Walla Walla Poetry Party '05 Well, Moira B.-you're right. I ought to write about The Walla Walla Poetry party.
It won't be all that quick; so I will do it in installments until I finish or give up.
I will mix in commentaries on some poets' work as I go.
At a wine bar, before the reading Saturday night, in a conversation with Hugh Fox
and Sharon Doubiago, someone said that if anyone kept a journal of his or her trip to
The Party, it would read like Basho's Narrow Road To The Deep North. Let it be so.
With my plane departing at 7:10, I had planned on getting up at 4:30, but alas woke up at 3:45. It would be a theme of the trip, the inability to sleep, for excitement or nerves or both. I took as reading material for the flight mark hartenback's GREATEST HITS, from the Pudding House Publications series, This House, a book length poem by Jim Bodeen, and Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, a delightful book, if you enjoy archaic spelling as I do, but one I never opened on the trip.
I always take a window seat. I don't care where I sit in a plane so long as it's by a window and not over the wing, which would obstruct my view. I watch the pattern of Tennesse's forested hills as we rise. I usually fly to the west, as I was doing Wednesday morning, April 13, over those woods out past Belleview. I love my home. Too much pollen, but it is where I belong. I opened up hartenbach. He is a poet whose work I enjoy and admire. It is good that Pudding House has entered an exclusive publishing agreement with him, but I treasure the little hand made books he has sent me over the years. The Time Garden's own Jan Fiering did a review of one of these for The Temple some years ago. The Temple, you know, was published by Charles Potts, the host of The Walla Walla Poetry Party. So, altho hartenbach was not at the party, it was appropriate reading material for leaving the southeastern part of the country heading northwest.
mark wrote in his introduction "sometimes i feel like everything i've written is one long line." I had thought that of his work myself. What he does is say everything is everything, but he says it from a 473 points of view, in varied, interesting rhythms too. Like Dylan's songs "Hard Rain" and "Watching The River Flow." (Do I have the titles right?) I was not surprised either to learn in the introduction that he is manic depressive ("i refuse to use the term bipolar until someone can write as great a song as hendrix's"). His work has the improvisational brilliance of manic depressives I have known, that expensive magic, yall know what I mean? Here is a taste of marc.
how do i free the intangibles
without dismantling the entire frame
without spoiling overall ambiance
hopped up method actor or holy ecstatic-
it's anyone's call
as i pry open jukebox & coffin alike
fumbling to get my ya ya's out
mark's book, like others in The Pudding House series-sister Christina Pacosz
is in the series too, as is Charles Potts-can be purchased thru www.puddinghouse.com.
I finished mark's little book and opened up This House by Jim Bodeen. I had
been reading it a bit at a time for a couple of weeks and picked it up with
the intent of finishing it by the time I would meet the author in Walla Walla.
It is a contemplative long poem in which jazz, dreams, dogs, wife, daughter,
students, baking, skiing-all run together in his house and in the poem, in "this
house." House of self, house of poem, family real house-merge. And students,
must not forget the high school students, mostly Hispanic, many illegal, who
weave thru the heart of this man's life and into this fine poem.
Here's some:
You were really singing last night.
I don't believe in God, but I believe in angels.
What you call the angel, I call the dream.
That talk last night-let me be clear about this:
It wasn't between a father and daughter.
That was a conversation with the angels.
Tsunami Inc. is the publisher, and it is available thru your bookseller or from The Temple Bookstore: http://www.thetemplebookstore.com/selectedpoets.html#ag.
