Michael J Hoover

For the past few years, my friend and a wonderfully powerful poet, Reni Fulton, has conducted a poetry salon at her home in Red Lion, PA. She has dubbed her gathering Brighid’s Forge Salon. I finally took her up on her kind invite to attend the holiday salon two weekends ago. Fulton’s invitation said, “We will explore our unique and universal experience of the season through poetry and writing.”

Maybe you’re asking yourself the same initial questions I had. What exactly is a salon? And, why Brighid’s Forge? A salon is a periodic gathering of persons noted in literature, philosophy, fine arts, or similar areas, held at one person’s home. Salons thrived during the Enlightenment.

Brighid is the Celtic goddess of activities and states of being conceived as psychologically lofty and elevated, such as wisdom, excellence, poetic eloquence, craftsmanship (especially blacksmithing), and healing ability. In short, she was, and is, the goddess of healers, poets, smiths, and inspiration.

It is little wonder Fulton chose such an apt appellation for her salon. She forged her assemblage of poets and people from all walks of life, different ages, each on his or her separate path intellectually, educationally, occupationally, and spiritually.

Fulton embodies a keeper of Brighid’s flame, being herself a poet, a healer, a sage, and a muse. Fulton is a facilitator extraordinaire, having served Vietnam vets as a trained therapist and having helped so many others to find meaning in this life. Her salon serves as a forge to purify words with spirit and emotion, the raw material of meditation and discussion, to become later the beginnings of poems themselves.

One instantly feels welcome in Fulton’s home. There is an ambience both warm and inviting. Hot soup on the stove, the aromas of dishes her guests brought along, the oblong of chairs and sofa in her living room, the meandering of a dog and cat, the decor begging to reveal a story behind each knickknack and furniture piece—all commingle to say, “Come in, stay a while, join the celebration we call ‘this moment.’”

Having asked a round of trivia question starters, Fulton passed out copies, labeled for educational use only, of the following poem by Edward Hirsch.

I Am Going To Start Living Like A Mystic

Today I am pulling on a green wool sweater 
and walking across the park in a dusky snowfall.
The trees stand like twenty-seven prophets in a field, 
each a station in a pilgrimage–silent, pondering.
Blue flakes of light falling across their bodies 
are the ciphers of a secret, an occultation.
I will examine their leaves as pages in a text 
and consider the bookish pigeons, students of winter.
I will kneel on the track of a vanquished squirrel 
and stare into a blank pond for the figure of Sophia.
I shall begin scouring the sky for signs 
as if my whole future were constellated upon it.
I will walk home with the deep alone, 
a disciple of shadows, in praise of the mysteries.

- Edward Hirsch

Fulton first asked us to pick out one phrase that spoke to us with importance. We then each contributed phrase and insight. What amazed me is that nearly everyone picked a different phrase!

Discussion ensued, including the relationship of the natural world to spirituality, the relevance of Sophia’s attachment to wisdom, the association of the astronomical, mystical, and mysterious, envisioned in the imagery of shadows, signs, constellated, dusky, prophets, ciphers, pondering, and occultation.

Conversation wove its way from the deeply personal to broadly religious contexts. The season of Advent, the Old Testament, eastern philosophy, numerology, genealogy, symbology, familial anecdotes–all enhanced the enjoyment one gets from such eclecticism.

One such discussion centered around whether we have had mystical experiences, which led to the question of whether we are occasionally mystics, which evolved into the revelation that mysticism is not something we can just try on.

Mysticism is not something we can casually attempt; we intrinsically either are or are not mystics. We can experience the mystical, but we cannot simply become mystics unless we are willing to be lost to this world apparent, a rare feat indeed.

Later, we broke bread and shared our “other lives” over repast and conversations, then eventually parted, knowing we had experienced an afternoon quite extraordinary and meaningful. We had entered the flame of human commonality and emerged stronger in our trust and belief.

We were somehow humbled by our communal awe of what we occasionally glimpse as insight into the experience of the inexplicable, which pushes and pulls us to find substance and sustenance in this world, by undergoing a kind of divine therapy.

Kate Brady is a local poet wise beyond her years. She is affable, strong-willed, sensible, and kind. She is dedicated to poetry, family, and community. She is the genuine article.

