Tag: Saint Mary’s College of California

First Day – Work Poems and Poetic Truth (video #11)

Posted on by Ross Belot

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First Day came out of material developed during that Key West workshop with Jane Hirshfield I mentioned in my last post. I had never done anything like what we did at that workshop. Jane would give us a prompt to write from and we would return in half an hour or so and read our poems to the group, for me a very scary situation with all the talent that was in the room. 

 

The first day I was astounded by what people brought back, I couldn’t believe the quality of what I was hearing. I felt totally inadequate. But Jane also said that what we were producing were not supposed to be finished poems, that the hope would be some of them would eventually turn into something we liked, a hope I hung on to as everyone else’s sounded very complete already. 

 

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while apple picking iv – spiralling poetry

Posted on by Ross Belot

I’m currently in a Zoom poetry study run by the poets Hoa Nguyen and Kristin Prevallet on the poetry of Bob Kaufman, the San Francisco based Beat and Black Surrealist poet. The discussion over the last two weeks has been around how Kaufman’s poetry has a spiralling quality to it.  A lot of repetitions, especially unusual phrases, in the poems we read were phrases like “blue crackling” or “ancient water” that are repeated,  and how he sometimes turns away and comes back to a subject many times. 

 

It got me thinking about about what poem to choose to do this week as well as how to construct the video.  I choose the poem “while apple picking iv”.  It is a partly manufactured poem that does spiral with plenty of repetitions, relatively few words that are repeated often and juxtaposed in different combinations while there are also moments of clear syntax.  

 

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bolted landscape – Wordsworthianism Entropology & Third Landscape (Poem#7)

Posted on by Ross Belot

Back in May 2016 a group of Saint Mary’s College of California MFA students were led by Brenda Hillman on a micro protest to go read poetry to the local oil refineries in the Bay Area, refineries that run some of the worst crude in the world (and surprise, it’s California heavy crude). I was there and I’m working on a documentary short that discusses Brenda’s thinking about micro protests as well as how I, as a person who worked in the industry, ended up at Saint Mary’s and at that protest and others with my fellow students. The longer piece is in process. This video of my poem is from that action as is Kelly Egan’s dance that opens and closes the video. 

 

In preparation for this action future mon amour Sara Burant and I, as the two key organizers, went on the weekend before to suss out potential places to do such a thing in Benicia and Martinez. One of the places we found was this space overlooking the Carquinez Strait where the I680’s two bridges cross between Martinez and Benecia.  To get to the space you drive on a road that pretty well runs through the Valero refinery.  I wrote a poem when I got back to where I was living in Lafayette and read it on the day of the protest at the site the poem describes. It was very fresh so perhaps a bit chancy to read.

 

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12 Dancers on 12 Tables (poem #4)

Posted on by Ross Belot

 

 

This week’s poem, 12 Dancers on 12 Tables,  is material collected from watching and listening to  an MFA in Dance group rehearsing out in the middle of the quad of Saint Mary’s College of California. The area was used by many students for eating and talking.  And in the middle of this normal every day occurrence, dancers unexpectedly got up on the large tables and performed in the middle of the rest of us.  A surreal experience where the observers were in the same space as the performers and yet also not formally an audience.  In addition as the performance developed there were crows, who were always about, that seemed to become part of the performance, at least for me. 

 

The material of the poem includes description of the scene, found dialogue, observations about the crows. But the mixture of material is attempting to provide the reader with the experience of being in that place and watching that wild mixture of something unusual happening in a usual place.

 

On the page the form of the poem mirrors this disorientation.  It has unusual line breaks, dropped lines and some material is grouped into stanzas while others into single lines.  Also the dialogue is not indicated except for “here” “we” “go”, which means it is up to the reader on whether terms like “really beautiful” is from the dance choreographer or from the speaker of the poem.  This mirrors the experience, who is just an observer and who is a participant.  Like as if you were at a table with one of the 12 Dancers on 12 Tables. 

 

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