Notes from California Poets in the Schools Symposium

San Francisco Poet Laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin is our keynote speaker. Hopefully this workshop will be better than the May Poets & Writers workshop. The last workshop was random ramblings, but he sure has raked up the accolades and awards. I read with him during the 2019 Petaluma Poetry Walk. Though I didn't care for his work, I am amazed by the way he speaks his poems, as if extemporaneously off the top of his head. But people say that's how the poems are written. He must have an eidetic memory. 

Tongo talks about arts disciplines, gives us a caveat, offers an apology, or a disclaimer. His thoughts are pretty fluid, but he comes across as almost cray-cray with his rambling dialogue. I am trying hard not to bail. But I really don't want to be here. Yet the CPITS conference is always one of the highlights of my year. This is our second virtual conference. Last year was amazing. 

Tongo talks about how the critical dialogue with yourself is important. Inner and outer dialogues. Let’s see if I can glean something. The problem is, he reminds me too much of my mother when she rambled on, street crazy—and yet here we are sitting at his feet, a gaggle of older white women layering accolades on him, saying Woo. Brilliant, etc. I hold my tongue.

Is he brilliant, or merely rambling all over the place? He works extemporaneously, off the top of his head, which I dislike. I want to have a sense of where we are going. The talking head approach to poetry doesn’t work for me. He said, Poetry is outside of real time and communication. OK I can relate to that.

Everyone is hunting for pearls. 

I am out chasing swine who've escaped again. 

Actually they are my Shetland ponies, 

who still haunt in my dreams 50 year s later, 

the consummate escape artists. 

Decades after they died, 

they still run through the streets of my dreams.

Tongo holds up a sharpie and says it’s a flame. OK. His hand is his mind. And I can’t see past it. Expanded the mind and look at the colors. OK, how we see or perceive the world. He talks about where he finds poetry. My frustration is growing. I need a fucking translation from English to English. We are oil and water: is it my inability to be here now, ADD? Am I unable to glean anything from his rambling due to an artifact of age? Race? Gender? I am so irritated. The clashing of styles for sure.

A part of him is charming, he is somewhat self-deprecating so I can glean that he’s somewhat uncomfortable with it all, uses his ego versus rambling narrative. The problem is, I find the rambling male narrative less than interesting on a good day. I think he is unclear on the collective expertise in poetry in this group. He doesn't know his audience. Assumes we know so little, yet presumes so much. 

Poetry is the intersection of backstory, the relationship between order and chaos. The way they cradle each other.

1. Details tell you most about the subject. 

2. He mentions the use of dialogue. I switch the Zoom screen to transcript mode so that I could follow along, but, HA! I didn’t write anything down, so I completely missed the point. Ironic, that. My dyslexia is turning me into a hangry Komodo dragon.

3. He says to zoom in on something. The specific, the journey to your voice. Zoom out again. The line is a synthesis both the smaller and bigger picture. I think of David Meltzer's adage, poetry is where the inside and outside worlds collide.

He talks about the pentatonic scale, asks what is the Blues note? What do you see that no one else sees? Oh, he’s a musician, this explains so much. I am still not writing, there’s still not enough writing time. Dammit. He gives us several prewriting prompts. It's taking far too long to get to the center of things. Timing is off.

His writing prompt is to imagine that your shadow shows knows more about you than you do. He asks, what would it look like? 

Rain, we are praying for it to come, 

even at this late date. 

We are officially enrolled in fire season mode 

simultaneously all at once. 

 A storm is stalled over Lake County. 

Hopefully there won’t be 9000 more lightning strikes, 

9000 bodhisattvas from hell 

grilled the land bacon crispy last year.

Blue, the sky is leaden, 

the chickens discuss the weather, 

not one hen is brooding this year. 

Too tumultuous.

Last week the bobcat almost carried off Big Boy, 

so the roosters are off their game. 

There’s a little chance of blue skies today, 

but we need all the moisture we can get. 

Resilient creatures, they scratch the earth. 

The progress of their lives is measured in seeds and bugs.

I think of how we’ve adapted to things, 

unfathomable in times past. 

I found myself straddling two worlds, 

teaching in a virtual world, 

and teaching in person. 

Each has its drawbacks, each has its strengths.

Diaspora, 

my family is part of a larger diaspora 

and it is hard to listen to Tongo’s rendition of history. 

Yes, he makes valid points, but if one's diaspora’s history is razed 

for the sake of another, we’re back to the same age-old problem. 

Swept under the rug.

He tosses in some YouTube.

I really don’t want to write about it.

as it has become a visual soundbite world 

and I resent it. No depth. 

I prefer the sturdy silence of the page, 

even though I no longer write in my journal, 

but in an electronic format. 

