RIP Michael Rothenberg/Susan Lamont Tribute/2007 Poem/Ed Coletti Cafe Frida Poetry Festival #4 Photos/Winter Hibernation/

Your responses to anything in this blog are most welcome and invited.  I've decided to switch away from  using the Blogger interface for this purpose.  Instead, please email me  edjcoletti(at)gmail.com.  I look forward to hearing from you.

Rest In Piece Friend, Poet Activist Michael Rothenberg (1951- November 21, 2022)

 

I along with other poets, friends and associates in activism received the following announcement and tribute from Susan Lamont, past director of the Sonoma County Peace and Justice Center, poet, photographer and dear friend of Michael Rothenberg.

Hi all - Not all of you on my lists will have known Michael, but many of you do, so I am sending this out as a broadcast email. And, of course, some of you will already have heard the news.

One of the most alive people I know - Michael Rothenberg - died Monday night of 4th stage lung cancer. He had undergone radiation and chemo, but it wasn't enough. When he was diagnosed, he said he only wanted a few people to know because he wouldn't be able to handle responding to everyone. He had SO many friends. So he swore me to secrecy, so, of course, this comes as a surprise to many.

 

Some of you knew him through his poetry and some of you knew him through his activism after the killing of Andy Lopez. I first met him after I'd heard of his and Terri Carrion's idea to create 100 Thousand Poets for Change - from a Facebook post by Penelope LaMontagne (another poet we have lost). Then, a young woman came into the Peace & Justice Center and asked me if I knew anything about the project. While we were talking, Michael called. He was thrilled by the synchronicity and that I'd heard of the project and we immediately became great friends. I organized 100TPC readings for quite a few years - usually at Gaia's Garden. And then Andy Lopez was killed and Michael and Terri threw themselves into the fight for justice as energetically as they supported poetry. When Michael and Terri do something, they do it 100%. We organized several 100TPC events around the life of Andy and a poem Michael wrote about Andy and a superficial and hypocritical Sonoma County has been translated and published in other languages.

 

He had hoped that the cancer wouldn't return because the treatment had screwed up so many systems in his body and he knew he's be unable to tolerate further treatment. And then he fell down some stairs and sustained a concussion. The last time we talked, he called me up to ask if he could cry because he was having such trouble with the rest of his body - and that was before the cancer returned. Of course, I said "yes."

 

He was in the middle of several projects. Books in the works. Also a CD/recording of poems and music. (After all, he once lived in Nashville and tried to write music there!)  He was always so busy, always creating. It's impossible to imagine that energy stilled.

 

Terri has been left with many loose ends to tie up - all the works in progress, continuing the work on his brother's estate - and she recently lost her mother. She is deeply involved with a non-profit for the lake to which their house backs up.

 

Over the last few years, Michael had lost so many people who were fundamental to his life - one death after another, one grief after another - his son, his brother, his dearest poet friends. Now he has followed them.

 

RIP Michael

 

Peace & solidarity, Susan Lamont

for michael rothenberg 
(by ed coletti c. 2007)

 

A

           KIND

                      NESS

                                  THAT’S

 

                                  WHERE

I BEGIN

                      TO FLESH

OUT THIS   

OTHER WRAUGHT

HEN               BERG

                                  MADE

WHO DWELLS

                                  AMONG

 US               

WHO 

          BENE

                            FIT                

FROM

                                  HIS LARG-

ESSE                      

THIS NOUR-

ISH                 MEANT        

HE WHO              CARES

NOT JUST      A WHIT,

                     MAN/ HE DOES

NURSE THE

                                  WHALENS

                                  MELTZERS

                                  COHENS                                                    

 THEY            

                      WHO

                                  MAY

NOT

                      EXACTLY

                                             F

                                                        I

                                                        T

WITHIN        

                      SUCH

 

                      (SPACES)

 

AS

                                  LIKE THEM

 

