Sonoma County Poet Laureate nomination

Poetry reading with Bill Moyers, Sonoma

I spent the morning on PBS radio with three students, and Arthur Dawson had two students reading poetry. Then we practiced with students at Roseland, running off flyers, then dashing off to the Sonoma high school gymnasium to meet PBS investigative journalist and author, cultural icon, Bill Moyers.

Bill Moyers said many of us aspire to be poets and then he read a quote from Gary Snyder saying that the mind interprets the world in so many ways. Tonight we are paying honor to the handwork. Moyers says that poetry is a journey. When you get it right pass it on, said Snyder. 

Bill Moyers recounted that William Stafford said he writes a poem a day. So what if it's not good? I just lower my standards. We laugh. Jimmy Santiago Baca in El Gato, said he wrote a poem to the parole board to get out of jail. Bill had a question: what's poetry done for you? Jimmy Santiago Baca said, Poetry's kept me from being one of America's most wanted.

We re-created the July Readers' Books event for Bill Moyers, with Jane Hirschfield David Bromidge, Tom Centolella, Sam Keen, Arthur Dawson, myself, and our students reading poems, in tribute to Bill Moyers and his PBS series, The Language of Life. It was a tear-moving event.

Bill Moyers praised us, and California Poets in the Schools, what we do in essence, is the heart of poetry. CPITS was the central focus of tonight's events. I emceed the student reading: Little Matthew Merner, a second grader from Higham Family School read with such confidence, I thought I'd burst with pride. And it was a packed gymnasium, all the way to the rafters.

I closed the kids' poetry section with Trevor Yeats' poem, This Body is to Ask. The audience gasped in appreciation. I had tested the audience earlier by telling them that Trevor Yeats was the great-grand-nephew of William Butler Yeats and they all yelled Yeats! I said, OK, you guys passed. I finished the reading with my Poem for Sarah, which Bill Moyers said he liked very much, and asked for a copy of it so I gave him the kid book.

This body is to ask
this question of the mind:
Is the sun to shine on the day of my death?
Is the hole in the universe to stay as big?
Tell me, tell me, where is the answer?

Where is the answer to lie in today’s hands?
This is the breath, to breathe this air.

Trevor Yeats
2nd grade,
Higham Family School
Santa Rosa, CA

I said that the poem was coming out in Voices Israel and, and he asked me to keep in touch. Later Judith, his wife said the next program they are working on is on healing and the mind, and they wanted to use poetry. Yvonne Lyerla told him how I had worked at Napa State Hospital. But I leapt ahead, nervous. 

At the end of my reading I said picking upon a line by young poet, Gabby, who was 10, had said about politics. I closed with: poetry is the ultimate political act. Which at the end, Bill Moyers quoted, building his closing speech around it. I was twice honored. A magical evening. 

We all went to a restaurant across from Murphy's pub where a guitarist was singing the Foggy Dew. My grandfather's favorite song. Earlier this morning I had read something that Bill Moyers had written in his book about folksongs as being poetry, and leading us to poetry. And I thought of how those Irish folk songs led me to poetry, and those circles were completing themselves tonight on several levels. Epiphany after epiphany.

RRWG anthology, A Stone’s Throw reading

Press Democrat, Poets with the Write Stuff, David Bromidge, Elizabeth Herron, Maureen Hurley,