The beautiful western landscape called me out of the poem now and then. It is an unfolding pleasure to fly over the west. The way traces of geological forces endlessly balance the random with the orderly, in fact, remind me of the quality of the two books I spend the morning with. As we approach the Las Vegas airport I see pinkish maroon streaks of dessert. Never have seen that color before, a glow inside sobriety. Southern boy far from home. Las Vegas the town is of little interest to me but the rock mountains and the desert around it I hope to see again. Changed planes, ignoring the slot machines in the airport, heading for Spokane. Sat by a photographer on his way to photograph boxing matches in Spokane. The boxing will be broadcast on ESPN2, he tells me. Personable guy, we compare notes on the wonders that computers offer to artists, whether in sound recording or photography, almost all the way to Spokane. [more to come]
at the Party! Watkins in Walla Walla WA part 2
In Spokane, my rental car was easy to lease, the back country route Charles had advised was easy to find and follow, and the country side overwhelmed me. It was time to regret that Linda could not come with me. Her father, her beloved father who as a single parent had raised her while her mother kept her own apartment across town, tho not divorced, her father whom I loved myself and whom my sons still speak of with awe, had told her, when she was a girl, that if she ever got a chance to travel to Washington state she must go for it was beautiful country. His company flew him from Detriot all over the country to work on diesel engines, and it was Washington state she should see. She could not come-ill. Her father was right tho. I would ask Charles later that afternoon how many farmers were killed each year when their tractors tottled over while plowing the steep wheat fields. He would answer, "some." The farmlands of the Palouse valley look like desert sand dunes on steroids in their shapes. The soil has blown in on winds, the crazy hills shaped by winds as these topographies must be, with top soil up to eighty feet deep in places, I'm told. I notice the traffic on these country roads pretty well keep the speed limit and I assume there is wisdom there. Semi's hauling grain slow me down too. The sweet curves of the road-how they would have charmed me in my midlife crisis days when I drove a Renault Gordini so fast I have no business being alive today. I don't even know what the brand of the rental car was, but it got me to Walla Walla, around, maybe, four o'clock. Instinct took me into town to Poulouse Avenue and up the street to Charles lovely, old home. His teenage daughter graciously answers the door and I hear Potts say, "oh, it is Watkins." Soon I am shaking hands with a good friend that I am meeting in the flesh for the first time.
Charles Potts is simply very impressive. He is a remarkable poet, quite a successful business man. He is in shape, playing tennis and hiking seriously. He is full of knowledge, which he wears lightly. He is smart. Hell, he may be as smart as I am. He understands that poets work better when a group of them support themselves as a group and he supports an open ended group of outstanding poets. And no matter how much good help he has in his efforts, this remarkable group would not exist in so rich and fluid a manner without him. Who was it, Thursday morning, when Charles walked into his living room from one direction as I walked in from another, said to him, "we were just saying how you are loved?" But hey-'scuse me-this is Wednesday afternoon.
I am introduced to Joel Waldman. "You have read Valga Krusa?" Charles asks. I have indeed read that autobiographical novel about Charles Potts and Laughing Water and the whole crazy gang in the Berkeley late sixties. "Who were you in that book?" Charles says to Joel. "I don't know. You tell me." They tease each other. Joel is a poet of course. 50 New Poems is his recent book, available thru The Temple Bookstore online. A blurb by Ferlinghetti says, "Waldman is a poet's poet." I don't know what that means, but Waldman is a fun poet. Here's a Waldman. (I cannot get his spacing of lines correct here.)
So this is a criminally insane enterprise, mother
mustang magic
dangerman
no tomorrow
secretasian
dot com
get academic, will 'ya
WHO
Walks erect into Olongapo
Smelling of Indian
Ocean
pussy, looking for a break
in the mending walls
listening.
We discuss agenda. Tonight it's dinner at a local Mexican restaurant with a group of poets. In the morning when we rise Charles will be playing tennis but later we shall pick up poet Sharon Doubiago from the Walla Walla Airport and go with her, Charles and Joel and I, to a French restaurant in a nearby farm town. A good agenda. Joel marvells at the town of Walla Walla, a town of--did they say?--some 25 thousand. Large enough, small town enough and somehow sophisticated enough. The town is "cute," Joel will be saying all thru the weekend. It will become a chorus, "Walla Walla is wonderful, Walla Walla is cute." I join the chorus.
