. Intersecting, muted squares and diagonals of wavering green, an endless expense of prairie burning up the road, flattening the sky, taking me with it.

1/11/1982

Interview with Katharine Harer, Statewide Coodinator, CPITS

SONOMA COUNTY STUMP 

January 7-14, 1982 
Artists cannot deal with the simple business side of life including filling out forms, earning a living, and relating normally to people around them, Fact or fiction? How many people buy the myth?

Poet Katharine Harer,  Sebastopol resident and native of the Bay Area, is the Statewide Coordinator for California Poets-in-the-Schools, and she very much disproves the myth that all artists are incapable of surviving in the 20th century.

In an interview, she debunks the myth entirely. She began teaching in Poets-in-the-Schools in 1978 and rapidly moved forward into the position of Office Administrator; in 1981, she was nominated the Statewide Coordinator for the entire program.

CPITS had its beginnings at San Francisco State University in 1964 and was spawned out of a writing program called the Pegasus

California Poets-in-the-Schools (CPITS) is a statewide community-based Artists-in-Schools (AIS) program jointly sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council, and is the only AIS program in the country which is fully administered by practicing poets. 

CPITS is the largest writers-in-schools program in the US and, as of last year, there were 130 poets teaching in the program in 220 schools in 21 regions of the state. Poets work directly with 19, 000 kids, kindergarten through 12th grade, in workshops lasting anywhere from 5 days to the whole school year. 

CPITS had its beginnings at San Francisco State University in 1964 and was spawned out of a writing program called the Pegasus Project. Similar to the Youth-in-Arts program in Marin County, CPITS brought established published poets into the schools to give readings at assemblies and special events. In 1971 the poets started going into the classrooms to actually teach children their craft. The results were astounding.

There was almost a 100% positive response: everyone wrote poems, and everyone could see the value of one another's poetic vision. Not only that, kids began to do better in other school activities. An enhanced reading and writing enrichment program, Poets-in-the-Schools has consistantly proven itself to be an important part of the school curriculum.

CPITS is especially active in Sonoma County, which has been dubbed a "hot-bed of activity, " due to Area Coordinator Lee Perron and the incredible energies of the local poets.

When asked what it's like to work for CPITS, Katharine Harer said, "I love my job because I not only believe in the program (bringing poetry to the kids) but the people I work for are creative and exciting. We are making it possible for poets to work at what they believe in, to do what they love to do.

Poets don't have to starve, bes, pump as or bus dishes…There’s a crazy kind of dignity that comes from walking into a school and having everyone know who you are— “Oh, you're the poet!'—and want you in their school. "

Maureen Hurley: In a recent article I wrote, Education: Back to Basics, Art as the 4th R" with Lee Perron (see Dec. 3-10, 1981 of the Stump), two of the themes I was concerned with were one's role as an artist, and the role of being a coordinator. How do artists function in the 20th century, and how does an artist deal with the myth of being incompetent and "flakey?"

Katharine Harer: I think a lot of poets in the program are disproving that. There’s such a bad reputation about artists, which is also part of the positive, romantic reputation of being an artist. aura that surrounds an artist, especially a poet, is that you can't deal with the world, that you re too cosmic, that you’re too involved in your neuroses. You’re too out of it. You can't do  paperwork, etc. It’s a myth. Last year poets raised a total of $225,000. That's money raised in the communities which includes private foundation grants and community money—that's an incredible statement about what we're able to do.

MH: Yes, how those flakes are hustling..

KH: That's right! I'm not saying there's something intrinsically great about being able to handle paper-work, but how do you live without being aware of some of those realities?

MH: A lot of poets today wind up in university situations but jobs there are limited. I think CPITS allows poets to continue being poets and still survive financially, which is a challenge, isn't it?

KH: It's a challenge to say you're not a technician in the schools, a mechanic who goes in to turn the right levers and the right screws. You're a poet. Hopefully  you're publishing and sharing your work in the community.

