by | August 26, 2011 · 11:34 pm

Favorite Poems Announcement

Dear Favorite Poem Contributors,

I want to make you aware of two important dates. First, I will begin to publish your Favorite Poem contributions here on the blog as of September 1, alphabetically by the poet’s last name, ie: Dickinson, Emily. I will likely post 3 poems with comments per week to begin with, so if you haven’t done so already, please DO subscribe to the blog for new post updates. Post updates are all you will receive, so don’t worry that you might be inviting a barrage of unwanted emails. And of course, you can unsubscribe at any time.

SECOND, and very importantly, I’ll be holding the first public reading of Santa Clara County’s Favorite Poems next month, Sunday, September 18th at Barnes&Noble Stevens Creek. I am looking for a first group of readers who will be given 5 minutes each total to read both their previously submitted favorite poem contribution with personal comment. Time limits are strictly enforced. If you chose a lengthy poem, please time your reading and select a portion that will fit our limited schedule.

Readers will be selected on a first-come, first-served basis, so if this is something in which you’d be interested in participating and you are able to commit to the September 18th date, do respond here asap. Include your full name and poem submitted. I will inform you of your selection.

Don’t worry if you can’t join us this time around or aren’t part of the first respondents. I will be holding two other readings in other locations in the County in the coming months.

Thanks again for your contributions and support of poetry in Santa Clara County! I look forward to hearing from you. Please email me your interest at sally.ashton@zoho.com.

Sally Ashton
Santa Clara County Poet Laureate

Leave a comment

Filed under Favorite Poem, Laureate's News

by | August 14, 2011 · 6:29 am

Philip Levine: New U.S. Poet Laureate

Philip Levine has just been appointed the 18th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for 2011-2012. Here is a recent interview with him from his “home now,” Brooklyn Heights, New York, produced by the Cortland Review. Apparently he lives blocks from my daughter, and it was fun recognizing the landmarks. I hope you’ll enjoy this informal visit where he talks about work, writing, and his life in New York.


Levine brings to his poetry a working-class sensibility in a clear yet profound voice. I’m looking forward to what he’ll do during his term and, I hope, seeing more new work. He won the Pulitzer Prize for The Simple Truth (1994). His most recent collection, News of the World, and others will be part of the book fair at the first Santa Clara County’s Favorite Poems Reading, Sunday, September 18th at 1pm at the Stevens Creek Barnes and Noble.

Mark your calendars!

And while Levine writes of hard work and industry from his early days in Detroit’s factories, as well as poems of the streets of New York, he taught at California State University, Fresno, for many years. Here is one of his poems set in the central valley. Enjoy~

Our Valley
by Philip Levine

We don’t see the ocean, not ever, but in July and August
when the worst heat seems to rise from the hard clay
of this valley, you could be walking through a fig orchard
when suddenly the wind cools and for a moment
you get a whiff of salt, and in that moment you can almost
believe something is waiting beyond the Pacheco Pass,
something massive, irrational, and so powerful even
the mountains that rise east of here have no word for it.

You probably think I’m nuts saying the mountains
have no word for ocean, but if you live here
you begin to believe they know everything.
They maintain that huge silence we think of as divine,
a silence that grows in autumn when snow falls
slowly between the pines and the wind dies
to less than a whisper and you can barely catch
your breath because you’re thrilled and terrified.

You have to remember this isn’t your land.
It belongs to no one, like the sea you once lived beside
and thought was yours. Remember the small boats
that bobbed out as the waves rode in, and the men
who carved a living from it only to find themselves
carved down to nothing. Now you say this is home,
so go ahead, worship the mountains as they dissolve in dust,
wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life.

Source: Poetry (November 2008).

2 Comments

Filed under Laureate's News, On Poetry

by | August 3, 2011 · 11:17 pm

Kay Ryan: On poetry

I never, ever worry about poetry or its survival because it’s the very nature of a poem to be that language that does survive. Poems are even better than tweets–they don’t require any electronic equipment. They can lodge right in your brain. They are by nature short. You don’t even have to remember all of them–you can remember just a phrase. That can be something you can turn to in any emergency, good or bad. You’ll pluck out a little group of words, just maybe a phrase, and that’s exactly what poetry is for. It’s for the things that really last. Because it lasts.