I sat on Charles front porch thinking of three poets that would not be here. Edward Smith first. I have heard a recording of Ed's reading at the last WWPP, the '03 one. His performance is very fine, and his stated appreciation of how such a gathering feeds us sums up the attitude of participants at a Walla Walla Poetry Party. On the recording you can tell he is speaking for the room, and certainly he was speaking for me, in advance. Ed and I began emailing after he wrote me a note thanking me for a bit on Charles Potts that appeared here (on TTG). I was to meet him in the flesh, for he planned to stop over in Nashville for a night on his way to Alabama to visit his daughter in January 2004. He died December 26, 2003. The second absence I thought of was Karen-Karen Waring in the Pacific Northwest Spiritual Poetry anthology, now Karen Sikes as nature writer for a Seattle newspaper. Ed had sent his copy of Ghost Trees to Karen, as a loan, to encourage her to write more poetry as well as prose about her hiking. I am happy that Ed's copy of Ghost Trees stayed with her. That he felt strongly enough about the poem to show it to another poet who loves the woods. Excuse my sentimentality. As Karen is a Washington State girl, I had hoped she could come. Karen does indeed write nature poetry as readers of Hoe N Tell know. I would be asked several times in Walla Walla how a Nashville boy came into contact with this Western scene. Well, I would say, I submitted to The Temple. Joe Speers, Beatlick Joe, gave me a copy and said, send them something, see if you can get in. At the time I couldn't even get rejected, much less published. I had no reader, not one. I would ask friends to read poems and they'd say no. And when I'd send out poems with SASE, seriously, they just went away, were never even rejected. But I did send some poems to The Temple, because Joe told me to, and I got an email saying, this is great stuff, or something totally unexpected like that. The Publisher of The Temple was always Charles Potts, but the editor at the time of my first submission was Stephen Thomas, and without him I certainly would not be a featured reader at the Walla Walla Poetry Party and would not have a new title, 5 SPEED, published by The Temple. Stephen is teaching, on a Fullbright, in the Czech Republic. His was the third absence I felt. (more to come)
a poem by one who wasn't there Karen Sykes: Cispus Pass
This day
There is nobody
In the mountains
But you and me
On a stony path
We don't know what
Time it is
But it is getting late
The car is far
Away
And it doesn't matter
Those small towns we
Have never been to
Nestle against the Goat Rocks
Their lights twinkle
Against the folded hills
The old volcanoes are hazy
With smoke from forest fires
Past the lodge-pole pines
We linger too long
in purple
Clouds of mimulus
In a meadow
Near the pass
Where long ago
Your secrets were given
And kept by the mountain
We know that losing and
Forgetting are the same;
The aging mind
A map without contours
Of any kind
The compass
Is rusty and old
Yet we keep climbing
Cispus Pass is the name
Of this place
But it could be any place
It could be your back door
It could be those apples
We never bought in Wenatchee
It could be the face turned away
From you in a dream
It could be
The light
In the eye
Of that hawk
Circling above
An empty meadow
Maybe it is the place
You dreamed
That love would find
You
In the rocks and
Pin you down
And kiss you
Until you went crazy
Or blind
We climb
Into a stony basin
Where the sun
Metes out blows
Like a stern god
At an altar
A melting snow-bridge
Gives us
Water
We drink quietly and
Deep like deer
At dusk
When Gilbert Peak
And Old Snowy were young
And there were no trails
For white men
The trail goes on
And on; Our old hearts
are tired of
These steep trails
But we do not turn back.
Karen
Deer rest Klyd, I must tell hue that yore web sight ease flat out rockin’. Eye donut care watt PW sayeth a boot thou. Ye half a weigh off bring ying pee pull two gather yin the spear it of you knee verse all calm rotter awry. Pleas key pup the good work.