MH: How do you deal with people who are technicians? I mean, there are great poets who can't teach and great teachers who are not artists.

KH: By encouraging them to continue to write and publish their work. I think a lot of us forget as we deal with all kinds of administrative and functional aspects of the CPITS program that we can never forget we're poets.

The Sonoma County group is very active. You put on readings for the communities. I think it's essential to keep reading the poems, and sharing the work.

MH: I've always felt that being a poet is a full time occupation, and being a poet-teacher in CPITS is also a full time occupation. You we’re saying earlier, it’s a challenge to stay a poet, with the two together. We're working double time as compared to most people, and we've got to somehow intertwine the two…

KH: yes, but somehow the one really spirals the other. Once I was a cocktail waitress and I thought I was going to write great cocktail waitress poems from this experience and it didn't happen. I think it's because I was so exhausted spiritually, because the job didn't give me much energy. A part of me feels that it's important—it's dignifying to work, and that was real work. I was in the union and working my ass off. Whereas when I teach, I'm so excited about poetry that I want to write. I want to be in the process of writing. In a way, we're working morè, but it's a self stimulating cycle.

MH: What about being with the kids and watching the creative process unfold?

KH: Part of the strength and dynamism of what we do in the classroom is not what gets down on a piece of pap-er, but our presence as a poet. I'm a poet. This is what I do. I get up in the morning and write poetry. Wanna see my notebook? I want to show them the process. It's messy. There are doodles and crossouts in it. If we can extend that to other textures and possibilities, like bringing in paintings, music, drama, mime, it enriches their sense of what expression is all about. I think that poets. are in the schools because kids need to be guided toward that poetic part of themselves just like adults do.

Adults are more rigid. They've been pushing words on paper for so long that they're really stuck on structures. What we're trying to do is to open the structures up. So, when kids write, because they're newer to language, they can open up much faster.

MH: That's what I really get a buzz from. Seeing them opening up the structure and seeing my own writing change so dramatically. When I'm writing in the workshops, that brings the whole process back home for me.

KH: You go back to your own work and realize you're stuck on structure too. I wanted to talk about why poetry is such an important medium for the expression of language with kids. Why poetry? Why not essays? Why not stories or sentences? There's a real interesting difference between a sentence and what we call in poetry, the line.

In poetry the line can be any length. It can be one word or one syllable. Or it can be twenty words strung together. The difference has to do with syntax, punctuation, length, and visibility. It's all those open structures that poetry offers compared to the closed structure of the sentence. When we're teaching poetry in the classroom, we're not only teaching competence or familiarity or excitement with language, which, of course, is essential, but we're also teaching a way of thinking, a way of thought which is right brain—non-linear circular thought. A process of opening up your mind to accept all kinds of possibilities. You're teaching a process of thought, and all those processes affect the way kids would approach any task in school.

Think of physics—all the things they discovered by mind leaping. That's what poetry is, leaps. What we're trying to do is to help the student learn the process of discovery. In poetry there are no right answers. In the process of writing, we discover we are independent thinkers.

For more information on Poets-in-the-Schools, contact Area Coordinator for Lake, Napa and Sonoma Counties, Lee Perron, 9312 Champs, Forestville, or call (707) 887-7850.

Fragment- horses

Dust curls around the horses’ hooves in small puffs, reminding me of wood fires. A horse snorts, oiled leather groans. Water tumbles over stones like a child’s laughter. The horses pull at the sparse dry grasses, keeping an eye out for the next tuft. A rib, bleached pale by the succession of suns, records a passage of time. A woodpecker breaks the arid silence with a gentle knocking. In the distance, thundering grasses.

An empty can rattles across Main Street. The dog, half-buried in the trash, doesn’t hear me coming. I slip in and hide between the wall and doorway. The brick leaves a ragged imprint in my hand.