HE     

                                  MICHAEL

                      ALSO DOES

                                NOT

                                  EXACTLY

                                                         f

                                    i

                                                        t

4th Edition of Our Quarterly Poetry Festival at Cafe Frida Gallery Sunday October 30th 2022 

Photos top to bottom

(Setting, ViolaWeinbergSpencer, GailKing/DaveSeter/PeterSpencer, Stage, Norm/Patti/Joyce, Joy Fritz, Bruce & contemplative Marty, Bill Vartnaw, Susan Lamont, Marty Lees-LeReynard, Ed Coletti, Steve Shain, Kathleen Winter, Carl Fredrick, Fran Claggett Holland, Viola Weinberg Spencer)

Please Put the Next Cafe Frida/Ed Coletti Poetry Event On Your Calendar. It will occur on Sunday March 26th, 2023. I as well as several potential readers choose to hibernate for Winter and gather instead in the "Spring" on Sunday March 26th from 12 Noon to 3 PM. Enjoy your holidays and recuperation and join us at the end of March, a month that we expect to come in like a lamb! 

U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limon/3d & 4th Cafe Frida Gallery Readings/Helping The Poetry-Damaged-Adult/Ed Coletti Poem/

Your responses to anything in this blog are most welcome and invited.  I've decided to switch away from  using the Blogger interface for this purpose.  Instead, please email me  edjcoletti(at)gmail.com.  I look forward to hearing from you.

Praise For Ada Limon Upon Becoming Poet Laureate of The United States

I recall watching and listening to Ada Limon reading some time ago at The Sebastopol Center For The Arts. I found her to be very engaging, one of those poets who establishes immediate contact with her audience. Most important is the quality of her work. She has become one of my favorite poets. I particularly enjoy her thoroughbred horse poems. Limon explained that she had moved with her husband from Brooklyn to Kentucky, the horse breeding mecca. Here follows one of those poems from seven years ago.

How to Triumph Like a Girl 

I like the lady horses best,

how they make it all look easy,

like running 40 miles per hour

is as fun as taking a nap, or grass.

I like their lady horse swagger,

after winning. Ears up, girls, ears up!

But mainly, let’s be honest, I like

that they’re ladies. As if this big

dangerous animal is also a part of me,

that somewhere inside the delicate

skin of my body, there pumps

an 8-pound female horse heart,

giant with power, heavy with blood.

Don’t you want to believe it?

Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see

the huge beating genius machine

that thinks, no, it knows,

it’s going to come in first.

 

Ada Limon, "How to Triumph Like a Girl" from Bright Dead Things. Copyright © 2015 by Ada Limon.

3d Cafe Frida poetry Festival Reading July 27

with David Madgalene filling in for Ed Coletti who then was undergoing heart surgery but who now is feeling great and raring to go! 

Thank you for hosting, David!

I, Ed, am personally gratified for having been able to choose and interact with a most energetic group of readers. and I have completed recruitment for the Sunday October 30th Noon reading. Prospective readers continue to respond most enthusiastically!

July partipants included Maya Khosla, Donna Emerson, Raphael Block, Elizabeth Herron, Doug Von Koss, Ron Thomas, Jim Shere, and Amy Glynn.

Cheers,

Ed Coletti

and next

Cafe Frida Festival Outdoor Reading Oct. 30

The Fourth Event in Ed Coletti's Cafe Frida Gallery Outdoor Poetry Festival

Sunday October 30, Noon to 2PM /food and drinks available/

Cafe Frida Gallery - 300 South A Street #4, Santa Rosa, CA 95401

Ed Coletti (hosting)

Kathleen Winter

Karl Frederick

Fran Claggett

Viola Weinberg Spencer

 

Intermission 15 minutes

 

Iris Jamahl Dunkle

Susan Lamont

Pamela Singer

Marty Lees (LeRenard)

 

Steve Shain accompanying on bass!

Please take photos and send them to edjcoletti(at)gmail.com 

 

From the June 2022 edition of Neologisms

Ed Coletti

Just Before the Evening’s Fight

This shoddy shebang

a shanty for their wild salad days

two broad beamed railroaders

sweaty          drain

four Jasper beers

while

like Sam Patch

the falling sun

turns lager amber

almost time for the skin flint keeper

to be skunked again

by a gandy dancer’s

casually ferocious

sockdolager.

