Articles in the Category of Community

How to be a Poet Every Day

While poetry is a product, being a poet is, to me, a worthwhile and lifelong pursuit. In my latest column for Read Write Poem, I dig beneath the question of writing daily, to answer how one can, in fact, engage life as a poet every day.

Some of the tactics may surprise you. Would you believe that actually limiting your writing time to shorter bursts can make you more prolific? Or that getting organized might make you more creative?

Check out this month’s Poetry Advice Column for more unusual approaches that just might help you live a bit more like a poet every day.

An Unexpected Dedication

Robert Peake reads a poem next to "Elliot" the bear

Photo by Randy Graham

I broke away from work to attend the dedication ceremony for my neighbor Mark Benkert’s new memorial sculpture to the Aliso Street Bear (a.k.a “Elliot”). In introducing me to read the poem I wrote dedicated to the bear, Mark also mentioned something remarkable about the process of sculpting the memorial.

For both Mark and I, the loss of the bear resonated deeply with the loss of our sons. As Mark was inscribing the letters “J” and “B”, the initials of his son, Jonah Benkert, the “B” also read much like a “P”–and he mentioned that “J.P.” reminded him of our own son, James Peake. Needless to say that by the time I took the microphone, I was nearly unable to speak.

Yet I managed to read my poem, honoring the bear, our sons, our community. The rest of the dedication meant a lot to me–from written poems and prose pieces, to impromptu verbal tributes, a song, and drumming. It was also a moment of catharsis for our community, coming together once more to honor all that the bear brought to us.

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“What Should You Learn From Rejection Letters?”

The first article in my new series for Read Write Poem is now available, tackling the painful and often taboo topic of rejection letters head-on. It’s not something poets tend to admit to receiving, let alone talk about with their peers.

Yet rejection is a natural and necessary (albeit sometimes painful) part of the writing business. Asking what you can get out of the experience is just plain smart. So, in that spirit, I have done my best to serve up fairly simple, practical advice with a dash of humor and a healthy side of encouragement.

I hope you enjoy it!

The Poetry of Sandford Lyne

“The half-time announcer at the 1969 Superbowl football game gave us this to consider: ‘The band will now execute the traditional designs and symbols of our national heritage.’ As a one-man band, I try to accomplish the same thing in my poems.”

-Sandford Lyne

Loch Raven Review has put together a wonderful online retrospective of the life and work of Sandford Lyne, bringing together scores of poems from several different books, and a few of his letters.

He was a tremendous man.

We became friends over a love of poetry, and a similar spiritual outlook. When James came into our lives, and left so quickly, Sandy was able to offer the inexplicable kinship of one who had also lost a child.

Sandy dedicated his life to working with children, teaching poetry workshops to over 50,000 students in his lifetime. Re-reading so many wonderful poems online, and discovering a few I had not read before, brings a little of Sandy’s purposeful kindness, gentle curiosity, and soft spoken wisdom back to me.

Enjoy.

Interdisciplinarian

Ventana Monthly August 2009I had a great time recently meeting Julie B. Montgomery, a painter who incorporates words in her works, and Ken McAlpine, a wily travel writer, in a round-table discussion for the August issue of Ventana Monthly. “An Author, a Painter, and a Poet” sounds like the beginning of a joke–but turned out to be the start of a great conversation. The editor, Matt Katz, then focused our lively banter into a print article on “the quiet art of words.”

I also had the pleasure of reading some poems on Thursday night for the opening of the “Profusion of Thoughts” gallery exhibit at the Ventura County Administration building. Thanks to the ingenuity of the Ventura County Arts Council, this government building with its brutalist exterior plays host inside to an exciting collection of paintings and sculptures, making it one of the most well-trafficked galleries in the county (and, no doubt, a much nicer place to work.) This particular exhibit featured works from the Ojai Studio Artists–a friendly group of talented visual artists who live in my own backyard.

Engaging in these kinds of interdisciplinary dialogs is good for me. I begin to understand the peculiarities of my medium–words–through conversations with painters and sculptors. I understand more about the aims of poetry through conversations with prose writers. And, when it comes to the discipline of art, I find we all have a surprising amount in common. Julie, Ken, and I discussed a lot that didn’t make it to the page–about finding freedom in limitations, the discipline of craftsmanship, surrendering to life’s constraints, the inadequacies inherent in any medium, and the “total adequacy,” as Heaney puts it, that comes through when a work of art transcends its materials.

More and more, as I engage with other artists, I begin to see myself, not as a poet, but as an artist whose particular medium happens to be words. Strangely enough, this mindset seems to propel me into a more exciting relationship with words themselves, using words, as I said in our discussion (quoting Marvin Bell), to get beyond words–even as a painter gets beyond the paint. Yet even as I identify more with artists in general, my appreciation for the strengths and limitations of poetry itself has never been keener. It seems that, even as specificity in writing is often the means to evoking something universal, the more I identify universally as an artist, the more I embrace being a poet specifically.

Poetry and Generosity

This is an open note of thanks to Paul Fericano. I had a great time reading at the Broken Word series at Farmer and the Cook last night, and listening to Danielle Camacho, P.Lyn Middleton, Quin Mallory, Paul Fericano, Crystal Salas, Steve Sprinkel, and Johnny Fonteyn weave words into the warm summer night. Afterward, I got to talking with Paul, and he showed me one of the gorgeous, limited-edition offset-print broadsides he creates. On remarking how much I liked it, he gave it to me. And then another. In fact, a whole set.

Strangely enough, this is not the first time I have gone to a poetry reading and come home with a gift. It seems to me that the best kinds of writing communities have, at their heart, a spirit of generosity. This was certainly my experience in the MFA program, where my advisers gave so much more than what was asked of them by the university. And so, with so much talk about “greatness” in poetry, I would like to propose a new definition–that poets not be measured so much by what the Paris Review says about their twelfth collection–but by how poetry inspires them to keep giving back. The product of great poets is great poems. But, so often in my experience, the by-product is generosity.


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