11/82? Added 2020

LOOK HOW HE STANDS THERE

LOOK HOW HE STANDS THERE

Look how he stands there, my friend
looking the world like James Joyce
In his vest, Joyce-dapper.
Joyce would never appear in the streets of Dublin.
dressed in a red corduroy vest 

with nine buttonholes
and three buttons, two at the breast
one stomach
all snug on his bare frame.
It must be the glasses and the hungry stance
that frames them both together in my eye.
Two incongruous writers who would never meet.
My friend goes to London 

to write poems to animals in cages.

no date 1982?

added 2/2017

on the same page as Best Revenge
I think it was an in-class poem, if so, then Guerneville School
corde du roi 

THE BEST REVENGE

THE BEST REVENGE

   The best revenge of all is living well

      —Spanish proverb

What I've discovered
is that reality is stranger than fiction.
Real life is fiction.
Truth is a stranger to fiction
when we write truthfully
from the heart.
To write about truth

is the best revenge of all.

no date 1982?

added 2/2017
I think this was in class writing, if so, then Guerneville School, June

LOOK HOW HE STANDS THERE

Look how he stands there, my friend
looking the world like James Joyce
In his vest, Joyce-dapper.
Joyce would never appear in the streets of Dublin.
dressed in a red corduroy vest 

with nine buttonholes
and three buttons, two at the breast
one stomach
all snug on his bare frame.
It must be the glasses and the hungry stance
that frames them both together in my eye.
Two incongruous writers who would never meet.
My friend goes to London 

to write poems to animals in cages.

no date 1982?

added 2/2017

FENUCCIO, II

FENUCCIO, II

(enroute to a CPITS poetry meeting)

1. I awoke this morning thinking of my mother 's 
black cat, Cantinflas who loved to swim in the tub.

On Mission & 18th, we pass a Doggie Diner,

Another Doggie points a forlorn nose up Army & Mission,

What luck, seeing two Doggie Diners in one day.

When she moved, the cat ran away.  No bathtub. In the '5Os,

everyone complained about the tacky Doggie Diners.

Today, artists are dying to save them.

We pass the abandoned Hamm's Brewery.
I don't have the nerve to tell my poet friends
my mother lives in one of those steel vats. 

She's a beatnik mother to addicts
and punkrockers who steal her blind.

I don't tell them she never had time to mother me. 
Or that there are no windows in the vats. Soul windows.

She can't see how the mountains slant toward the sky,

how resting clouds form right angles after rain.

The wet street glistens like fungus on rotten logs.

The pavement in the middle of each lane 
is dry from the heat of cars, a rainy conundrum.

My traveling companions drone on about Rajneesh,

& the woman who was raped while the movie was filmed,

everyone asking her how she felt. They wanted her 
experience as if it was something holy and profound.

2. Fennel is one of California's toughest invaders.

Along cement cracks and in abandoned lots

its feathery jeweled plumes glisten after rain.

I sit outside Carol Lee Sanchez's home in Bernal Heights, 
and watch a snail maneuver along a broken curbstone, 
where the phrase: THE STAR SPANGLE  is etched. 

When the snail reaches the granite precipice

where the missing "D" should be, he stops 
and waves his eyestalks in wild circles.

From the lot, I pluck white chrysanthemums 
for my birth month, soon I will be 30.

I pluck rosemary from an abandoned garden plot,
and fennel plumes, the sharp odor of petrichor 
and Ouzo assaults my senses, scours the air.

As we write, a Japanese poet says
 my feet hurt because of my heart.

I mutter under my breath, I'm so tired 
of living and no one hears me. Typical. 
Does every suicide want a rebuttal? 

Then, my mother has many coming.

 I'm sick of hearing the poets drone on about 
their spiritual gurus, Krishnamurti and Rajneesh, 
and I hate the color orange.

3. Shards of amber glass collect pools of water.

Only dogs are brave enough to walk barefoot in the city.

From rooftops, pigeons flap their wings like white sheets.

Do they have genetic memory of their ancestral home

the Italian sea cliffs? Fenuccio, Italian for fennel;

Fenuccio's on Broadway; transvestitsm; liquorice; anise;

underneath it all, it's all the same thing.

