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Feature: The Marinic verses
Our county's rich poetry community shares a common refrain—rhyme is on our side

by Joy Lanzendorfer

Just under most people's radar, the Marin County poetry community is quietly flourishing. Not only does Marin have some of the country's best poets—including Robert Hass, Jane Hirshfield and Kay Ryan, among others—local poets are busy publishing books, giving readings, creating literary journals and meeting for writing groups and workshops.

And yet, most people who live here have no idea that this community is right in their midst.

"Even though Marin has this affluent, erudite population, people here can be intimidated by poetry," says Margaret Stawowy, who is on the board of directors for the Marin Poetry Center, a nonprofit established to nurture the growth of literary arts. "Sometimes poetry can be opaque and difficult to understand. I came to it by accident. It was never academic for me, more of a sensual experience. It's kind of like opera in that way—it's very enjoyable, but there has to be a spark to get you into it."

To help raise the profile of the local poetry community, the Marin Poetry Center is working with the Marin Arts Council to appoint the first Marin County Poet Laureate. Poets laureate in Sonoma County and San Francisco have done much to draw attention to literary arts in their areas. So, when oral historian Richard Brown first suggested establishing a poet laureate in the county to the Marin Poetry Center, his idea was met with enthusiasm. Everyone had wanted to create the position for some time, but no one had gotten around to it before Brown. He believes that the county will name the first poet laureate sometime in 2008.

"There has been considerable attention to other art forms in Marin County, but not so much in poetry," says Brown. "The time has come to bring attention to it in a broader way. The time is right for a poet laureate."

Of course, Marin can lay claim to another poet laureate. Robert Hass, who grew up in San Rafael and still has a house in Inverness, served as the United States Poet Laureate from 1995 to 1997. During his term, Hass's poetry, which often deals with the natural world of Northern California, drew attention to national environmental issues.

Now, 10 years later, Hass still believes in the role of the poet laureate, especially when it comes to its impact on young people.

"Honoring poets and sharing out among practicing poets in a community is always a good idea, I think," he says. "In many parts of the country, children who grew up touched by the power or the magic or the truthfulness for beauty in some art form—poetry or music or visual arts or fiction—have no idea about how to get there from where they are. In the Bay Area, and all over Marin, there are really interesting practicing artists [and poets laureate] who can function as role models for kids and for young adults."

• • • •

LIKE EMILY DICKINSON hiding her poems under teacups, poetry is written in secret as a private expression of the self. Some poets experience life deeply and use poetry to express the subtler shades of emotions many of us ignore. Other poets explore private questions, intellectual or otherwise, through wordplay or imagery in the hope of revealing something new about life. Writing poetry, then, is a solitary act. There is a reason that the prevailing stereotype of a poet is a loner laboring away in obscurity—preferably in a garret or on a cliff top.

Given this, it may seem odd that a poet would want to connect with other writers. And yet, many poets depend on their writing community, especially in Marin.

"I don't want to call our poetry community incestuous," says Terry Scheidt, chairman of the board of the Marin Poetry Center and a poet who will be releasing a book titled Husk this summer. "But there's a lot going on and we are all reading each other's work and writing to each other."

Some of this is practical: Poets depend on other writers to exist. Since poetry books don't make money, large publishers rarely buy them. So small presses, many of them run by other poets, are left to publish the books. Too often, poetry is a labor of love protected by those who love it the most.

Connecting with other writers also makes writing less lonely. Poets act as mentors, fans and audiences for each other's work. Jane Hirshfield was a founding member of the Marin Poetry Center and sat on the board of directors in 1982. After, her most recent collection, was named Best Book of 2006 by the Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle and is the only title written by a Marin resident to be nominated for the Northern California Book Awards this year. Though she has less time to be involved in the local community these days, knowing it is there, she says, "buoys you up."

"Writers are not total hermits," she says. "Connecting with other poets helps you feel that what you're doing isn't a selfish act and that you aren't doing it alone. You can hear other people say, 'Yes, this touches me, that moved me.' It acts as a bridge to other human beings, so that the most solitary part of us is touched by the most solitary part of others."

These days, Hirshfield's poetry community is no longer limited to Marin. Her work has taken her all over the world. Earlier this year, she attended poetry festivals in the United Kingdom and later on she will be traveling to the Middle East to attend a symposium of 30 writers to talk about justice.