Ed Coletti is a poet widely published internationally and holds Masters Degrees in Creative Writing and in Business Management. Ed also is a painter and middling chess player. He has published a dozen books. Journals include ZYZZYVA, Volt, Spillway, and North American Review. Ed curates the blog “No Money In Poetry.”

 

From Two Sylvias Press & Two Sylvias' Weekly Muse: September 25, 2022

"On how to repair our poetry-damaged (adult) population"

Issue 22

Two Sylvias Press Sep 25

Hello, Poets and Writers!

We hope your autumn is off to an inspiring and creative start! We would like to thank you for being a Muse Subscriber and for helping us keep Two Sylvias printing books and offering writing tools so that we can continue to share poetry with a world thirsty for art and beauty.

Speaking of sharing poetry, with whom do you share your poems? Most of us have “poet friends” and poetry writing groups (in real life and/or online) who read our poems, but how many of us feel comfortable sharing our work with our significant other, our parents, our kids, or our close friends?

We often don’t regularly share our poems with the people who are closest to us because we aren’t sure they will “get it” and because they may have told us bluntly they aren’t fans of poetry. Maybe your best friend has revealed her trauma at having been assigned a Gertrude Stein poem in her sophomore year of high school (perhaps the Stein classic “Susie Asado”), and she froze in class when asked to explain the line: This is a please this is a please there are the saids to jelly. Since that afternoon in a classroom in 1985, your BFF has never been able to read another poem, including anything you have written.

How can you reintroduce poetry to people who are either indifferent to it or who simply hate it? Here are a few tips to help non-poets gain an appreciation of the genre all of us love:

• Tell them that poetry in school was probably introduced to them incorrectly. You can enjoy a poem without having to take it apart line by line, without writing an essay on it, and without knowledge of iambic pentameter and rhyme schemes. You can enjoy a poem when you don’t fully understand how it is constructed.
• 
  
• Take them to an in-person poetry reading or watch a poetry reading on Zoom or YouTube with them. Show them that the poetry world is much more inclusive and accessible than Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Donne. 
• 
  
• Read some of your poems aloud to them and discuss what prompted you to write those particular pieces—giving an insight into the process is enlightening.
• 
  
• Explain to them that they don’t have to fully understand the poem’s meaning—they can simply read or listen to the poem, allowing associations, images, and feelings to arise. Poems can have multiple meanings and are very subjective. It’s okay for a poem to wash over you, leaving a deep impression that can’t quite be put into logical words.
• 
  
• Gift a poetry book to them. Do some research and find a book of poems they would find interesting. Do they like nature, ancestry, pop-culture, or are they going through a grieving process? Find an appropriate book of contemporary and accessible poems. Are they really into food or horses? Search out an anthology of food poems or horse poems.

Try some (or all) of these tips with the people with whom you would like to share your poems. Help poetry overcome its bad rap.
****
We so appreciate your support of our small press! Thank you for subscribing to the Weekly Muse! If you come across any issues involving the Muse or if you have any questions, you can email us at: twosylviasweeklymuse@gmail.com
****

I'm looking forward to seeing as many of you as possible at Cafe Frida Gallery at Noon on Sunday October 30th!

- Ed

Zelensky A Visual Poem/The Luna's Book/George Carlin/Elizabeth Herron Poems/

                           A Visual Poem

Congratulations, Elizabeth Herron, Sonoma County's New Poet Laureate (2022-2024)

Here are 3 wonderful poems by Elizabeth

Memphis

Sleeping in the narrow bed in his study,
surrounded by his books,
I think of my father’s hands,
a scholar’s hands -- still,
hands that fixed the toaster, hands that
took apart and put back together.
 
Through the open window
on the clear cold wind after rain, the long
whistle of a train coming
closer, then passing.
 