The pen furrowing across the page 

like a plow in the spring.

Tongo asks, What does your shadow know? OK, the freewrite. By this time, I am so annoyed by the speaker I could spit. Sulking, I don’t even want to do the assignment. My hip hurts. My back is killing me. Some of my grumpiness is due to the sheer amount of pain I'm experiencing. I can't even sit up.

I’m sitting on my shadow, 

holding it prisoner so we can’t escape. 

See, it’s daybreak. 

The shadow has the night to wander about, 

defined only by nightlights 

and late trips to the bathroom. 

But during the day, it’s faded by horizons.

He says choose an object in your room, describe it, now use that heckler in your head, make the second line a negative line, and take what you’re feeling, and give it voice. By this point, my inner heckler is downright rude. This is sort of like Bantu rhythms. 

When does autobiography become auto-bigotry? Nothing to do with Tongo. I misread the transcript. Imagine your shadow knows more than you do. OMG! Can we just get on with it? Apparently I am the only one who hates this workshop. Tongo rambled on for an hour and a half and left us barely any time at all to write. I am so cross I can barely contain myself. It’s a good thing that this is a Zoom conference because I cannot hide my aggravation. I had to turn off my camera.

Cie Gumuero’s workshop is on hope and resilience. She has us rub our hands together to create friction and warmth and then hold them over our chests. We focus on breathing, centering, she said to consider hope and resilience. Let an image come to mind, and then type it into the chat.

I write the sound of rain during the season, 

voice and agency through repetition. 

A fearless capacity to dream. 

Still, there is something to be said 

of the pen furrowing across the page 

like a plow in spring.

She makes zoom posters of her lessons, what a great idea to keep students visually engaged. We talk about bringing poetry to the larger community. Cynthia Parton mentions how she brought poems into local businesses in Livermore, making them visible to the community at large. Poems with themes of Earth Day for example, images of butterflies, and botanical gardens. As Cie talks about her projects, my mind wanders, and I riff off a poem I had translated in the 1990s by Bei Dao. I am primed and ready to write, and all the presenters have rotten timing. I write this poem, cribbed from another poem. Despite a profound lack of poetry prompts from her workshop, I manage to write a poem anyway, an indirect influence, outside of the premise and the time frame of the conference. Beggars can't be choosers.

• TO WRITE after Bei Dao
•           —after Bei Dao

It began in a dream
ending at the source,
a reign of ice. Melting glaciers
become part of the story
of water returning to the source.
But an alien rain is falling
on the icefields of Greenland,
the first time ever,
it opens the sluices, veins of time,
and Shasta stands naked, without snow—
another first within living history.
New rivers seeking the sea
all at once, a cacophany of stories
unleashed from the beginnings of time,
the last tear falling
from the corners of the eye,
that saline bath, words
worn smooth as stone.

Fernando Salinas's workshop is on mentoring. I take almost no notes. I enjoy his workshop, and I get what he is saying. I have mentored many students, and now as adults, they are my friends. But there is a fine line of distinction between the two. I have also mentored many poets within Poets in the Schools. And then I always say they have to pay it forward.

Dawn Trook was referring to multicultural teachers and the privilege of speech. I am bored beyond tears. The next workshop is even worse. I won't even mention the hour an a half workshop we spent on gender. An hour I'll never get back.

Our guest poet Shanda Buchanan really is a firecracker. The first workshop that I’ve actually enjoyed. She reads Langston Hughes, The Negro Speaks of Rivers. The poem was written when Langston was in high school as he was enroute to Mexico to see his father. It was written on the back of the letter from his father. It is a heritage poem. She tells us to look to the verbs and the repetition. She tells us stories of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1930s.

Shanda reads from Joy Harjo, She had Some Horses.  Tells stories of the Trail of Tears. She isolates the elements of hope and heritage. Heritage poems combine history, a sense of place, time, and they contain cultural references. They hold both the positive and the negative. Write yourself into a poem, and your place in at all. What is your role your function? Who is your audience, how are you passing down history and heritage to the next generation? History, place, time period, cultural references, artifacts the sense of self and identity all come into play. What is your place within the poem, within the culture, within society, what is your role, and what is at stake?

Again, there’s not enough time to really write anything. Sensory memory workshop questions include freewrite, using the five senses. 

I write: taste, tea, when strangers cross the threshold, the world from the outside entering inside. the Transition. Sanctum. Hearth. Oikumene. No idea where I will go with it.

My grandmother presiding over the teapot,

the idea of hospitality deeply ingrained. 

Inside and outside worlds, not the same thing 

because she asks about hope,

the odor of green grass, the horses tearing at it, 

hot sodabread laden with promise,

the odor of forgiveness,

not the acrid odor of spilled blood, 

the scent of the earth itself, 

the rain washing away the sins of the world.