M Panasuk
5/12/05
Thank you for the wonderful reports of your Walla Walla Poetry Party experience, Klyd. You have a gift for mixing the mundane of life with the momentary blessing or fleeting memory. I also must comment on Karen Sykes' poem. Her analogy of the aging mind being "a map without contours" was stunning. The sun meting out blows "like a stern god at an altar" gave me chills. Does Karen have any poetry books published? Your website never disappoints me. It's the highlight of my day when you post something new! Moira B. Thanks, Moira. A good selection of Karen's poetry (as Karen Waring) is included in Pacific Northwestern Spiritual Poetry, a book lovers of contemporary American poetry should not be without. In 1976, Litmus Inc. (Charles Potts' first imprint) published her Exposed to the Elements, which I assume is out of print. A CD of Karen reading in Seattle a couple of decades ago is available thru The Temple Bookstore.
welcome to a new voice on TTG, well know poet and reviewer Hugh Fox THE WALLA WALLA POETRY PARTY-2005
All
the blue mountains, vineyards, wheatfields, hills,
then downtown like a living museum of perfect, old,
let's call um "Civic Buildings," churches, stores,
the Temple Auditorium, huge-ceiling and ancient,
feeling I'm more in Old London than Old Washington
State. Andy Clausen, ancient, hairy, hefty, smiling,
greets me, "Hugh Fox, I haven't seen you since 1968...
thirty-seven years," "Howya doing?" "Well, I never
thought I'd make it into the world of rectal exams
and hip replacements, but...," this skinny anciana
appears, limping, grey-white hair spiked up on top
of her head, "I'm Janine Pommy Vega, you've reviewed
lots of my books over the years," I answer her in
Spanish, "Pero es la primera vez que tenemos contacto
cara a cara, no es cierto? / But it's the first time we
have face-to-face contact, isn't that true?," she's
happy with my/our Spanish, "Si , la primera vez /
Yes, the first time," Sharon Doubiago saunters by,
a beautiful, smiling blonde shipwreck, a little embrace,
as Charlie Potts, Mr. Kiot, the organizer of this whole
shebang, saunters by, "How you all doing?", me still not
able to turn him into "old," remembering him in Berkeley
in the 60's and 70's, Mr. Charlie Kiot, a long-haired
marijuana (for sanity's sake) incarnation of Hippydom,
Jim Bodeen from Yakima gives me a hug, like a plush khaki pillow...
all the local poets, Kaia Sand, Ed Foy, Janice King, still to
get to know, become close buddies with Klyd Watkins, another
long -(white) hair like myself, not sure which way I'm traveling,
into Glorious Hippy Heaven Past, or other Wishful Thinking
Hippy Heaven futures yet to come.
Watkins in Walla Walla WA 3
Still sitting on Charles' wrap around front porch I remembered to turn on my cell phone. Off since getting on the flight from Las Vegas. I find I have missed a call from home, and I return that call to report my safe arrival, swap I love you's, and get the news.
"I had an interesting phone call," Linda says. "A guy from LA called and asked if I were the Linda Watkins on Poetry Out Loud. [Poetry Out Loud was a series of ten record albums released in the 70's.] He had found some in a used record store and bought them and liked them and wants to find more. He asked me," Linda goes on, "if I were the one who had done 'Down To The Sea.' He says he goes to sleep listening to it every night. I told him Patricia Harleman did that."
I sigh with exasperation that she could forget her own song-poem. "No," I tell her, 'Down To The River' was by the four of us. So was 'Ocean.' But you did 'Down To The Sea' by yourself, on your guitar. You were actually in bed strumming and I turned on the tape recorder and held one cheap Shure mike toward you, and that beautiful piece spilled out. You never sang it again."