Below her own introduction which immediately follows is a poem that melds Brady’s roots, her keen sense of perception, and her distillation of a city’s occupants, speaking to the universality of people whether from the farm or the city.

I began writing in high school, and after taking a few creative writing classes in college, I knew I’d like to pursue an MFA in poetry. I received my MFA in May from Columbia College Chicago, where I also taught first-year writing courses.

My appreciation for poetry became magnanimous in graduate school, where I stumbled upon some of my favorite poets: Jo McDougall, A. Van Jordan, Frank X. Walker, Natasha Trethewey, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil. While in Chicago, I also became a member of several different writing communities, as teacher, student, friend, and facilitator.

I was raised in Hanover, PA on a horse farm. Most all of my extended family lives in Hanover or just outside. So, I grew up with a strong sense of family. My cousins and animals were my best friends.

A country lifestyle has most influenced my writing, although it took moving away and perspective to write most of those poems. I went to James Madison University in Harrisonburg, VA, for my BA in both English and Media Arts & Design.

Then, I moved to Chicago where I received my MFA. Time and distance have been my best tools, even better than a perfectly sharpened pencil point. (And I love sharp pencils so much I used to carry a tiny sharpener to class with me.)

As all poets know, your life quickly becomes one large poem. Everything to me is a metaphor, and since discovering this, my life has been that much more vibrant and exact. Writers know things are meant to be by the connections they make between events.

I can’t imagine living without poetry. And I’m not saying this to put non-poets down, because I think everyone has a poet inside them somewhere. It’s not about vocabulary or good handwriting or saying lofty things; poetry is merely honesty, and everyone has the potential for that.

I also think every community should offer creative writing and/or arts classes. While living in Chicago, I volunteered at the men’s homeless shelter in the basement of my church. I met a few guys who had been writing poems and sharing them with each other, and I jumped at the opportunity to start a weekly writing workshop for them.

Poetry was the one steady thing in their lives and the only thing not accompanied by bad fortune. They wrote to get through the day, and then they started a poetry reading series at a community center.

There are so many other people and communities that could use the outlet of poetry (or any kind of art) to get through their own trials. Poetry is absolutely indispensable to me, to you, and to the world.

Grit

It comes from warm blood, movement
of breath, chest exorcising
daily. There are hints
of gasoline, sawdust, tire tread,
a woman’s perfume. It smells
like my father
at dusk in the summertime,
like the construction worker beside you
on the rush hour train.
Yes, it’s refreshing.

It’s pedestrians leaning
into the wind, as if gravity
likes the upper body better,
the chest, the neck, the forehead.
People bend above the bellybutton
when they forget their hat,
hands on their ears and elbows forward
like they’re entering the parallel squat rack.

It’s two feet moving in different directions,
hitting the ground at precise times
widening weight.
It’s feet in rubbers in muck.

- Kate Brady

The vibration was upbeat, the energy high, the ideation rapid fire! The Cultural Arts Alliance of York County meeting four weeks ago held at the Eichelberger Performing Arts Center was expressly aimed at local artists to share their thoughts about cultural programming in Hanover. The open forum was part of the seven month planning process to create a Community Cultural Plan for York County.

Diane Mataraza, former Deputy Chief of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and executive director of the Grammy Foundation, facilitated the meeting. Musicians, actors, conductors, directors, writers, singers, artists, and dancers offered ideas for initiating or sustaining or strengthening programs.

Participants discussed positive points and drawbacks about working in Hanover and York County. They commented upon possible ways that the arts could be made more accessible and that information on the arts could be disseminated more readily. Also proposed were wish lists for combining programs, having a community calendar available online, and advertising of events and programs.

The Alliance is also compiling a database of artists to be made available to the community to ensure organizers of programs a vehicle to get in touch with local artists. Artists can use the database to contact people in their respective field in order to network.

According to a September press release, “in order to hear from every sector in York County, Mataraza is planning meetings with as many groups and individuals as possible. She has already met with more than 200 people in York and hopes to reach more than a thousand, either in person or with surveys.” Let us not be passive or apathetic when it concerns our community. Remember that poet Robert Frost once quipped with caution, “The world is filled with willing people; some willing to work, the rest willing to let them.”

