Poetry

“Road Sign on Interstate 5,” which received an honorable mention in the Rattle poetry prize and first appeared in Rattle #30, is now available on the Rattle website both as text and as an audio recording of me reading the poem.

The simplified tale of this poem’s creation is that I wrote it almost entirely in one sitting. But the more complete story is that it actually represents a kind of revision of several previous, less successful attempts at writing about my experience growing up on the U.S.-Mexico border.

I had seen the immigrant crossing sign numerous times during trips through San Diego. But it was not until I began to explain the significance of the sign to my wife, an Englishwoman, that I realized its symbolic power. My explanation of the human circumstances behind the sign and its necessity left her in tears. Sometime later, this poem came into focus on the page. Enjoy.

Today I had the honor of giving the student speech at the 2009 Pacific University commencement ceremony. Here is the text of that speech.


Associate Provost Wilkes, Dean Hayes, Vice President Akers, Ms. Washburn, faculty, staff, graduates, alumni, family, and friends—good afternoon. Today we celebrate our completion of the requirements for Pacific University’s Master of Fine Arts in Writing degree, and a milestone for each of us in our ongoing education as writers. This also marks the fifth year of this MFA program’s existence. And if any program has earned the right to act its age, this one has. If memory serves me, this involves spontaneous tantrums followed by graham cracker cookies and a nap. At least, that’s what I liked best about being five. It was also the age when I dictated my first poem to my kind and patient mother. It ran seven pages. And, although I have learned a lot since then, today I would like to be brief in simply reminding us all of some truths about this program, and about writing, we all already know—but might want to hear repeated.

I would not have been able to complete an MFA in writing poetry while holding down a job as a technology executive had I not been a longtime practitioner of the GTD^® methodology. In a recently released podcast, David Allen, my boss and the inventor of GTD, asked me about how the GTD concept of the ubiquitous capture tool relates to poetic inspiration. (That conversation begins around 16:56.) My process has evolved considerably in the past few years, from capturing phrases and lines whenever they came through my head to “assemble” later into a poem, to establishing a regular practice of opening up to the muse. This shift sees me capturing fewer individual lines in the moment, and focusing more on getting my head clear of work and personal responsibilities—by using GTD—so that when I do sit down to write, I can slip through the keyhole unencumbered into that poetic space.

The practice of capturing inspiration in the moment is nothing new to artists and writers. After the Ojai Poetry Fest Fundraiser, I had a stimulating conversation with a fellow writer who also happens to be a journalist. As our chat got interesting, he whipped out a pad and paper, seemingly on reflex, and began to take notes. He was “off duty” in the sense that he wasn’t taking notes for a news story—but it got me thinking that if one is, indeed, a student of life, there is no “off duty.” And a good student takes good notes about subjects that fascinate. The difference GTD makes, of course, is that it presents a systematic approach for what to do with those notes—including tracking any resulting commitments to oneself or others, and executing appropriate action and regular review in order to make one’s dreams more than just a scribble on a notepad.

So, in case I haven’t said it lately, thank you, David, for bringing this methodology into my life, helping me to bring appropriate focus and attention to the many different worlds I inhabit. The gift of being more present in my life is truly precious.

At the start of each of my four semesters in the MFA program, I posted a call to help me find poets for my student reading lists. The responses were wonderful. (You can still read my requests, and the suggestions for my first, second, third, and fourth semesters on this site.)

Recently, Val and I have been spring cleaning books—since we had reached the point where we needed to either buy another bookshelf (we have six lining the walls of our small cottage), or cull the herd. We ended up selling about fifty books back to Powell’s, and gave away lots of others. With the MFA commencement right around the corner, our hotel in Portland booked just blocks from the main Powell’s store, and my $75 in store credit now converted to a gift card that’s burning a hole in my pocket, the only question left is: what should I buy?

I have been enjoying Yehuda Amichai lately, and want to get some Ibrahim Nasrallah. Newer poets like Shaindel Beers are on my radar. And one could do worse than, say, to stock up on some William Carlos Williams. But I’d love suggestions—particularly if you’ve read something recently that, as Dickinson says, takes the top of your head off. Something you would want to thrust into my hands with a wild gleam in your eye and say, “man, you gotta check this out.”

I came down from the hills tonight to hear Timothy Green read from his debut book American Fractal. Tim’s work is sonorous, fragmentary, and he reads it well. During his reading a disheveled man kept shuffling papers in his backpack. Afterward, he introduced himself to me as “John,” a “published poet.” He said he, too, lived in Ojai once, before he lost his home. He reeked of alcohol, making it hard to be near him. “Everywhere I go,” he said, “I make the ground safe for barefoot children.”

Poetry seems to attract highly sensitive people—sometimes vulnerably so—more than other art forms. Perhaps it allows us to protect the imagined children that are our own barefooted selves by picking up sharp fragments wherever we go, and assembling them into something sparkling and musical, as Tim did tonight. Or perhaps, like John, we are simply clearing a pathway, or a place to sleep. I was moved by Tim, whose love of poetry has led him through extensive study, and to editing a well-known journal. I was moved also by John, no less possessed of a poet’s turn of mind, who reflected to me, once again, the universality of poetic need. I wish them both a peaceful rest, wherever they lay their head tonight.