The soft earth slips under my feet.

I need to take off my shoes for grounding.

Sitting on curbstone overlooking a sea of houses,

I uncurl my feet like a snail from its shell.

These girders anchor my breasts to this continent.

1/82
10/23/15

Folklore fragments from my grandmother on the Sullivans

Folklore fragments from my grandmother, Jennie Walsh Reilly, collected in Forest Knolls, 1982

Death Superstition

The pictures fell off the wall and the glass broke. (Death.) All the boys— I’m getting superstitious. Ricky is already gone. There is still David, Kevin, and Guy. All those wars.

Before the English came, keening rituals
The voices moved up the hill. The women were crying when grandfather died. All week long it went on. We got used to it. All around his bed the birds singing, singing for Old Donough Sullivan Beare, he was the last of the clan.

The Sullivan Babe, keening ritual
I was facing the window, looking out, and I heard the voice of a woman crying, that was the banshee, it means fairywoman. The voice traveled from one row of trees to the next, and all along, down the houses, the Sullivan babe had died. It was the Rh factor, I think. I don’t know how many they had lost. It was an ongoing grief with no end in sight.

Sullivan Men, bog men and bog butter, and why you need to wash linen.
The Sullivan men were all so tall, square shoulder and handsome, my niece was married in England and the Sullivans standing beside her were all related. The isolated peninsula across the bay was known as the bear place. The boys looked for the cave where the bear skeleton was. Only the Bantry Sullivans are O Sullivan Bear. There was once a real bear. The skeleton is in the Irish museum that belonged to an earlier era. A huge skeleton of a man was found with it—when I was growing up. He was nearly 8 feet tall, you see, the bog preserved him. They used a special type of basket, a firkin and wrapped him up in linen. Linen absorbs the moisture. A firkin of butter was so many pounds worth – they took it into town. They used to sink the butter into the bogs for years. Flax grows on wet ground. That’s why you have to wash your linen tablecloths, to keep them alive.

Early childhood memories, teaching notes, Westside school

From my CPITS teaching notes. don’t know if I was teaching the workshop or Lee Perron was, but my boyfriend Edwin Drummond was there, which leads me to believe it was me teaching. Or perhaps, Lee and I were co-teaching. Personification, early childhood memory.

The first thing I remember was crawling in the grass. I opened up my hand and there was a leaf. A —student from Westside school fifth grade.

I was walking down a circular staircase, lost my balance, and fell. I remember my head hitting the stairs and my vision blurring as my head struck each step. I didn’t have any word for pain so I didn’t feel it. I remember seeing the walls in the sky bounce around. —Maureen Hurley.

I was chasing my brother down a long, circular stairway case on Cape Cod. We came around the corner, and I saw my father on the landing, putting trash into a wastebasket. There was a lightbulb on over his head. My father looked up at me, and smiled. —Lee Perron

 I was two years old. I was at the ocean and a shiny glistening star was floating in the water. I went to pick it up. The water was deep, and I walked up to my chest and brought it to my mother. She screamed. It was a jellyfish. —Edwin Drummond

I was standing on a stonewall. I was waving goodbye to my sisters as she was going to school. Suddenly, I’m crying, my mother picks me up, takes me inside and takes off my shoe, four wasps crawl out. —No name. The teacher?

SURVEYOR’S MARK

This one beside me, 

this straight road 

is a surveyor’s mark, 

a line-up, a painting

held by invisible threads. 

It is straightforward, 

no hidden surprises, 

it’s level, above board, 

predictable, though odd. 

Neither a prime, nor a composite 

nor a compound number, 

its slender surface,

a vanishing point

perspective.

At the end is a period, 

the beginning, or the end.

1982 no date.

From a Lynn Watson workshop, I was training her.

WHAT THE SCHOLIAST SAID:

Zara Altair said write a poem without naming it. Use juxtaposition. Write about how a chrysanthemum in bloom is like art or ants on fire.