"Well, anyway, he says he will call back when you are back in town." This happens to us about once a decade, which means it has happened four times now: someone will become enthused enough about the products of our most obscure poetic revolution to run us down. The second time, a guy called up Peter Harleman and talked with Susan, his second wife. Peter and Patricia Harleman were our partners in Poetry Out Loud. And the Harlemans' work together as a duo was a huge part of those recordings. They later divorced. This fellow told Susan that he had paid $1200 for a copy of Poetry Out Loud #1, and that we could 'make a lot of money with it.' Susan understandably had no enthusiasm for such intimate souvenirs of Peter's marriage to Patricia as the Out Loud poems are, and she told the guy, "he already has lots of money" and rushed him off the phone. What this has to do with The Walla Walla Poetry Party was that neither one was supposed to happen. I have accepted that I failed to find an audience-for a poet that is not a small failing-and I became, after some indulgence in frustration, at peace with that. Then these little successes come along. That's all. I call upon that truth the Stoics knew, that these things will come and go, and really make no difference-I also sit me on Charles' porch tickled as can be, eventho I don't expect that we will hear from the guy again.
Word is coming in about people who will not make it into town tonight, stuck overnight in Seattle, so we wait no longer to head to Ti Kali Restaurant. Who was it quoted who was it, saying, "there's nothing like a company of drinking poets?" Maybe it was poet and bookseller Janice King quoting Basho? I did pour me down a couple of Negra Modelos along with the good meal. And it was indeed "a good table," with, let me remember, Joel, Charles, poet and artist Juliet Raine, Janice-Janice King was good company several times over the weekend; here is a taste of her lines:
"Morning
came up from behind Blue Mountains' rim
glowed like a rose on land with the contours of women
rolled quietly across the pasture to the Cascades' peaks, . . ."
(from "The Porter Place" in her book Taking Wing, from Golden Notebook Press). Janice shared the logistical load of producing the party with Charles and with Travis Catsull. Travis is author of Open Spirit, manager of The Temple Bookstore and half of Charles Potts' Magic Windmill Band. (People are said to have a hard time understanding that Charles is in the name of the band, not in the band itself.) The other half of that band, Dirk Michener was there. I don't have a title of his but he read very effectively Thursday night. And Douglas Warriner , who has a very interesting little book, Underpony, from Effing Press-it is moderately dense, slightly surreal kind of cowboy stuff. I look forward to spending more time with it. Travis' charming friend Amanda found it very exciting that Joel had a Caballero-she loved those cars/trucks. El Caminos were great but the GMC version was much cooler. There is excited talk about the possibility of a headliner patch that will make the cloth over the driver's head attach to the top of the car and not sag, from parts available right on Palouse Avenue! Joel declares there is nothing that can make him a hero at home but he might get a few whiffs of sympathy if he came home with such a wonderful improvement to the vehicle. We talk a little about who has published what where etc. but the most enlivened topic is whether Charles can provide Joel with the correct socket to repair his windshield wipers. The Caballero has a more urgent problem than sagging roof cloth. A man can't drive from Walla Walla to Elk, California without either windshield wipers or enormous good luck one. There is a subtle element of sincere exasperation along with a ton of fun in the exchange, which ends with Joel declaring he cannot use the metric sockets Charles has to offer, because the nut requires an unusual size English socket. We spill into the parking lot three quarters sober and say our good nights.
Back at Charles' house, he brings his guitar out. A nice old acoustic-electric Gibson. Just about every night he will do this. He plays country music from the fifties and forties. Every time, he plays "Bye Bye Blackbird." He is a fun guitarist and could be very good if it were a major pursuit, if he had kept his threat made in Compostrella/Starfield, "to disinfect country music when I turn 35." He plays a song of Catsull and Michener: "Ganesh" -a plaintive gospel song addressed to the dancing Hindu god with the elephant head-
"Ganesh,
Ganesh-
You can hear me, I guess
With you great gray ears"
(something like that) This wonderful little song, whose irony is the more tasty for disappearing continuously into sincerity somehow, became the anthem of WWPP 2005, in my mind at least. Charles would sing too his own "Peyote, King of the Cactus." He would tell Janine Pomy Vega and me during the party Saturday night that he has never listened to The Grateful Dead, yet when he does "Peyote" it is somewhat reminiscent of Jerry Garcia in country mode. I was half in a mood to improvise vocally over Charles' guitar, but only half. The awkwardness of explaining to him how I needed him to strum and a bit of nervousness besides prevented me from taking that leap, but when Charles and Joel went up to bed I stayed on the porch a while, went to my rental car and got my brief case and a legal pad to write down the words that had wanted to come out while Charles was playing guitar, a Waylonish cut-time waltz:
Honky Tonk Pride
Chorus
It wasn't nothing but honky tonk pride.