I received my contributor’s copies of Silk Road Issue 4 today. The journal is a publication of Pacific University, where I recently completed my MFA, and bills itself as “a journal of place.” This issue is bursting with tales from Minnesota, Kentucky, and Africa, and poems from the Deep South, Provence, and Mt. Fuji. My poem, entitled “How Can a Boy Hate Fishing?,” touches on the landscape of my childhood in the Imperial Valley—a desert farming community on the U.S.-Mexico border. The publication is beautifully done, and I look forward to perusing the stories and poems with interest.

“Even the pick / of those we share our pulse with shares this jolt / beneath the ribs, this double click of love. / How could they cope with even just one heart?”

I have Jilly Dybka to thank for sending Andrew Philip my way. Since I have written openly about the difficult and transformational experience of losing our first-born son, she must have recognized the the rare opportunity our being in touch provides. I am glad she did. It is an experience Andrew and I share.

Naturally, I was keen to read his debut book. What I discovered was not only personally moving, but profoundly accomplished work. Andrew writes in both English and Scots, placing himself in a tradition stretching back to John Barbour and encompassing Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns. As an American, I feel under-qualified to comment on the unique cultural and socio-political implications of this dual-language approach. (And, I must admit that I gave the online Dictionary of the Scots Language a good workout in making my way through some of the poems.) However, both as a poet in love with lyricism, and a father who lost an infant son, I can not resist adding my praise and commendation to the acclaim this book is gathering.

Andrew writes not only in Scots, a Germanic (not Gaelic) language, but in German as well. In “Berlin / Berlin / Berlin” he combines all three. If it is true, as Robert Frost tells us, that “Poetry is what gets lost in translation,” there is a poetry uniquely found between the languages by Andrew Philip. Wildly associative, and at times experimental, the musicality of these poems lend congruity and veracity even as they burst with linguistic mischief. This is, above all, a collection full of life—which is what makes the moments in which poems touch, lightly but unflinchingly, upon grief, all the more profound. From the premonitory vision of a “difficult, unasked-for joy” in “Pedestrian” through the incredible moment in “Still” when grief rewrites the resurrection, announcing in broken lines across the page, “he is not here / he is not here / he is not here,” these poems are rapturous even in despair. Sentimentality and easy words seem as though they might never have been invented in the remarkable worldview Andrew hands us in this book, “in a language,” as he says at the end of “Tonguefire Night,” “yet to be born.”

As part of Salt Publishing’s innovative cyclone virtual book tour, I will have the pleasure of interviewing Andrew in about a month. I hope you will join me. Salt has also recently launched a highly successful “just one book” campaign to save this well-regarded imprint from financial doom. If you do choose to support world-class poetry publishing by purchasing just one, or one hundred, books from Salt, be sure to make your first The Ambulance Box.

I received a nice letter from Indiana Review yesterday informing me that one of my poems was picked as a second runner-up in the 2009 Indiana Review Poetry Prize by Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey. It appears the other runner-up poem is by the same author that won the prize—Tom Christopher. Congratulations to Tom and the finalists. His poem is guaranteed publication in a forthcoming issue of Indiana Review. As a subscriber, I look forward to reading the poem.

Donald Mace Williams’ “Wolf” sees the ancient epic hero Beowulf don a Stetson and trade his broadsword for a Colt revolver. Ranch hands are a fitting analogue for the warrior-bands of Dark Ages Northern Europe and, though colloquialisms and rhyming couplets give this work a distinctly “cowboy” feel, the poem goes far beyond the novelty of its theme. Amidst the heroism and monster-fights, there is a deep sadness in “Beowulf”—of a people whose fate is uncertain, at the end of an age. In the introduction to his translation of “Beowulf,” Seamus Heaney says of the poem’s ending:

The Geat woman who cries out in dread as the flames consume the body of her dead lord could come straight from a late-twentieth-century news report, from Rwanda or Kosovo; her keen is a nightmare glimpse into the minds of people who have survived traumatic, even monstrous events and who are now being exposed to a comfortless future. We immediately recognize her predicament and the pitch of her grief and find ourselves the better for having them expressed with such adequacy and dignity and unforgiving truth…

Even as the original epic grapples with its monstrous past, so, too does “Wolfe” take up the difficult subject of the settlement of the American West. In one passage, a ranch hand recalls his Colonel ordering them to kill one thousand Indian horses, telling us, “They say / The white bones made, in later years, / A heap like bent and bleaching spears.” From this dark past, the rage of the ancient wolf-like creature standing in for Grendel seems an embodiment of the wild land itself. This sense of weary sadness and regret carries through the heroic deeds and distinctly western theme to elevate “Wolfe” from simple legend into a more complex, human sphere. Musical, compelling, and timeless, Williams has given us an insightful new take on one of the oldest stories in English, fusing it with an honest look at American history.

Never before in human history has such potential existed for the large-scale digital analysis of text. Thanks to the Google search engine index of the world wide web, and the emerging Google Books project, which aims to index books, an enormous amount of text exists in indexed digital form, and this base is growing constantly. But the mechanisms by which digital texts and their indices are currently used to judge the relative quality, value, or meaning of a work of text are relatively crude as compared to how humans perceive and relate to text, and especially literature, which is text as art. This begs a chain reaction of questions: are there gains to be made in the fields of literature or linguistics by exploiting this digital base of text? Is it possible to derive aesthetic principles sufficiently logical to work as algorithms for the analysis of digital text? Would analysis based on such principles yield new insights into our relationship to language and literature? Could such analysis contribute toward something like a greater computational “understanding” of text, with implications for improving search engine results, speech recognition, and computerized translation? These questions fascinate me.