At a meeting put on by the League of Vermont Writers recently, I had the opportunity to meet and speak with Toussaint St. Negritude, a poet now at work in the Northeast Kingdom, arriving by way of Philadelphia, San Francisco, New York, and other locales. Before leaving the meeting, I got hold of a copy of his book, Mountain Spells, published by Rootstock Publishers, Montpelier, in 2024 (https://www.rootstockpublishing.com/rootstock-books/p/mountain-spells). At home that evening, I read the poems, which are first-rate, and sometime later went to bed. But I awoke in the night, the meeting now attending me! And with Toussaint's poems still calling, my hand made two couplets:
These poems flow,
like breath.
These poems mean,
like bones.
Two sessions were of special interest that day, the yoga workshop and the end-of-day genre session, with two other poets (Toussaint St. Negritude and Liz Gauffreau). The genre group was especially meaningful for me. At one point, we addressed one of the prompts provided by the event organizers: name an influential poem or collection that's remained important or influential. Liz spoke about T.S. Eliot's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' and its continuing influence on her work. She also mentioned writing haiku every day for a year, which I understood was part of a generative poetic practice. Eliot has been, and remains, a touchstone poet for me. I thought of William Carlos Williams's Paterson, adding that in addition to the poetry, Williams's use of contemporary materials, such as newspaper articles and local histories, ground and situate (and deepen) his text, incorporating a vernacular dimension. Toussaint spoke about Allen Ginsberg's Howl, a poem he hadn't paid much attention to, he said, until he had the experience of reading the poem aloud, while walking across the Golden Gate Bridge with a friend. Toussaint spoke to the significance of Ginsberg's effective use of lists of everyday things in Howl, embedding them into the flow of the poetry. By the way, Ginsberg and Williams were natives of Paterson, my hometown.
Interestingly, each of us chose a foundational text first discovered long ago. Which put me in mind of writing by another dharma poet, Hank Lazer: the closing paragraph from his reflections on The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry (edited by Andrew Schelling, published 2005):
As one gets older, the desert island game becomes less fanciful and more exactingly pertinent: if you knew you were going to be stranded on a desert island, and you could only take three books with you, which three books would you pick? Those of us who have many demands on our time play the game in a less definite way every morning and every day. Increasingly, the mad rush to read and read and see what's new and read it all gives way to a deliberate return to those books, poets, poems that matter most to us. Perhaps fortunately, it is not at all easy to figure out which books these are. That's why we look at our bookshelves and have trouble each morning deciding what to read and why. I wish that the climate for critical prose writing in our time encouraged greater consideration of how and why these few key books matter to us. It is not an easy thing to discuss truthfully.
I like this passage for its evocation of books or poems long held close, but more especially for the enigmatic last sentences. What did Lazer mean? When I think of Eliot, for example, or Yeats, two poets who've meant quite a lot to me, I'm disaffected by the conservatism that overtook them as they aged -- but I continue to benefit from their poetry. Even so, I suspect that this doesn't capture Lazer's meaning. (More on that some other time; meanwhile, here's a link to his essay: https://riull.ull.es/xmlui/bitstream/handle/915/17329/RCEI_52_(%202006)_04.pdf?sequence=1).
Moving on, the workshop titled "Yoga and Creativity: The Art and Practice of Breath, Flow, and Creative Expression" was convened by Joy Cohen, a playwright, who led guided breathing exercises followed by writing prompts, suggesting one-word responses to each prompt. To "Who (or what) would you like to dance with?", I answered, "sky". Thinking it over in the night, one of my recent poems came to mind, also written in response to a writing prompt given at a meeting earlier this year; also featuring yoga -- and sky. My poem was inspired by a longer poem, or rather two linked poems, collectively titled Not Quite Noon, by dharma poet Paul Naylor, reflecting his experience climbing a challenging mountain, then returning to that mountain twenty years later -- less successfully the second time up. (https://www.dosmadres.com/shop/not-quite-noon-by-paul-naylor/). Here's the relevant passage from Naylor's poem:
Calm and agile -- llamas make their way along
the trail with little thought of what they aren't.
Or so I assume. I can be calm, but agile's in my
past. No amount of yoga or tai chi's bringing
that back. It's now about losing ground as
slowly as I can.
My poem initially strove to replicate haiku, though it finally submerged and abandoned that form. I'll note that mine is fundamentally a distillation, and does not engage the rich complexity of Naylor's:
Shoshoni Sky
Gannett Peak
Wind River Range
Shoshoni sky
The poet scrambled up
The poet scrabbled down
Yoga
Tai Chi...
...he did them all
Yet...
Climbing the mountain
Twenty years later
He stumbled
Suwakkawai*
*a Shoshoni word meaning "out of breath"
Before closing, I find that I have yet another "sky" poem to offer here. This one came while thinking about a poet's oeuvre: the little sheaf, the life's work; enduring; not enduring:
Sky Burial
Riverrun
Reflecting
Beclouding
Poems gather
Sheaving
Concatenating
As lichen will
On stone or tree
Or as condensation will
On glass...
...or sky
Breath percolates, suffuses. Bone. Breath. Sky.