Summer Poetry at Idyllwild

This afternoon in Idyllwild, California, a number of poets will wander up to the amphitheater stage to read recent work, to conclude the week-long summer poetry festival here. It's a good group for a town of 1,000: Ted Kooser, Natasha Tretheway, Terrance Hayes, Eloise Klein Healy, Marie Howe, Charles Harper Webb, David St. John, Cecilia Woloch. All week these poets and about fifty students have been on campus, wandering the trails with notebooks, wearing shorts, eating salads, and talking shop. I love shop talk. There are, naturally, a few parties associated with the festival. Last night, the chief muckety-muck of the foundation had folks over for cocktails and snacks at his house, and I talked to a number of friends from Idyllwild, who, although they'd enjoyed the readings, especially the plain-spoken friendliness of Ted Kooser, felt it necessary to point out that they hate poetry, generally, and would never read it (although they might buy a book of it once in a while), and then say again how much they hate poetry, with a stringer emphasis on the word "hate." Because I like these people, I laugh along with them, admit that my mind drifts away too at a poetry reading, and that, yes, there's a lot of bad poetry out there. But I don't understand, really, what about poetry causes otherwise educated and thoughtful people to such extreme aversion. I quite like it.

Of the poets here at Idyllwild, there are two whose poems have been in high rotation in my mind for years, and I'll post them here. See if you like them or hate them.

Elegy for John Berryman (by Ted Kooser)

He had a head like a fire engine
and a heart like a shelf of old hats.


HUSH (by David St. John)

for my son

The way a tired Chippewa woman

Who’s lost a child gathers up black feathers,

Black quills & leaves

That she wraps & swaddles in a little bale, a shag

Cocoon she carries with her & speaks to always

As if it were the child,

Until she knows the soul has grown fat & clever,

That the child can find its own way at last;

Well, I go everywhere

Picking the dust out of the dust, scraping the breezes

Up off the floor, & gather them into a doll

Of you, to touch at the nape of the neck, to slip

Under my shirt like a rag—the way

Another man’s wallet rides above his heart. As you

Cry out, as if calling to a father you conjure

In the paling light, the voice rises, instead, in me.

Nothing stops it, the crying. Not the clove of moon,

Not the woman raking my back with her words. Our letters

Close. Sometimes, you ask

About the world; sometimes, I answer back. Nights

Return you to me for a while, as sleep returns sleep

To a landscape ravaged

& familiar. The dark watermark of your absence, a hush.