That woman just give me a ride.
Tell you the truth, I lied.
It was a matter of honky tonk pride.
Verse 1
I saw you and Buddy
Over by the juke box
I saw the smile that you gave
This was as far as I got Thursday night. (Since then I have finished the song and lost it. If I find it before I finish this little history I will put it in later.)
I stuck the
brief case under my arm and went up the stairs to my room to go to sleep.
note on some necessities--it was necessary that Thomas Jefferson have children with a slave. Sally Heming was her name. It was necessary that this fact would not become verified to history until our own day. And the following poem is necessary. new voice on The Time Garden--Sharon Doubiago Sally Heming's Dress
When I put
on Sally Heming's white dress
I found myself climbing the highest building in Charlottesville.
I pulled it off and draped it over the steeple cross.
When the sun rose I was standing there naked, the father
of my children. And when the sun set
I was the moon and all the stars, the father
of my country.
This doesn't
mean I don't love
Thomas Jefferson in his pants.
Of course only in Heaven
does he get to wear a dress.
Here even the President can only lie down on the bed,
drape it over himself and sigh
what am I to do with this?
When he
puts the cigar in her vagina
the highest building in Virginia
collapses
brick by brick. The Dress
goes up in flames, semen of sunrise, noose
strung from the oak around his neck, bloody cock
in my black mouth.
But then
the moon rises again, Virgin impenetrable.
I step through the sky in my dress
issuing forth all the Union and Confederate Dead
in their dresses.
(thanks to the Charlottesville artist Todd Murphy and Jack Hirschman)
Sharon
Doubiago
from Christina Pacosz: "Good to read Sharon on the site! Welcome to the garden, old friend!"
Walla Walla Watkins 4
Charles was already playing tennis when I got downstairs Thurday morning, April 14-over a month ago now. I found Joel in the kitchen. Fine old high ceilings, lots of counter and cabinets. With good morning pastries laid out.
Joel and I confer over whether to be responsible and try to get his windshield wipers working or play truant and take a walk. "Which do you want to do?" he demands, willing to be tempted. "Well, hell, I want to walk, of course" I tell him. "Charles gave me a walking map to the town's largest trees, and I want to see them. On the other hand, what we ought to do is get your car safe to drive." And off we went, in my rental car, to buy the odd sized socket he needed. It was something/64ths, or something like that, as Joel came to think after experimenting with such sockets as he had at hand. We stop and get coffee and directions to a car parts store. Joel shines in this setting. He introduces himself, and me, and he is P.T. Barnum. The people of Walla Walla will do well to help him with his automotive problems, he lets them know, as he just might stay here otherwise-he loves the feel of the town so. He invites them to the poetry party. He is so forward that I, in my reserve, have to consciously relax. I understand exactly what he means when he tells me his wife hates it when he does this. My wife, on the other hand, also has this tendency to launch into warm conversation with strangers. And I used to cringe. I eventually got smart enough to realize it is a good thing, but sometimes still I have to remind myself. The man and woman behind the counter seem to be a couple and seem to be the owners; they give as good as they get. A polite battle of wits ensues with the man insulting California and Joel insulting Walla Walla, complete with points marked up with invisible chalk on invisible blackboards. I am thinking Joel now is like Whitman, igniting the working day. With no lack of ceremony he purchases the socket he seems to need.