This morning beside his hospital bed –
honey rose opening, the blessing
of falling away from old hurt.
The maw of grief already waiting,
Love, I said, pretending I am not afraid.
​

Wishbone

They aren’t quiet, the dead. We hear
their clamor, words jammed and jostled,
so we don’t know who’s talking
and who’s talking back.
 
From the four directions
we gather our drawn limbs and our wits.
The day reassembles itself
 
in the singularity of each rock, each
pair of eyes, a sunny sky. Well,
here we are in the post-post world
with its glassy silence. Our tongues
 
have been mended, but what can we say?
Most silent is Dear Innocence -- a barge for her
laden with lilies, roses and rosemary.
Look at her face, eyes wide as heaven
 
in surprise. She’s dead!
But she won’t shout with the others,
whose interrogations and insults
trouble even the dark. We close her eyes
 
with a moonstone over each socket,
so she will know the gaze
of her own bovine love. We did
the best we could for her.
 
She wore you thin as a wishbone.
She wore me thin as a whip.
 

Dust of Life

Bui doi they called the half-American
children of Vietnamese women, dust
of life. I learned this the day I heard
a baby was found alive in a trash compactor--
the same day a homeless man died
when the dumpster he was sleeping in
was picked up by the truck.
Dumpsters are warm because decomposition
is an active process. That might be what
kept the baby alive. The homeless man slept
perhaps like a baby. I lie awake
and rummage the dust and refuse
of my mind. It offers up what it can. Tonight
I forgive myself
for not being able to spin straw to gold
or make shoes, or sing a baby to sleep.

The Luna's Book

Please take a look at this tender heartfelt book by my friend Washington poet Chris Luna and his son Angelo. It would make a wonderful Father's Day (or any day) present. Exchanging Wisdom

George Carlin's Philosophy on His End of Days

I highly recommend that you watch the two part completely honest HBO documentary George Carlin's American Dream.  All of you are quite familiar with the great comedian/philosopher.  HBO does a deep dive into Carlin. I loved it!  Take a look here at Carlin's bleak final views on the prospects for the human race.

Photos From Cafe Frida Reading(s)

       Please send me more if you have them.

Your responses to anything in this blog are most welcome and invited.  I've decided to switch away from  using the Blogger interface for this purpose.  Instead, please email me  edjcoletti(at)gmail.com.  I look forward to hearing from you.

 

Cavellini il Magnifico/Eddie Rosenthal/Sondheim On Poetry & Music/David Alpaugh's Mixed View/Ed Coletti Poem/Letter to Mary Oliver

 Cavellini il Magnifico

At times, I still wonder if  G.A. Cavellini and I might be related to each other on my Tuscan mother's side. She was Anna Cavellini.  He was born the same year as both of my parents, 1914.  A knowing few appear to regard me also as somewhat of an absurdist.

Ed Rosenthal - my friend, poet, Chess Expert, website developer, dog whisperer, and all-around decent fellow has a new blog he wants shared with you.  The URL is

http://takingrefugeinpoetry.blogspot.com/

Sondheim Contrasts Poetry and Music

Stephen Sondheim intensely loved poetry.  Here he looks at the differences between poetry and musical lyrics. See also No Money In Poetry November 2011 edition

“Music straightjackets a poem and prevents it from breathing on its own, whereas it liberates a lyric. Poetry doesn't need music; lyrics do.”

“Poetry seems to me to exist in terms of its conciseness—how much can be packed in,” he told Bernard Levin in 1980. “Lyric writing has to exist in time … Therefore it must be crystal clear as it goes on.”

 I firmly believe that lyrics have to breathe and give the audience's ear a chance to understand what's going on. Particularly in the theater, where you not only have the music, but you've got costume, story, acting, orchestra. There's a lot to take in. The whole idea of poetry is denseness, is concision, is abutment of images, and that sort of thing. You can't do that when you've got music going, and expect the audience to take it in.

 Poetry is something that you can go back and read multiple times to extract its meaning. But with lyrics, you hear them once and they have to stick."