"It's one of the strongest paradoxes of my life now," says Hirshfield. "Poetry is something I began doing completely alone from childhood on as a solitary act of self-preservation and rescue. Now I'm running around all over the world talking to strangers.

"But," she adds. "Language is like that. It's both solitary and communal."

However, not all poets need to spend time with other writers. Kay Ryan prefers to keep her distance from the poetry community, although she has made a few connections that are significant to her, including her friendship with Hirshfield.

"Community is not very important to me, although I couldn't get along without Jane Hirshfield," says Ryan. "But for me, poetry isn't what I want to talk about. I write it, I read it, I love it, it's essential to me—but it isn't essential to my social life."

• • • •

RYAN GREW UP in the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert. Her father was a well driller and she has described her mother as a "nervous person" who didn't like noise, so Ryan was raised without a TV or radio. For the last 34 years, Ryan has taught remedial English at College of Marin in Kentfield. Then in 2005, her sixth book, The Niagara River, won the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize; the award-givers recognized it as an "extraordinary body of work."

Ryan's compact poems are full of intricate wordplay, internal and external rhymes, and wit. In most of the articles written about her, she is described as an outsider from the poetry world in part because her style isn't like the longer narrative style that is popular today, and because she didn't move in the circles many poets come up in—she didn't get an MFA in creative writing from a prestigious school, for example.

"I think every poet ought to hope they're an outsider," says Ryan. "In the sense that the only thing they ought to be gaining recognition for is the quality of the work, not the quality of who you know. And I don't know how you know anything new if you aren't in some sense on the outside and seeing something in a way it hasn't been seen before."

She laughs when asked whether poetry ever seemed like a viable career option. Not only did poetry never seem like a career to Ryan, that was its appeal. She wrote it simply for the pleasure of creating something private for herself, which is why she never went into teaching it.

"I wanted to keep what was important to me private to me," she says. "I didn't want to talk about poetry or teach literature and confuse my private perverse contemplation with my job."

As a young woman, Ryan wasn't particularly concerned with how to make a living. She earned both a B.A. and an M.A. in English; she began work on a Ph.D. in literary criticism at UC Irvine, but never completed it because she didn't like the idea of being an expert in the subject. So she took a job at College of Marin teaching basic English skills.

"When working on my Ph.D., I realized suddenly, Oh my God, I'm going to be a doctor of literary criticism. People were going to want to talk to me about it and I would have to answer questions," she laughs. "At that age, it was almost beneath me to consider how I would earn my living. I had no job skills other than to teach, so I made a living doing that—a small living, but I was happy to trade that for time. Fewer professional obligations meant more time to woolgather."

Today, Ryan has even more time for woolgathering. She writes lying down in bed in the morning. First, she reads something to stimulate her mind, and then, she starts "fooling on something," usually a question that has been bothering her.

"I'll begin with a little bewilderment that is in my mind, and I'll set down a few words on paper," she says. "And then I will fall upon a soft spot, and find a way into something."

Writing gives Ryan a feeling that she has created something, as if she has made her mark "with a hammer or a piece of stone."

"It's a high," she says. "It's also a terrific low. Failing at writing a poem is almost physically painful—it's like poison going through my veins, to work for hours on something and to know I haven't done it."

Like Ryan, Hirshfield writes in the morning in bed in privacy and silence. She is not the kind of poet who can work in a crowded cafe, she says. She has been known to use the back of discarded drafts of old poems for new first drafts, using her old failures to create new work.

Hirshfield was born in New York and moved to San Francisco in 1974 where she studied at the San Francisco Zen Center. She has lived in Marin County since 1979, and in Mill Valley since 1982. Success came early for Hirshfield. She won a national poetry prize when she was still in college, published her first poem in The Nation and her third or fourth poem in The New Yorker. In 1988, when her second book, Of Gravity & Angels, came out along with her co-translation of two Japanese poets, she had what she called her "coming out party." In one year, she did 35 readings.

Since then, she has gone on to win numerous awards and receive fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the NEA and the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations. Although publications and awards are gratifying, the real measure of success for Hirshfield is more personal: It hangs upon finishing each poem.

"For me, success is writing a poem," she says. "And then I can rest on that a few days, and then I'm a failure again because I haven't written the next poem. Success is momentary, fragile and vanishing. When the poem is done, I'm not writing anymore, and then I'm nothing but a failure."