We get back to Charles' and Joel bends over his car and gets to work. I pace here and there, coming close for occasional consultation. On one of those approaches Joel is grimacing. He has discovered that he actually did need metric sockets. The horrible thing about that was, it made Charles right! He would never live it down! Please, please, I was not to tell Charles. I said I didn't know, I might just tell Charles the minute I saw him. But there is hope yet for Joel, for he knows where Charles-the super organized, oh how I envy him for it, organized, Charles-keeps those metric sockets, and he can possibly get the job done before Charles returns. He never need know. And Joel might have succeeded, except the little metric socket set did not have the capacity to generate the torque needed .
I am thinking, why on earth didn't we drive Joel's car itself, the patient, as it were, to the parts shop? Then we could have tried it there. I mean the day is clear as can be. Well, there is enough gray in the scarse clouds to burnish the light some, but it is not going to rain and, when it does not rain, El Caballero is not crippled. P.T. Barham, Walt Whitman are unmasked as the Marx brothers. And the thing is, there is not time to get to the parts store and back, as Charles will be here soon and we are to go to the little Walla Walla Airport and pick up Sharon Doubiago, then on to fancy lunch! And sure enough here come Charles toward us. Joel confesses all.
We speak on the way to the airport of Sharon Doubiago's work. I have recently read Body and Soul thru twice and found it alive, full of momentum. Charles tells us that a critical study of long poems by contemporary American women has a treatment of Hard Country, her epic. (Lynn Keller, Forms of Expansion: Recent Long Poems by Women.) He adds, if Doubiago isn't the greatest poet of our generation, then she is certainly a contender.
The airport provides further evidence of how cute Walla Walla is, particularly the revolving baggage track. It is tiny but it comes out of the wall and turns around just like those in large airports. Again Joel admires the perfect scale of the town. Sharon is introduced to Joel and me, gathers her luggage off this synecdoche. We get into Charles' little SUV and head for The Petit Café.
I don't know whether to say that Sharon Doubiago is strong and lovely, or lovely and strong, for she is strong-lovely and lovely-strong.
We drive thru a valley road among wheat fields, the route I drove in on, the route I take some pains to observe since I will have to follow it out of town back toward Spokane come Sunday morning. We pass thru one small town and on to the next, speaking of children and grandchildren, speaking (Sharon does) of how Bob Dylan's hometown, Hibbing Minnesota, was only two miles from the still smaller town Cherry, Minnesota, the home of Gus Hall, prominent as a candiate of the American Communist Party, and an area that was haven to a number of left wing Americans-so the consciousness of that country kid Robert Zimmerman may be in part explained. When we pass a semi on a long grade, Joel brags sarcastically on Charles SUV. He declares he will make a little plaque vaunting the vehicle's accomplishment, to accompany the For Sale sign in the back window.
I can't recall the name of the town where The Petit Café is, a considerably smaller town than Walla Walla. It is somewhat surprising to find such a good restaurant in a little country house on the main drag there. There are about four tables total, but with our arrival three of those are filled. I have Halibut and salad. Joel and Sharon and I share a bottle of a local Chardonnay. I had determined to sample Washington state wines every chance I got. Charles is the designated driver. More for us! Everything was delicious and Charles and I have desert, a home made coffee ice cream for me, and coffee all around for the wine drinkers.
Our conversation goes on, with the coffee and wine competing to influence our talk, each in its own way, as Charles drives a longer more scenic route back to Walla Walla. The day is still bright, but the scarce clouds have gained more gray in them than earlier, making the light more intense where it spills over the gray, intense over those strange dune hills, over four poets snaking along the country roads, I keep looking out at the clouds. The light is remarkable to me. (You don't get to read this next sentence, Hugh Fox, but you may return after it's over.) The light feels to me like a 4th companion.