Now see David Alpaugh's mixed view on the subject in my then favorite of his essays which I originally featured here in 2011.

When Poetry Counts Even More

I once again caught myself wondering about what had happened to the status of poets actually influencing the course of history in many countries and the poet's quieter influence on the health of readers. I recalled my own poem in the Fall 2020 issue of  So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum Library and especially the amazing letter of gratitude to Mary Oliver (1935-2018) from a teenaged girl who had been  pondering suicide.

If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools.  — Plato

 

Underground During Ages of Autocracy

 when all the writers and artists who depart

facebook twitter instagram and even email

begin painting and reciting in caves catacombs

and other hidden chambers from which

their material work emerges clandestinely   

being distributed by hand subversively

much the same as the works of

 

Gallileo Voltaire Pussy Riot Ai Wei Wei

Pasternak Solzhenitsyn Thamsanga Mnyele

Wally Serote Thomas Paine Mayakovski   

 

whose creations became entwined with struggle

as ferns with mosses and mushrooms surviving

even thriving in the cool obscurity of caves

where these poets of truth and even hope expanding

as ocular pupils beyond restraint by the iris

enabling oversight engendering action

more substantial than  the statesmen politicians

and silenced effigies of incendiary leaders

 

while all the more of us in our catacombs

study and write our muses continuing in us

 

Diogenes Socrates Plato Sappho Pindar

Hypatia of Alexandria Hildegard Von Bingen

Thomas Merton Teresa of Avila Salman Rushdie

 

No one knows how it all ends

with a bang a whimper a sigh

something there is senses an ending

to the all there is was or won’t be

the scent from funereal blossoms waving

 

 Ed Coletti in So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library (Fall 2020)