Her most recent book, After, deals with both public and private tragedy. The first poem in the book is about 9/11 and the last deals with the Christmas tsunami of 2004. In between, there are poems about Hirshfield's personal tragedies, including the death of her father, sister and several friends.

After explores coping with a life that has been fractured by what Hirshfield calls "a tsunami of grief."

"The point isn't to box up grief in a pretty set of words and be done with it, but to feel the grief and look at how it enriches life," says Hirshfield. "Certainly for me, writing poetry is a continual process to say yes to and affirm the things that are the most difficult in life. It's an engagement I can't find through anything other than poetry."

• • • •

IT SEEMS THAT people are always debating the health of poetry. Although it's indisputable that fewer people read poems than they did pre-TV, no one is sure exactly how much the art has actually suffered from the advent of technology. One thing is for certain: People seem to have misconceptions about what poetry is. Scheidt ran into this problem firsthand one day when picking up her child from school.

"I mentioned that I wrote poetry to another mom and she said, 'Isn't that kind of a dead art?'" she says. "Oh brother. People think of poetry as little old ladies or guys in berets in North Beach scribbling on notepads."

Overcoming misconceptions about poetry is part of the mission of Youth Speaks, a San Francisco group that organizes poetry slams and spoken-word workshops all over the Bay Area. The group works with more than 40,000 young people each year. In Marin, Youth Speaks has partnered with the Marin Youth Center, Marin Academy, Tamalpais High School and the Branson School.

Youth Speaks' poetry slams are set up like competitions. Five judges are chosen randomly from the audience and asked to judge teams of performers using signs with numbers similar to those used in the Olympics.

"It's the best gimmick in the world," says Chinaka Hodge, associate program director for Youth Speaks. "For whatever reason, people respond to competition. It's a great way to get the audience interested. There's heat, there's fire, people are holding up scores, people are shouting and everyone is engaged in the poetry."

The schools may not be teaching as much poetry, but teens seem to be getting their poetry fixes from other sources, especially music like rap or hip-hop. In the slams, the kids tend to slide back and forth between the rhythms and sounds of hip-hop and traditional poetry, creating a hybrid art form that's part written word, part performance piece. Young people seem to be getting the message that poetry is about expressing their individual experiences, says Hodge.

"Ten years ago, we would go into the classroom and ask, 'Who here writes poetry?' and a couple of hands would timidly go up," she says. "Now when we go in and ask, 'Who here does poetry?' and everybody's hand shoots up."

The Marin Poetry Center hosts a high school poetry competition and sends poets into the schools to lead workshops. The teens who like poetry aren't always easy to predict.

"One teacher told us that many Hispanic students call themselves poets," says Stawowy. "We told her to get one of her students to submit a poem for him to read at an event. He came in and we read a translation. It knocked us off our feet, it was so good. The Hispanic community has such a respect for poetry that they bring here, but maybe because it's not in white society, it's not being noticed as much."

While some teens are developing a love for poetry, they are most likely still in the minority. For Ryan, that is all right as long as poetry continues to reach an appreciative audience. Hirshfield, on the other hand, believes that poetry is as healthy as it has ever been. Not only do people tend to turn to poetry for big life events like weddings or funerals, and big national crises, like war, Hirshfield notices poetry all over the place: on benches, buses, doors, subways, the Internet. Even the tag of a dress she recently bought had lines from Wordsworth on it. Maybe it's OK after all that there isn't that much money in it.

"The life of a poem is passed hand to hand, person to person, and it's doing fine," she says. "If poems were sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars, would a poem be better? I don't think so. Parts of life don't belong in the spotlight. It's all right for something to be turned to rarely, and when needed."

• • • •

MARIN HAS A rich poetry tradition—from the "Poet of the Sierras" Joaquin Miller gathering laurel boughs on Mt. Tamalpais to bring to Lord Byron's grave in England to Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac living together in a cabin in Homestead Valley for three months (which Kerouac later wrote about in The Dharma Bums).

Poets seem drawn to the area, maybe because of the location—Marin has natural beauty while still being close to the culture and excitement of San Francisco. Regardless, the beauty of the area leaks into the poetry written here and leaves its stamp.