Mataraza intends that the Alliance’s plan be informed by as many people who have a stake in seeing that the arts play a central role in the development of our community. To that end she is meeting with as many people as possible and asking them to complete an artists’ survey before December 31. Also the general community will be asked to complete a survey in January. It will be available on the Cultural Alliance’s web site <www.culturalalliance-york.org>, as is other Community Cultural Planning information.

It might be helpful to recall cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead’s words “Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Hanover has a unique opportunity to speak and have our words be put into action.

The Cultural Alliance is a united arts fundraising organization that has raised nearly $8.5 million in cash and in-kind donations in the past nine campaigns. This coming year marks their 10th anniversary. The mission of the Cultural Alliance of York County is to improve the quality of life in York County by: leading an arts and culture plan in collaboration with others that transforms our community; raising increasing funds for arts and culture; making arts and culture an essential part of life; and, strengthening our members.

It seems that the Alliance is taking a big step in providing an opportunity for each of us to heed the words of former President Jimmy Carter whose guiding credo is: “my faith demands that I do whatever I can, wherever I am, whenever I can, for as long as I can with whatever I have to try to make a difference.” Add to Carter’s wisdom one-time chaplain for the U.S. Senate Edward Everett Hale’s call to action, "I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything I will not refuse to do the something I can do."

The formula for success seems to involve some of the easiest things to do but never making the time to do them. Let’s keep the arts alive and thriving in York County! Fill out a survey and do our future a favor!

Advent is a dervish of down and leaves,
of birds gone south, trees letting go:
shadows frame the world in lavender.

Seasons adjust to axis and latitude;
we practice solstice rites whose sun
turns away on the promise of return.

Modern magi, we search the sky
for manifest miracles, metaphors
in stardust and cosmic mystery.

Autumn’s feast is eclipsed by heaven’s
debris; winter whispers its epiphany:
time bends heaven toward a creche.

Having read a meditation this week about changing every complaint into an act of gratitude, I thrust the lesson upon my students their first day back from Thanksgiving break. Before the veil could be drawn by any of them, I suggested that I bet most of them probably answered their alarms that morning by complaining, “Oh no! I don’t wanna get outa bed! I don’t wanna go to school today. I just wanna sleep in.”

Since I used my best whine imitating my inner seventeen-year-old voice, I got most of the class to smile or chuckle. Then I went in for the kill. “You could have answered that alarm with grrrattitude instead. You had a chance to say, ‘Hey, thanks for reminding me that I can even hear the alarm, that I can get up, and can wash and dress myself, and drive myself to school, and even be excited and thankful to be with Mr. Hoover in class today.’” Laughter ensued after the initial wave of contemplation.

I always remind students that I am just like them. That my first inclination that morning was to grumble at the alarm, too, until I realized I was thankful to be able to have the prospect of another day. That we all like to take jabs at the minor disappointments of each day, instead of waiting a beat to think about how we can turn the moment into grace and be thankful.

Then I reminded them that a new practice takes time to form. To that end, I used the opening of each of the next two classes to bring more examples of how to turn complaints to gratitude. We even read an essay by a double amputee who had every right to complain, but chose rather to meet adversity by seeing the potential in every situation and being gracious she could do so.

I told them that I had recently complained to a friend that I come at autumn, usually a favorite season, with a sense of ambivalence. Although I love the crisp air and beautiful colors, I also dread its latter days of cold rain and bare branches, too early evenings and scraping morning frost from the windshield–all harbingers of the winter to come.

Later, I forced myself to go for my daily walk though it was fast approaching the twilight of five o’clock. As I headed in a southwesterly direction with a full view of the sky, I saw a big bow of moon with nearby Venus and Jupiter, two points to a nearly perfect horizontal segment–all three the only lit objects in the inky blue expanse.

The clean, cool air only served to accentuate the beautiful scene before me, and I was grateful for having come out when it would have been so easy to have given in to my earlier complaint of it being almost too cold and dark to go for a walk. I remembered that this particular view only happens about every thirty-five years as I had recently read, and that I won’t in all likelihood be seeing it again. It’s beauty only increased.

