Silicon Valley Poet Laureate?

Who knew? I live here, and I didn't know.

Nils Peterson is the grand old poet of San Jose, that's true, but I'm not sure his old orchard slow poems are representative of the nasty snatch and squeal I think of when I think of Silicon Valley. Still, who am I to tell?

Poetry Center San Jose has a good range of information on him and his work.

A very cool thing he is doing is having a contest of 13-syllable poetry lines, which he will assemble into a word collage. I heard him on the radio describing how this is like an elegy -- interesting poetic form to use for a up-and-coming valley. See my comment above about his old-timer's view.

Santa Clara County recently chose its first-ever poet laureate. Nils Peterson was named to the honorary post, and one of the first things he's done is to put together an unusual competition. He wants county residents to submit a single poetic line about life in the Valley. One hundred lines will be chosen for a special 'word collage.' We take a peek at some of the early submissions. [If you're a Santa Clara Valley resident, you can submit your own line of poetry. Email your 9-13 syllable line to poet.laureate@ceo.sccgov.org or by mail to Santa Clara County Poet Laureate, Office of Public Affairs, County of Santa Clara, 70 West Hedding St., 11th Floor East Wing, San Jose, CA 95110.]

A nine to thirteen syllable line? Here's mine.

With my wet laundry, I startle a doe.

My Mother's Day Poem

Still Life for Mother's Day

Who's making pancakes, I wake

to their call, not really, I've been long

awake. There's no wrapping

paper, get out of my way. You’ve
gone out to buy the steak, then bring

back lavender, pink, white sweet

peas, so many they don't fit

in the vase. I asked for something

smaller, quiet, something like a song
for my heart, but today's treat
is they -- one by one -- leave me.
Lozenges for my wounded lips,
oil for the bitten teat. Sunday
regular with laundry on the line
and my babies fighting
in the kitchen over their place
in the deep hole they have dug through
me with you. It should be they,
but on Mother’s Day, you
flip the hot cakes in the pan,
slip your hand into my shirt,
ask me still love. I do.

The photos are from my son's birthday, but you get the picture.

Espaliered Pear Trees

Kathy, a gardener who's blog I follow, uses some great words to describe her garden and her hard work. I had to look up "espaliered" -- always the right thing to do when you are a serious poet.

According to North Carolina State University: Espalier (ess-PAL-yer) is the practice of controlling plant growth so that it grows relatively flat against a structure such as a wall, fence, or trellis. In the 17th Century, espalier originally referred to the frame or trellis on which the plant was trained. Today, espalier refers to both the plant and the horticultural technique of actually training the plant. Espaliered plants can be used to create a focal point and as a form of art. In an area where space is limited or where a plant is needed to accent a large blank wall an espaliered plant can be an outstanding landscape feature. A mature espalier plant will catch the eye of almost any visitor to your home.

I have not written a poem about this phenomenon, but I will. In the meantime, pictures.

Poetry Chair

Good for you, Albert!

A chair made of poetry books, happy in the hills and sunshine of Marin's hills and wind. (Click the photo to read the article.)

I have some books I could have donated, had I known you were in need. Shall we make an entire dining room set??

Poem In the Making -- Or -- Process Flow??

This is a the cover of a thank you note I received from one of the third graders who came to hear me speak at Discovery Day, Regnart Elementary School's annual day when community members come and tell the kids what they do for a living.

Even though I don't make my living as a poet, I love to talk to the students about how a poet lives and works. They love me, too, which is the best reason to go. I get four third grade classes, for about 35 minutes each. We write a poem together as a class, I give them prompts, they shout out, we write on the board, we argue about which word is best, and their classroom teacher writes down the finished project. Then I answer the inevitable quesitons: "do you have a book" and "are you famous" (no, and no) and we all break for lunch. Then their teachers make them write me thank-you notes, which I love love love, especially the ones that say "Mrs. Brown, you are the BEST POET EVER." Who wouldn't love it??

Anyway, this year, one of the boys drew this on his thank you note. It's a picture of the process -- me writing on the board, the kids all shouting out their ideas. I love it, because it's not one of the overly cute and perfectly scripted letters that third grade girls are so good at. I showed it to my boss, and he was amazed -- this kid may have a future in business! What a kick.

And here's the poem we were creating:

School

Third grade floats as high as Ms. Cavanaugh.

We are smiley, shyly, shoelaces,

highly smart.

We float to another galaxy, like a television.

School obeys, does what we tell it to do,

comes up, starts dancing

with screamy, colorful moving pictures like a TV,

floating

squeezed tightly in a box.

Don't you just love it??

Haiku for Jackson

Rain in May, and hot.
Get ready, boy, it's coming,
Not what you expect.




Happy Birthday to my boy, who's 13. Ready or not. Here we come.

Saturday Might Be The Day

Will I write today? There is still hope, even though the furnace is broken in my house, even though it's raining in California in May, even though I'm cold, Jackson has a baseball game, and I must do the laundry, I might still write a poem.



In the meantime, there is fabulous poetry news in the world: After 341 Years, British Poet Laureate Is a Woman! Even though I don't know anything about Carol Ann Duffy's poems, I like several things about her already. She has three names, one of which is the same as an entire beloved branch of my family (Duffy) and she's got great book covers. Here's a glimpse.



"In Out of Fashion Carol Ann Duffy selects the best and most stylish contemporary poets and asks them in turn to select their favourite poem, from another time or culture, which looks at how we dress, or undress, how we cover up or reveal. In these vibrant poems, we are shown how clothes, fashion and jewellery are both a necessary and luxurious, a practical and sensual, a liberating or repressing part of our lives."

If she's really collecting poems about clothes, then she's my kind of woman/poet: one for Laundry Songs!

More about her at the Guardian, and the Academy of American Poets. Harder to find any of her poems published on line -- at least in the obvious first choices that Google coughs up. Here's one, called 'History' that I found at AAP. It's not very nice, but staggeringly powerful and beautiful. As usual, Blogger has mangled the formatting, so check out the AAP link to see it in its intended shape.

History

She woke up old at last, alone,
bones in a bed, not a tooth
in her head, half dead, shuffled
and limped downstairs
in the rag of her nightdress,
smelling of pee.

Slurped tea, stared
at her hand--twigs, stained gloves--
wheezed and coughed, pulled on
the coat that hung from a hook
on the door, lay on the sofa,
dozed, snored.

She was History.
She'd seen them ease him down
from the Cross, his mother gasping
for breath, as though his death
was a difficult birth, the soldiers spitting,
spears in the earth;

been there
when the fisherman swore he was back
from the dead; seen the basilicas rise
in Jerusalem, Constantinople, Sicily; watched
for a hundred years as the air of Rome
turned into stone;

witnessed the wars,
the bloody crusades, knew them by date
and by name, Bannockburn, Passchendaele,
Babi Yar, Vietnam. She'd heard the last words
of the martyrs burnt at the stake, the murderers
hung by the neck,

seen up-close
how the saint whistled and spat in the flames,
how the dictator strutting and stuttering film
blew out his brains, how the children waved
their little hands from the trains. She woke again,
cold, in the dark,

in the empty house.
Bricks through the window now, thieves
in the night. When they rang on her bell
there was nobody there; fresh graffiti sprayed
on her door, shit wrapped in a newspaper posted
onto the floor.