WHAT THE SCHOLIAST SAID:

Regard the chrysanthemum
stalks, flat on the ground, 

flowers, twisting the tips 

past the roof shadow.

The spent bud

a honeycomb, 

a hornet’s nest, 

significance once as a pattern, 

but a theory of progress? 

A constant explosion 

of shapes, 

quiet, fringed, yellow, 

burning, and the bush, 

utterly consumed

No date 1982

random fragments culled from scraps of paper, 1982-84

Dennis Banks and Abby Hoffman 

are the only real heroes left.

Do you remember when you realized 

you were going to die?

The oppressor and the oppressed

Their women pass time
pressing strawberries between their thighs
The oppressor is always "they"
They have nothing better to do 

than to watch their wives sitting at home 

squashing strawberries between their thighs. 

No strawberry sunday at the fountain

We're all shiksas looking for home

Nuptial

I bet you're so perfect 

you don't even get junk mail.

Primal

As Richard plays the piano late at night
Coastal fog drips from pine trees 

a morose foghorn sounds in the distance
Do we respond to those notes 

the sounds we heard as children
What makes us respond to music?
Certain chords touching off the coastal fog 

dripping off Presidio Pines 

and the forlorn cutting the fog 

1984

When his hand grazes on my body 

reality and memory cease 

and all there is is the moment.
What I want to tell the fish 

rolling in my bed at night 

is that none of us can crawl back 

to that place called home 

no matter what coast we seek.

And the robins sings of smashed mates 

the feathered triumph of my VW 

mercilessly breaking the bondage of robins 

April 1984

I am as innocent as I can afford to be – Howard Hart

I wish bad poems were more like clay pots 

slumped at the wheel
Instead they're fired with air bubbles 

trapped within the clay wall 

and they explode in the kiln 

or break with ease leaving us 

to piece them back together, 

our hands sticky with glue. 

No date I'm guessing 1984

The sand shifting of time
This marriage of poetry and art
The infant weaving the woman's hourglass
The band bird is the color of white horses
I cover my eyes and speak
I cover my ears to see
I cover my mouth to love
My breast is laid bare 

this clothing gathers them in.

I have been running for more than a year 

in the act of running the rabbit legs lengthen

the ears elongate the ratio between ear and hind foot 

measures the distance of fear.

Billowing loose from my shoulders 

the hair at the nape of my neck

gives me chills, like the dead come to visit.

All words are suspect
prepubescent poetic intention 

covering the eye, the ear
Aural intentions of the throat
The ancient sea voice whispering in my ear
Reminding me the shape of time 

is woman shaped. 

And I have hands to turn the glass 

on its side 

looking really looking into another's eyes 

for the first time. 

And as I gather up  my infant body 

covering the exposed flesh along the belly 

where the outgrown clothes pull apart 

revealing the darkness underneath 

in fetal defiance my knees are raised to my chin 

as I survey that mouth I want to kiss again and again

Our bodies never forget the touch of old lovers


After the honeymoon

I come away from the conference feeling both old – 

the wasted time floundering on mnemonic chores 

and doing that the last stages of my infancy

growing pains anchoring the honeymoon 

is this another poem about about writing 

how I bend over while driving to retrieve my hat 

and the feathers licking my fingers greedily 

as the car swerved into oncoming traffic
We are alive for such a short time 

and the unfinished poems remind us 

of the sand sifting through the hourglass 

in the shape of a woman's body
Yet another year passes. 

that odor of tar weed and skunk, 

the aging yellow edges of blank paper, 

wanting to slip off the cliff 

a feeling that lasts longer than the flight of poetry.

7/82  Napa Poetry Conference


Coyotes

Five coyotes emerge out of darkness, 

with strange square jaws with herbivore's teeth. 

The coyote spoke to me but I couldn't understand—

it was a coyote dream. What did the coyote say?

added 9/2016

revised a bit as they don't make a lot of sense.