"I would have different thoughts if I were looking out the window at a river rather than Mt. Tam," says Hirshfield. "A county like this is perfect for me. I depend on a sense of spaciousness, on the permeability of the real world. I value silence and light and the changing natural order of things."

With all the poetry that has been written here, and all the work that is continuing to be done here, Marin's literary history is beginning to attain a sense of permanence and stability.

In the end, that may be the most important reason to pay attention to the local poetry community, believes Hass.

"Marin is still a very young place," he says. "On Mt. Tamalpais, along the coast, in some inland valleys, you can still feel as if it were possible to throw a rock to the Neolithic. But it has begun to acquire a history, almost 150 years' worth—and poetry, written poetry, among the other arts that have been practiced here during that time, carries the record of our experience of the place.

"It's good to treat it as if it matters. It's a way of caring for our being here."

The following poems were generously provided by the Marin Poetry Center from its 2004-2006 anthologies. Visit www.marinpoetrycenter.com for more information.

"Dishes Jushta Shay"

We drunk all

the beer

that was left

in the fridge

but your neighbor

sent the cops

over

so we left.

By the way,

your husband called.

(sorry about

the dead cat)

—Brian Raymond Buckley

"Geography 2"

Like Texas our king-sized bed:

prairies, wasteland, your northeast

corner, my arid southwest. I want to

roll off into Mexico,

secede from the union.

Canada was pink like the map, I thought:

pink trees and rivers and rocks

Round was the world they taught

before I reached the edge

this falling off place

of shifting borders,

a desert between us,

miles of movable stars.

—Gloria North

"My Bees"

The bees in the middle of my heart

Must make honey now from flowers far away

From potted geraniums and lavender

In Paris

The bees in their formations rub their back legs

Loosening their pollen sacks

Take us to Paris

Get thee to Paris

Where the light is exquisite

And the window flowers are sweet

Take your wild, undomesticated, post-nest self

And get thee to Paris

You will be free

You are free to go

Just go

Make a beeline

We'll bring our Queen

—Julia Vose

"The Word That Is A Prayer"

One thing you know when you say it,

all over the earth people are saying it with you:

a child blurting out as the seizures take her,

a woman reciting it in a cot in a hospital.

What if you take a cab through the Tenderloin,

at a streetlight, a man in a wool cap,

yarn unraveling across his face, knocks at the window:

he says, Please.

By the time you hear what he's saying,

the light changes, the cab pulls away,

and you don't go back, though you know

someone just prayed to you the way you pray.

Please: a word so short

it could get lost in the air

as it floats up to God like the feather it is,

knocking and knocking, and finally

falling back to earth as rain,

as pellets of ice, soaking a black branch,

collecting in drains, leaching into the ground,

and you walk in that weather every day.

—Ellery Akers

"Night"

Not even a breeze tonight.

The moon looks like a monocle

worn by a judge, the blackness

his robe. He wants truth, won't

let me hide. I plead I was given

a road map that's sketchy.

He tells me everyone's is.

—Stephanie Mendel

"Enlisting"

There was this form to fill out, though

I think it was more questionnaire. It had

the force of law on its side, at the end

we would all sign, and there was

a warning about perjury, explicit.

And implied was something different,

something like: You will fill this out,

answer true or false. There were questions

of conscience, of objection: Do you

believe in war: True. Do you object

to killing: False. Are you a sissy, have you

ever known one, played around... (though

they used a bigger word, a forceful word

loaded with arms, commands, orders)

and we all put down: No. Perhaps

we all knew someone, even ourselves.

Maybe this couldn't be but we all

signed and took our clothes off, cut

our hair down, swore an oath, and

some of us went to the fighting, some

of us came back, some didn't.

We were lied to, and we lied back.

—Joseph Zaccardi

"Love Like a Meadow"

Love, I was taught,

is like a lightening bolt.

One hour the heart is whole,

the next it's split

and sick with longing

for that other heart,

dependent on that mate

to feel complete.

Perhaps it's true.

I have no standing

to dispute love's myth,

but offer anecdotal evidence:

distrusting storms,

I always stood my guard

but placed no watch

against the power of sweetness,

how love can grow

as quietly as grass

one day unnoticed,

next day high as knees

then taller than thighs,

belly, eyes, and taller still

until, like a meadow

overgrown with spring,

the heart can't see

beyond encircling love,

but hums along,

content in that

rich green.

—Yvonne Postelle