It was then that I was reminded of a poem I had written a few years ago about this time of year. Liturgically, Advent begins a new church year full of the joy of preparation. But, it comes, ironically, at the time of fall that is nearly depressing. Though the tone of the poem is at times melancholic and borders upon complaint, there are hints of hope and anticipation, which exude a sense of gratitude in being able to see the miracles in each day.

Clockwork of Random Design

Advent is a dervish of down and leaves,
of birds gone south, trees letting go:
shadows frame the world in lavender.

Seasons adjust to axis and latitude;
we practice solstice rites whose sun
turns away on the promise of return.

Modern magi, we search the sky
for manifest miracles, metaphors
in stardust and cosmic mystery.

Autumn’s feast is eclipsed by heaven’s
debris; winter whispers its epiphany:
time bends heaven toward a creche.

- Michael J Hoover

During Michael Hoover’s convalescing, area poets will be featured each week. This week’s poet/columnist is Katy Giebenhain who lives in Gettysburg.

What else does this part of autumn bring besides raking our leaf-choked lawns, mid-term exams and finally packing away shorts and sandals? The anniversaries of both the birth and death of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, and the annual Dylan Thomas Festival, which coincides with these dates. Fresh on the heels of this year’s October 23-November 10 festival, it’s an appropriate time to remember a man who has greatly influenced writers around the world including innumerable Americans.

For a few days I attended festival events in Swansea, the city where Thomas was born. It was interesting to hear news coverage of Pennsylvania in the last days of the presidential campaign. The election was followed closely in Wales.

Events were held at venues throughout Swansea, but the hub of the festival was the Dylan Thomas Centre. The theme this year was “Performing Dylan.” In addition to an exhibition with the same title, performance aspects of his work and life were especially celebrated and examined. The festival program, along with its partner event, the “Dylan Thomas Fringe,” offered theatrical readings, performances, scholarly lectures, the premier of a Dylan Thomas radio play discovered by his biographer, Andrew Lycett, concerts, poetry readings, and special readings from authors short listed for the Dylan Thomas Prize, an international literary prize for authors under the age of 30.

Another first for this fall is that the Dylan Thomas birthplace just opened to tourists. Now, it is possible to stay in the restored townhouse on Cwmdonkin Drive where many of his stories, poems, and plays unfolded. His use of language is legendary and his influence on other writers difficult to estimate because it is so far-reaching. Some of his best known pieces include A Child’s Christmas in Wales, the play for voices Under Milk Wood, and poems such as “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.”

There was plenty of controversy surrounding the personality of Thomas, as his life was peppered with drinking, adultery and not-always-amenable public behavior. The end of his life is perhaps the most controversial of all. For those interested in looking into the details of his death in New York (while on a tour performing Under Milk Wood) Seren Books has just published Fatal Neglect: Who Killed Dylan Thomas? by David N. Thomas. He is also the author of Dylan Thomas: A Farm, Two Mansions and a Bungalow which was the basis for the screenplay of the film The Edge of Love. The
film stars Keira Knightley, Sienna Miller, Cillian Murphy and Matthew Rhys (playing Thomas). Its U.S. release is set for the spring of 2009.

This time of year is a fitting one to hit the library or bookstore, or your own bookshelves if you have a copy of his collected poems and just haven’t read it for a while. If you are traveling to New York City, download the new, self-guided walking tour (prepared by Thomas’s daughter Aeronwy Thomas, and Welsh poet Peter Thabit Jones, in association with the Welsh Assembly Government in New York). The map and descriptions follow his footsteps in Manhattan. For more information about the festival, visit the Dylan Thomas web site: www.dylanthomas.com/ . To see a trailer of the film The Edge of Love visit www.theedgeoflove.co.uk/ . Here’s a poem which is not at all like those of Thomas, but coming home to South Central Pennsylvania I thought of his well-known characterization of Swansea as an “ugly, lovely town.” He was very fond of Swansea. I’m very fond of our “ugly, delicious” local chips.