	This newsletter is ad-free and depends upon the generosity of its readers (that’s you!), so if you can afford to, please consider becoming a paid-up member. Or gift a subscription to someone else. Or donate. Or buy a book. Or download the audiobook. Or simply share this newsletter with friends. It all helps. Thanks x When Death Comes A powerful letter of thanks to poet Mary Oliver Although ultimately about hope, the following letter discusses suicide ideation. Proceed with caution. In 2015, then-16-year-old Aidan Kingwell was tasked by her English teacher to write to someone who had influenced her in some way¹. The result was this letter, addressed to Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver, whose words—her poem When Death Comes, specifically—had helped Kingwell during a particularly dark time as a young teenager, and during moments of depression ever since. Frustratingly, despite my best efforts, I’m not allowed to reprint that poem here; however, I’m sure you can find it elsewhere, including in Oliver’s New and Selected Poems, Volume One, first published in 1992. Thankfully, it’s not essential. This letter is a powerful piece of writing that stands on its own. Dear Mary, I know it’s an unconventional subject for a letter: death. A fact of life that most of us endeavor to avoid, or at least ignore. But I, Mary — I have walked side by side with death all of my life. I was thirteen the first time I read your poem, and at that time in my life, there was a good chance that I would not see my fourteenth birthday. I had been depressed since age ten, but I had never received any treatment. My mind was very dark; I dove deeper and deeper into my own twisted thoughts with each passing moment. I was someone who was simultaneously terrified of dying and yet obsessed with the idea. I was suicidal, which is a state of being that I cannot well describe, because there are not words that can describe such utter loss of hope, such bitterness and pain and unrelenting sorrow. I wanted to end my own life so badly that most days I could not find one single reason for living. It was not a cry for attention; it was a feeling of utter self-hatred. There is also no accurate way to describe the feeling of hating yourself and your life so much that you long to end it all. It is a feeling of being trapped, of being insane, of being hopeless. When you are suicidal, you are like a wild animal just barely being contained by a thin human shell. Your soul is empty and your heart is blackened and dead. You have no straws left to grasp, no ladder to climb out of the abyss; the only rope offered to help you scramble out is in the shape of a noose, and after weeks or months or years, that noose begins to look very, very appealing. So there I stood, face-to-face with death on a daily basis, wondering if each new day was the day that it would finally consume me. I was afraid of my own mind. I found no comfort in wooden crosses or the taste of bitter crackers, nor in the deluded words of psychiatrists. That eventual uncertainty — the uncertainty of the terror of my own death — haunted my footsteps as I walked from day to day, wearing it like a heavy, bitter cloak. The very idea of my own death was killing me. Then, one day, in my seventh-grade English class, I was presented with your poem. My teacher referred to it as “a dark poem with a note of hope underlying it,” but within it, I found so much more. Within it, I found new life. My mind opened up as I read your words; I was a frail but inspired butterfly clawing my way from a dark, putrid cocoon. The way you spoke, Mary; the way you talked about death, and how he will come to buy you with “all the bright coins from his purse,” how he will come “like an iceberg between the shoulder blades.” I could tell: you knew. You knew what it felt like to be owned by death’s shadow, in the same way that I was then. You had felt the same terror, the same all-consuming dread. But you were also strong. You faced death and said that it did not own you; you had looked into death’s dark eyes and said, “No, you cannot have me; I am not yet done here.” When you spoke of not wanting to have simply visited this world, my own world turned upside down. I began to think about how horrible it would be to have only been a visitor, in the way that you said: to not have made my mark on the world, to have only passed through with no real substance. I thought of a life lived entirely in absence of beauty and amazement, a life barren of love or excitement or laughter. I began to realize that that was what suicide would do to me. I saw that life was fast becoming my own. I saw that killing myself would take me away before I even had the chance to make something of my life. Suicide would eliminate my pain, yes, but it would also close any doors of possibility that I might have still open to me, doors that may lead to happiness in my future. I never would have imagined, Mary, that not killing myself would be one of the hardest decisions that I would ever have to make. But in the end, I made the choice, and I am still alive today. My life has not been full of joy; in fact, it has been dark, and hard, and at times I have even slipped back into death’s unrelenting grasp. But at those times, I have reminded myself of what I thought then — that I want to make something of my life, and that ending it would mean turning my back on all future possibilities, as well as the few pieces of happiness that I have managed to find in the present. At those dark times, Mary, I often also read your poem to myself — the poem that catalyzed my grand suicidal epiphany. I still struggle with this menace, but now I have one thing that I did not have before: I have hope. “When Death Comes,” Mary — and it will — I want to face it as an equal, and shake its hand as a friend, and accept it as an eventuality. You taught me that that is the only proper way to die. With your words you taught me that life cannot be lived in the shadow of death — that life must be a thing separate from death. And you taught me that when death comes, I should embrace it, but also that I should not welcome it before its time. You taught me, Mary, that there was nothing to be feared in death so long as my life was one well lived. “I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world,” you wrote. And “When Death Comes,” Mary, I will tell it that you were my friend. Because you were. I will tell it that I am armed with your words, and it will bow its dark face in respect, and then, it will offer me its hand and lead me into whatever may or may not lay behind it. I will feel no fear, Mary — I no longer fear death and all its ways. I will know that I have beaten death down with your words and the inspiration that they gave me. I will know that I did not let it take me in any way but the one I wanted. And I will know that my life, no matter how twisted, corrupt, and fearful, was worth living. So thank you, Mary. Thank you for wrenching death’s grip from my wrist. Thank you for showing me that the burden of my soul was not so dark. That there was still hope left in me. Aidan Kingwell From JOURNEYS: YOUNG READERS' LETTERS TO AUTHORS WHO CHANGED THEIR LIVES. Copyright © 2017 by the Library of Congress. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Candlewick Press. 1 Mary Oliver died in 2019, and it’s unknown whether she read this letter. However, in 2015 it was entered into—and won, quite rightly—the Library of Congress’ “Letters About Literature” contest, which ran for 27 years until 2019. Your responses to anything in this blog are most welcome and invited.  I've decided to switch away from  using the Blogger interface for this purpose.  Instead, please email me edjcoletti(at)gmail.com.  I look forward to hearing from you.