Robert Peake

This year marked the first anniversary of the passing of our son. Leading up to those difficult days, I was away at the first residency of the Pacific University MFA in writing program, shivering through an Oregon Winter. During the semester that followed, I studied with Joseph Millar, and began writing in earnest about grief, with his support. After the second residency, I studied with Sandra Alcosser, and began exploring the lyric and meditative traditions, deepening my understanding of the relationship between inner and outer experience, and therein finding a voice. I feel that I have made remarkable progress in my writing this year.

Later in the year, Pacific University’s MFA was named one of the top five low-residency programs in the country by Atlantic Monthly. This year, I also had one poem published, albeit belatedly, in our nation’s oldest literary magazine, and was a featured reader at several local venues. I also gave my first paid lecture on poetry and craft.

We returned to London this summer, and were sorry to leave. I walked in the graduation ceremony for my Doctorate in Spiritual Science, after seven years of transformative studies. And, when the 2007 Ojai Poetry Festival rolled around, I redesigned their website and orchestrated their online ticket sales.

I have written very little about technology in the past year, focusing my efforts much more on poetry and its significance, personally and universally. Still, this site has retained an audience of about four thousand unique visitors each month—although likely from a different demographic now than when my thoughts on PHP programming were widely syndicated. I have met some remarkable poets and readers through the blogosphere, and even broke down not long ago, after long resistance, to begin harassing my friends through social networking websites.

Several friends and acquaintances passed away this year, including the poet Sandford Lyne, who sped me on my way to Pacific with heartfelt encouragement and a letter of recommendation. The temporal and precious nature of life has never impressed upon me more. As the third residency of the MFA program approaches, and soon after that the second anniversary of our brief time with James, I marvel that such a rich, full year has passed, with me in it—writing, reading, loving—and learning to hope again.

Kudos to Phil Taggart for a rare feature in Ventura Life magazine detailing his extensive support of the Ventura-area poetry scene. The article also includes a striking combination of Phil’s poems overlaid against photos of his schizophrenic brother, Rick. A digital version of the entire magazine is available here. The “Living Askew” article begins on page 36. (Type 36 into the page display at the bottom, hit enter, and then double-click on the article to zoom in to a legible magnification.)

The current issue of Ventura Life also contains a complete reprint of Askew Issue 3, which Phil co-publishes, including one of my poems (page 126, at the bottom). It is rare for tireless supporters like Phil to receive recognition from mainstream press, and rare for new independent poetry publications (Askew being a broadsheet, no less) to get syndicated by more conventional channels—to have both happen at once is auspicious indeed.

Friend and MFA classmate Michelle Bitting just published her first chapbook, Blue Laws, with Finishing Line Press. I have pored over Michelle’s poems-in-progress during workshop, but it was a very different experience to regard this outstanding collection of finished poems, carefully arranged.

From the opening poem about her brother’s suicide, I was riveted. Michelle knows how to make a strong impact by staring life squarely in the face. However, in this collection, she also demonstrates great focus and care, commitment to each aspect of each story as it unfolds—line by line, and poem by poem—into something far more expansive than any straight narrative could hold.

In a poem like “The Sacrifice,” Bitting realizes some of the best results any single-stanza, free-verse poem can aspire to achieve—the careful build-up to a remarkable conclusion, a human revelation. She addresses the memory of her mother sewing costumes for her junior high play—“diaphanous number cut from a swell of black crepe,” building up to address her mother “in the hushed cool of your reserved seat, … the little bobbin of your heart / spinning inside its quiet nook while you watched me / do the hard, privileged work of feeling for both of us.” The poem is as tight as her mother’s stitch work, spoken with veracity and the best kind of sincerity—the kind that looks unflinchingly at the complexity of what is.

I am also invested in the themes explored in this book: grief, parenthood, and the trials of a a sensitive consciousness in the mundane brutality of this world—from dental surgery and her son’s autism to the horrors of the nightly news. This is a praiseworthy collection, sparkling with observation—worth picking up and taking in. A quick search of the blogosphere shows that one poet has already, in reading this book, identified Michelle as her hero. Bitting has accomplished what I hope one day to emulate: a remarkable, even heroic, debut.

I have heard, from multiple sources, that there is a movement afoot, especially within academia, to rebrand what I have known as avant garde or experimental poetry as “innovative poetry.” The phrase strikes me as redundant, if not tautological. All poetry worth reading innovates in some way upon language. Furthermore, the four-thousand-year history of written poetry has been punctuated and advanced almost exclusively through innovative techniques. The differential between the poetry of forbearers like Walt Whitman or Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the majority of other Nineteenth-century verse, is far greater than that of any contemporary experimental project as it is compared to mainstream poetry.

While contemporary experimental projects, which often pursue a particular aspect of poetry in the extreme, do advance the art—even as exercising isolated muscle groups improves fitness—labeling such efforts “innovative,” with all this implies about other projects, is the worst kind of synecdoche—as absurd as defending thumb wrestling as the ultimate sporting event. Allowing experimental poets to call themselves “innovative” is like allowing a political party to rename itself—not as Democrat, Republican, or Tory—but as “The Party Which Stands For All That Is Right And Good About Politics.”

Repackaging postmodernism is not the great project of our time, nor is narrowing the scope of poetics down to a few theoretical elements. We must call such bluffs. Any art, in fact, which requires hefty intellectual defense, is unlikely to weather the common sense of individuals who know, on instinct, what moves them. Certain forms of experimentalism do provide a valuable antithesis to traditions like lyricism, but it is only an emergent synthesis—a whole-body poetics, that stands, like a body, complete and functional without explanation—that can truly be called innovative. Making a play to label one’s project as representative of the most fundamental aspect of poetry—innovation—amounts to a dangerous kind of wordplay, if not an all-out attempt to legislate taste.

I was saddened to read that technology journalist Marc Orchant passed away this afternoon, having been unconscious for several days following a major heart attack. I only met Marc once in person, but he struck me as vibrant, fit, and extremely likable. He is survived by his wife and two children. If you feel moved to help support them through what must be an incredibly challenging holiday time, details on making a donation are available here.

Marc’s was a lightning-quick creative intelligence and, coupled with his love of technology, made for stimulating conversation and insightful reading on ZDNet and, later, blognation. The blogosphere is abuzz with tributes to his memory. For my part, I would like to extend my heartfelt condolences to his family, and hope that they are buoyed up by the support of friends and family during this time.

My friend and colleague Kelly Forrister (née O’Brien) stopped by this evening to hand me an autographed copy of Seamus Heaney’s New Selected Poems: 1966-1987. She studied with him and several others on a summer course at Trinity College, Dublin, and had pints with him after class. This was just after his appointment at Oxford, and before his Nobel Prize. I am touched that she would give me something so personally meaningful.

Funnily enough, although we only live a few pretty blocks apart in the sleepy idyll that is Ojai, she found out about my rekindled interest in Heaney from this website. Who says blogging doesn’t have its rewards? In the end I have only to say: thank you, Kelly. I will use it well.