To a Hanover Potato Chip

Both china-delicate
and work-glove-rough, you
snap, flip, shatter,
rub-crash in traffic jams of air and salt
each bubble preserved
each rick-back dive
each broken third
and cracked-off ridge.
You are hard, fragile, ugly,
delicious –
all curves, no planes.
Like bodies, and
like snowflakes, there’s
no other like you.
From the earth you came
and from the kettle,
and screech-wheeled shopping cart.
For a split-second you
are loud. Spectacular. And then
your absence leaves
a pause, an aftertaste,
lonely and subtle as the end of that
kind of phone call.
- Katy Giebenhain

In the wake of Michael Hoover’s convalescing, area poets will be posting articles to further the conversation of poetry. This week’s contributor is John Hutchinson John is a retired educator, grandfather of eight, and one who greatly appreciates the outdoors and traveling. He also enjoys writing a poem or two.

Questions, questions, questions! We are full of questions. Questions are the life-blood of human curiosity and are driven by need, want, and sometimes by the workings of imagination.

We may ask simple questions like, “What time is it?” “Where is the bathroom?” “What does a rutabaga look like?” Sometimes our questions require more than a simple answer such as might be the case when we seek a doctor for treatment, “Which doctor might best help me with my condition and why?” Sometimes the questions that weigh most heavily upon us take us into the forest of no answers where we stumble about and ask, “What would have happened if….” or “How will I be remembered?” And, sometimes our questions stretch us and others to see beyond the walls of how we usually think.

Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet in El Libro de las Preguntas or The Book of Questions (Copper Canyon Press, 1974), created his final work in question couplets. His questions have no obvious answers, but simply serve to take the reader outside the usual boundaries of thinking and into the world of imagination and/or examination of self and the condition called human. Here are a few of Neruda’s lovely and/or provoking couplets:

If all rivers are sweet
where does the sea get its salt?

Where does the rainbow end,
in your soul or on the horizon?

What forced labor
does Hitler do in hell?

When I see the sea once more
will the sea have seen or not seen me
- Pablo Neruda

Neruda’s work must have been in the back of my mind the other day as I sat waiting for a poem to come (watched pots and poems never seem to boil). Sitting there in thought, I finally started looking at the scraps of paper on the side of my desk – the scraps with scribbled notes, words that wanted to be more than words, and a few poems-in-progress. It was then this Neruda-like poem of questions came:

Words-in-Waiting

Going through
the scribbled notes,
the faded pieces of paper on the side of the desk,
scraps cloaked in their yellows and whites,
newspapers with writing in the margins,
words, words, words,
discordant hand-maidens to the muse,
words-in-waiting
that never found the hand of marriage,
words that finally gave themselves away
as stand-alone questions at the alter:

Did restlessness rustle her skirts
for others to catch a glimpse of need?

After man made his bed to lie in it,
how come the bed didn’t have a say in the matter?

Why is it so,
harried we hurry to helplessness of habit?

What will merchants of death sell,
when there’s no one left to buy?

If weeping is a river that carries you to the sea,
is there danger of drowning?

Why did she remember the corsage he pinned at her waist,
after she wasted away on love that wasted away?

Do cold hands sometimes mean
energy bills are too much to handle?

Does the window of loneliness
ever not open to a larger house?

Why are new dreams
built upon collapse and compromise?

Why was his mouth always on,
like a TV on reruns, not pausing for commercials?

Is a man a solitary sailor
on the ship of fools he laboriously built?

What do the neighbor’s think
of the one who worries about ‘What’ll the neighbor’s think?’

Do clichés wear themselves out
trying too hard for something to say?

Does the island of indecision
have any boats without holes in them?

And, after the congratulations, the photos, the rice in the air,
the floral’d questions with their faded smiles
simply disappeared.
- John Hutchinson

Questions gave this poem a life it may not otherwise have had. I think it is often in these unanswerable questions we see what is at the core of being human, what lies behind the masks we wear, and what it is we often don’t talk about. Questions such as these are worth honoring, nurturing, and pondering for we never know when they may carry us to a shore we have not explored before, maybe as does this final couplet of Neruda’s:

“Where is the child I was,
still inside me or gone?”
- Pablo Neruda

John has two books of poetry in print: A Taste of the Sun by Publish America (also available at Amazon.com) and Sitting in the Bloom of Us, Conversations with Mother (available at Reader’s Café and via email)

This week I am pleased to share a guest column by poet, writer, visual artist, singer, healer, and friend, Susan Beverly. Her “work is widely published and awarded. She loves reading publicly . . . and enjoys collaboration with colleagues in the arts. [Beverly’s] writing thrives on the concepts and experiences of philosophy, psychology, relationships, and spirituality. She loves titles and twists that surprise at the end of poems.” What follows is the text of Beverly’s own creative energy.

