From Left to Right, Top to Bottom: Blue Mountains Walking (Multiple Authors),
Weight of Water (Samantha Wallen), The Light We Give (Mary Anne Evanson),
Why to These Rocks (Hass/Alvarez), Misanthrope (Annie Hendrix), Souvenir (Sara L. Jewell)
Author’s Note:
Subscription billing is paused until fall as I move to a monthly posting schedule to
promote Misanthrope in the wild and focus on editing a collection of short stories.
In Good Company at Sierra Poetry Festival
I had this strange dream I was selling and signing Misanthrope at the 10th Annual Sierra Poetry Festival. I spent the day alongside fellow Gold Country Writer Mary Anne Evanson, who just released her debut collection, The Light We Give, and among titans of contemporary American poetry. Poet Laureate Emeritus Robert Hass was there, reportedly bemoaning the ills of psychotherapy near a food truck. When I woke up, I had fewer copies of my collection, a haul of books from other poets, and instructions on how to write prose poetry from Jose Hernandez Diaz.
Why Does Kafkaesque Nonsense Always Happen to Me?
Jose Hernandez Diaz drew me from the table to the main stage as he read his prose poem “Why Does Kafkaesque Nonsense Always Happen to Me?” about being charged tuition for a semester of college he never attended, in a city he had never been to. I connected deeply with this bizarre, insidious mundanity and later attended his generative workshop Experimenting with Prose Poetry.
Diaz defined the medium in-part by its surreal and experimental nature, noting a long list of conventions and a much shorter list of rules, of which there is really only one: no line breaks, as in other forms of poetry. Questions arose from the attendees about how it differs from micro-fiction, given the presence of dream logic and magical realism elements. It made me ask myself a version of a question I’ve seen floating around in the fiction community on Substack for some time:
When channeling the surreal, what is the line between fiction and nonfiction?
Are the thoughts we have alongside our experiences factual?
The prompts shared during the workshop included writing about a date with one or more deceased artists, writing from the perspective of someone invisible, and musing with the Kafkaesque. I wrote something quite personal about a recent experience I had:
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R e d a c t e d
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Robert Hass and Brenda Hillman
Blue Mountains Constantly Walking
Robert Hass and Brenda Hillman delivered a keynote address in which they discussed Blue Mountain Constantly Walking by Gary Snyder. The essay, coincidentally, is in-part about hermitage of monks who walk into the mountains to separate themselves from the “dust” of civilization, and ultimately calls for equal attention and reverence for humanity, which I felt aligned well with some of the themes in Misanthrope.
Robert Hass read poems from his book Summer Snow, including “Spring Rain,” “The Creek in Shirley Canyon”, “John Muir, A Dream, A Waterfall, A Mountain Ash.” These poems are highly imagistic and include rich depictions of plants and animals found in the California landscape, as well as human presence in it.
Hass had this to say regarding the seemingly disparate nature of the various subjects in his poetry:
“What they have in common is that they exist.”
and I felt you could apply that sentiment to a lot of things.
In a mid-festival stupor I approached The Haikuists and they asked me if there was anything significant going on in my life and I told them I was having a weird dream that I was vending my debut poetry collection at the 10th Annual Sierra Poetry Festival, and that Robert Hass had just held the door open for me on my way out of the theater.
The woman behind the table, fellow poet and author Samantha Wallen, assured me I wasn’t dreaming: she was real, her typewriter was real, the festival and its incredible lineup of poets and presenters was real, Robert Hass was real, Jose Hernandez Diaz was real, and my book was real.
We traded poetry collections, and she wrote me a haiku for the occasion, complete with human error, which serves as hard evidence that it wasn’t all a dream.
Right?
P.S.
I had a blast chatting with Dan Araujo about poetry, music, modern tech,
and learning to coexist on his show Work In Progress on Auburn Community Television.
Misanthrope: A Collection of Poems is Out Now!
Thanks for reading!