The Writing Life Too

Morning sky is a pale, smoky blue. I taught writing workshops at the Write on the Sound Conference last weekend in the lovely town of Edmonds, Washington and on Saturday afternoon attended the talk given by the keynote speaker, Samuel Green. He is a poet and his talk was entitled Singing the World into Being: The Discipline & Consolation of Poetry. He is the first Poet Laureate of Washington State, has taught poetry in Ireland, and lives with his wife on a remote island without electricity where they run the Brooding Heron Press. This press specializes in producing the poetry of the likes of Donald Hall, Gary Snyder, and Denise Levertov. He has other accolades, but it was clear that the man who has chosen a wardrobe of all black to make his life easier since he travels a lot as poet laureate, spouted poetry and the knowledge of poetry with such ease that I felt practically illiterate in his company.

Green began the talk by telling a story from his boyhood. When he and his brother were together in the back seat and started acting up his father would recite poetry to quiet them. This led to a lifetime interest in story poems and poetry of all types which broadened into trying his hand at writing them. When he fell in love at age 10 he wrote a poem to impress the girl of his dreams. He read that poem to the audience and when he finished, sitting near the front of the theater, I started clapping. To which he replied, “Where were you forty years ago?”

Throughout his talk he wove in the poems of his friends and favorites, ee cummings, Robert Service, Marilyn Hacker, Jane Kenyon, John O’Leary, and Hayden Carruth who died about a week ago. In Carruth’s New York Times obituary it was written: “He had a greater variety of poems than almost anybody,” said the poet Galway Kinnell, a longtime friend. “He was interested — superinterested — in everything and he could write about anything.” You can find poems by Carruth and other poets at www.poemhunter.com.

But mostly Green starting talking about how he turned to language to figure out his struggles, to allow the heart to speak. To quell the terror of not being able to connect. And as he talked, I remembered listening to NPR in the days following the 9/11 attacks. They ran a show that featured a number of poets reading their favorite poems, offering solace. I recalled how the voice of W.S. Merwin came over the airwaves from France and as I listened to him read, as Green said, I was willing to come out differently on the other side of the poem. And did. And for the first time since those terrible events I felt like we were all going to be able to go on.

After Green’s talk, drunk on poetry, I slipped into a Thai restaurant and ordered tea and a bowl of Tom Kha soup. Maybe it was the poetry, or the autumn afternoon, looking at the brooding sky, trees shivering in the autumn wind, and people bustling past bent against the wind, but it was probably the best bowl of soup I’ve ever eaten. The soup was creamy from coconut milk and had been simmered with complex flavors of lime, chili, and lemongrass.

Later I walked up to the Edmonds library and settled into a chair with a book of poems by W.S. Merwin and another by Ted Kooser, Winter Morning Walks. They were written as postcards to his friend Jim Harrison. In Kooser’s book he wrote poems, mostly haikus, about his walks as he was recovering from cancer and his poems are filled with acute awareness of his surroundings and all seem touched with the fragility of the human body. In the preface to his book, Kooser wrote: “In the autumn of 1998, during my recovery from surgery and radiation for cancer, I began taking a two-mile walk each morning. I’d been told by my radiation oncologist to stay out of the sun for a year because of skin sensitivity, so I exercised before dawn, hiking the isolated country roads near where I live, sometimes with my wife but most often alone.”

Each poem begins with a brief comment on the weather and conditions. If you’ve never read Kooser’s work, you’re missing his painter’s eye and deft hand with metaphor. The library is perched on a hill far above the harbor and was lined in windows. Between reading poems I watched the ever-changing sky as clouds in shades of funereal gray and cigarette smoke and fresh bruises scuttled northward as if heading beyond Canada.

Now that I’m home, I’m going to make my own version of Tom Kha and watch the autumn sky from here, and read more poetry. I’m going to be traveling down to Newport, Oregon to teach a class on Story People on October 25. For more information write me or check out the description at Craig’s List. Happy writing to all.