Three resiliences, 

gathering around the table, 

gathering in the of the clan, 

but we let go, we let it go, we let it scatter 

like blow wives to the wind

forgetting to make a wish. 

My grandmother held the flame of the family, 

she was our anchor against the onslaught 

of homogenized cultures. The flat American A.

She was the keeper of the old ways, the old stories.

But those worlds collided in school 

where I couldn’t ameliorate the distance of it 

and I took refuge, hiding in the hills with my horses. 

The color of my heritage is green, the grass, 

I come from a land of fields, 

fenced off by the orange band of oppression. 

We all carry that oppression within us, from the outside,

Call it sacrament, but the church carried it on, 

ecumene, an insidious approach.

The distant drone of uillean pipes raises the blood memory. 

Tunes with no words that survived the ages. 

New words were added with each generation, 

there was always the war on oppression.

What did we do to survive? 

The urge to assimilate, to blend in, is strong,

and having white skin makes it easier to hide,

still we were shamed for our blood and religion.

But to hold onto the past is a drowning in floodwaters,

to hold onto one’s roots, is a silent struggle.

I write an imaginary letter to a family member 

who needed to hear the words most. 

I write to myself, thanking the ancestors 

for showing me where my family came from. 

The heritage, the lineage. 

What about the trauma and the neglect? 

It’s hard to move on. 

What you’ve learned.

I survived the chaos and learned

the positive is not always positive. 

My grandmother objecting to my singing 

America the Beautiful. I felt wounded. 

Betrayed by assimilation. It took me decades to see 

how the song betrayed her too, and our culture.

I lived with my grandmother’s disappointment,

and as I cleaned the houses of the rich,

she said she had higher hopes for me than that.

The second sight cast a blind eye

on the alcohol that ruined the lives of her children,

and the vagaries of God’s altar come home to roost 

in the broken minds of her daughters

like carrion crows on the battlefield

of the past.

For what is your take away? Define your strengths your limits and your boundaries. What are you left behind and what won’t you pick back up, what is your least favorite historical incident. Letter to the future What will you pass on? What does resilience taste like, the outside culture. Heritage tastes like, smells like... heritage tastes like HOPE smells like resilience sounds like the lineage is name a color he knew that love was some thing hard.And again there was not enough time included in the residency to actually do any real writing.

Pam writes a stellar poem about her father, how he never talked. Shonda reads from her poems.

Susan Wooldridge's closing workshop was loaded with imagery and and that we could hold onto. She talks about the failing trees, and the rusty railings in the immaculate distances, 10,000 stars, a tangle of clouds, the heart is bigger than our sadness. Keep still in any language without strangeness, something salty, go on walkabout. 

What I want is single minded silence. 

I gather the words in cloud bones. 

You promised me the pockets of the wolverine moon. 

Susan says, Go to a childhood place where you felt at home. Stand in front of a doorway, somewhere where you felt welcome, touch the door knob, touch it, enter it barefoot. Find the Heart Center of this room. You were invisible, what do you hear and smell and feel. Describe where you are.

When I found the secret center of this room, 

I was invisible, the silence was like batting of an old quilt.

I’m standing on the lintel of the front door 

where the weight of the horse broke the step. 

Bring your shadows to the table.

Up here, my shadow is as long as memory 

and it stretches across the tiles larger than life. 

The couch is covered in old newspapers, 

my grandmother is reading 

swatting the cat sneaking in for a cuddle. 

She will have none of that.  

Susan asks us to be specific.Your grandmother, what does she want?

I say, I don't know.

I wish I could fly across the open meadow, 

the tears of flowers and the bluejays 

are screaming I’m here, I’m here! 

They divebomb the cat at his bowl. 

The wind pulls the curtains back to let the sun in. 

My grandmother looked up. Conas ta tu? she asks.  

She is far away in another realm of the self. 

But in my mind, I don’t demand that presence, 

a spotlight, razor sharp, carving off moments of time, 

softening them. 

Instead, I prefer to sit in the companionable stillness 

of a room in late afternoon 

and listen to the soft breathing of the day. 

Memory playing us like a glove, 

divining the moment.

A prayer for the coming light. 

In the kitchen she stands at the stove, 

a wedding of shadows and baskets of words. 

My grandmother lets me blow out the flame, 

the odor of the match that burnt down the kitchen. 

I carry you, a murmuring lullaby 

to the singing tangle of memories, 

to the mud hearths of my seventh grandmother, 

the re-imaged doorway, the ailing stars, 

and the silvered voices of the Otherworld. 

My grandmother speaks of the lower field 

and asks me in Irish, how are you?

And so the dream continues.