A TRACE OF WRONG SKY DISEASE
Well, this had been a long interruption of the Walla Walla WA Saga, and some of you are wondering did I get my house clean? No, I vacuumed some, and the little vacuum cleaner is waiting at the top of the stairs now, to force me to pick it back up soon and get on with things. What I've done instead, and this indirectly ties us to Walla Walla, is deal with Poetry Out Loud business-spent the day yesterday taking those records out of my closet and into shipping boxes. I told above of the call to Linda and of learning that someone was threatening to buy some records. Turns out he did, and, after thirty years on the quiet, there has been a constant stream of poetry out loud business since. And it is a good thing, for I need it, and time in my studio, to treat wrong sky disease, which I seem to have contracted in Walla Walla.
Joel emails me, saying he can feel the distance. It is no fun to tease me by getting my name wrong and calling me "Clive" anymore, "because I can't see the slightly askance look in your eye." Yes, Walla Walla is fading; only a touch of wrong sky disease remains.
But to continue before memory fades entinely: we got back, Thursday, from lunch at the Petit Café, helped Sharon get her bags upstairs to her room, where she would retire and begin to write poetry. She must have gotten the muse's room because she was writing and speaking into her cassette recorder for hours each day.
My goal was to see whether 5 SPEED had arrived from the printer. I wanted to be armed for a splurge of poetry book bartering, and Joel didn't need my help at the moment in the windshield fixing quest, so I drove to The Temple. There is hum of poet conversation everywhere. Down stairs, in the bookstore proper, Travis, Clint, a bunch of young guys. Travis finds that a couple hundred copies of 5 SPEED did arrive that morning. Looking around I see another white-haired-long-hair. I guess correctly it is Hugh Fox, and he gives the nod of recognition sometimes exchanged between old hippies tho they've never met. It will be another day before he and I sit at the Mediterranean Café next door wolfing down gyros and baklavas and speaking of a parade of wives and children. (He had a parade of wives and children, I only a parade of wife and children.) Upstairs is a dance studio area, the auditorium, where we will read, and a kitchen. Here I check out the book table, where we poets hopefully place their wares. I run into Julian Raine who is placing a catalog of nudes she has drawn. There are lovely, clean of technique, natural, and with that paradoxical privacy many good nudes reflect. She is a poet too and we promise we will exchange books come Saturday night, when the last show is over. The loft above is a living quarters, it feels like. Or a studio, for there is art work all around. Artists living quarters perhaps. Something. Joel is here, speaking with Amanda and another young lady. He will need me to follow him to a garage, it turns out, where a young man with all manner of sockets and ratchets and expertise will do the windshield repair. Going out of The Temple, I meet Paul Nelson, with whom I have had some email correspondence, a poet whose improvisational poetry sustains exceptional flashes. He was with a lady whose name escapes me tho her face and smile remain clear.
Driving Joel back to Charles' house, I ask him, so who were you in Valga Krusa? He could not for certain answer that but he was in fact, back in the day, one who helped drive Charles to the psychiatric hospital.
Back at Charles' tents are going up in the back yard. One of those is Jim Bodeen's, one Steven Potter's. Jeremy Gaulke is on the scene. People whose work I know distinctly I meet for the first time. On the back porch I give Bodeen a copy of Ghost Trees and to my surprise he sits himself down and begins to read the fifteen page long poem right there. I step inside and Kluipchultz and Dan Raphael introduce themselves to me. Readers of The Temple (the magazine) and of Pacific Northwestern Spiritual Poetry will know the names well. I find a hammock on a balcony off the second floor and lay me out among the hubbub for a cat nap. Get up soon and go to the back porch again where Bodeen is still reading Ghost Trees. I sit down on the steps and study the light on grape vines and maples. Jim shuts the book, having finished, and graciously claps his hands to applaud the poem. I thank him. He speaks some of Robert Graves' The White Goddess, which I confess I have read only portions of. I am to read it again, in full, with attention, he says.
I don't remember having supper Thursday. Some handfuls of cheese perhaps. I had excitement for supper.