First night of autumn, there’s a breeze when I walk the Pekingese. Skateboarders slide by almost silently in the dark. I look back over four years, culminating at Lehigh University and then Trinity College. My nights have become a dark and brooding poem, like the weather in Dublin and Galway, as well as along the Shannon River. My days are enlightened by His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, at whose feet I studied for a week, in awe. No president or pope could have more compassion and unconditional love. A very cheap airline ticket from dad and a friend to stay gratis made the green island a two-week blessing. An internet-saavy sister made it possible for me to learn the mysteries of the origins of the universe from an aging monk.

Dependent origination means that eternity unfurls in both directions, alpha and omega, without end. It also means the answer to all behavior and understanding. The lecture hall was kept at temperatures only a holy mountain dweller could love. Someone gifted me a blanket.

Wet, cold, dark days send the Irish into pubs, bookstores and cathedrals to talk about Oscar Wilde over strong tea, Guiness, and Bushmill’s. It all falls together with a lot of sense. Climate creates the character of peoples.

Poetry emerged, some ranging across the universes of philosophy and sciences. Also one about a cold-water codfish meal, one about a couple from Spain. I went to James Joyce’s wife’s home. I entered St. Nicholas’ cathedral where Columbus was inspired to explore and touched old, old stone. I fell under a spell through the arches of Trinity, later seeing not only the Book of Kells, but nearly collapsing at the sight of a first-edition, handwritten tome–Dante’s Divine Comedy in that library older than oldness.

The world was a poem, as I strolled down to the sea to buy an ancient ring for my daughter, to munch on spinach salmon quiche in a bag. It was also a poem as I meditated on the end of my nose, taught by a laughing man who loves the Chinese as if they are Tibetan.

I could show you some of the poems I wrote, but I think I am writing some kind of poetry-like prose here, capturing the light in an eye, the setting silver cold north island sun, where I could not survive. Galway was filled to the brim with interesting people, cobbles, stories, songs. When I came home, much felt empty. I’ve thought of moving backwards, but shan’t. I will stretch my mind, my money, my vision. I will move forward and remember the concept of no-thing-ness:

It would seem that the closer you get to the bottom of something the more is-ness it would be of itself, the more like itself, say, an apple would be. But the deeper and smaller or the further and larger one gets, the nature of the thing disappears into nothingness. This fluidity reminds that I too am mostly a river of empty space and energy, moving forward, expanding, learning, growing.

That settled, I do what any self-possessing poet my age would. I head for that rare find, a PhD in Creative Writing. Thank you, my Lama, and thank you, Emerald Isle.

Ode to Eire

I fell in love with a fish from Galway–
a cold-water cod in this crowded cafe,
with chips and curry, a little wine.
I ate heartily; it was gone in no time.

When I got home to Maryland’s Eastern Shore,
I found myself craving that dish even more.
That cod from McDonaugh’s on Quay Street–
it’s the only seafood I still want to eat.

I’ve forgot about oysters, clams, and crabs,
scallops, flounder and bluefish seem drab.
I want that huge codfish, so flaky and gold
from my first trip to Ireland, so rainy and cold.

I didn’t mind the weather and I was happy to pay
for such a great meal on such a gray August day.
So be happy you live there and eat all you can
because I’m back in America, so sad that I am.

I live by the Atlantic near the Chesapeake Bay,
but I want codfish and chips from Ireland every day.
- Susan Beverly

Susan Beverly MLA is Creativity Consultant for Sweetspot Arts and Wellness. Her two latest collections of poetry, The Bodies of Trees, and, The Cool Side of the Pillow are much praised by Michael Glaser, Maryland’s Poet Laureate, one of her long-time mentors. Reach Susan via email.