Kay Ryan, former U.S. Poet Laureate
winner of the Pulitzer Prize, 2011, for The Best of It
(from an interview in The Wall Street Journal online)

1 Comment

Filed under On Poetry

by | July 26, 2011 · 12:09 am

Content Magazine: A piece on the Poet Laureate

A nice piece introducing the Poet Laureate including cool photos and a poem. Once you click on the image below and get to the issue, hover on the cover, click “view fullscreen,” then proceed to pages 48-53. Better yet, subscribe to this very hip, new, San Jose cultural scene zine!

Coming soon to this blog: Announcing the first Santa Clara County’s Favorite Poems public reading!

Sally Ashton
Santa Clara County Poet Laureate

Leave a comment

Filed under Laureate's News

by | July 14, 2011 · 3:53 pm

Poet Laureate Home

After three and a half remarkable weeks in Portugal and Spain, first teaching a poetry workshop in the Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon for two weeks, then traveling a bit with my husband and son, I am at last back home in the county and look forward to begin the process of posting the nearly 100 Favorite Poems that have been submitted.

I plan to post the poems in alphabetical order according to the poem’s author’s last name, and much as U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky did in his national project, I will list all comments in one post for a single poem in the case of multiple submissions. I’ll let you know when the posting will begin. Look for a blog update soon.

Then stay tuned for the second part of the Favorite Poem Project as planned, which is a series of readings around the county given by YOU, the contributors of Favorite Poems. Not to worry if you did not manage to submit a poem in time for inclusion on the blog(submissions now closed). Any resident will be given the opportunity to read a Favorite Poem at these events.

In the meantime, I’m including this newsworthy item, below. During my time with the literary program in Lisbon, I was struck by the value placed on all the arts in Portuguese culture and how well they were integrated into daily life. This seems far more common in Europe than here in the U.S. Well, we’re doing our part!

French Coach Relies on Poetry (click on link)
By Jeré Longman
The New York Times

Sally Ashton
Santa Clara County Poet Laureate

1 Comment

Filed under Laureate's News

by | July 4, 2011 · 2:08 pm

Poet Laureate Abroad: Update

Happy 4th of July and beyond! Here are my final 3 posts from Lisbon on the Best American Poetry blog. As noted, at the close of the Disquiet literary conference, I’ve traveled on to Sevilla, Spain and met up with my husband and son.

I’ll return home July 12th, and look forward to getting the Favorite Poem posts underway. In the meantime, it’s not too late to send your own Favorite Poem with comment, or to encourage your friends and co-workers to do the same.

I hope you enjoy these words, music, and poems from Lisbon.

Hasta la vista,

Sally Ashton
Santa Clara County Poet Laureate

June 29

July 2nd

July 3rd

Leave a comment

Filed under Laureate's News

by | June 25, 2011 · 12:28 am

Poet Laureate Abroad: Lisbon

I have been in Lisbon, Portugal for one week so far, teaching in a new international literary program, Disquiet: Dzanc Books International Literary Program. I am guest blogging for Best American Poetry about the experience while I’m here, and I will list the posts to date below.

Today’s post concerns, among other topics, an important contemporary Portuguese poet, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen who had this to say about poetry. “Poetry,” she says, “is something inexhaustible, something vital. It begins with our relationship to things, to daily living, and this relationship is mythic. Without mythic thought, man is unable to inhabit the world.”
(by Sophia´s translator Richard Zenith).

I will post more blog links as they’re written. I’m having a blast!

July 25, 2011

July 21, 2011

Sally Ashton
Santa Clara County Poet Laureate

 

1 Comment

Filed under Laureate's News

by | June 17, 2011 · 11:52 pm

Christian Wiman: On poetry

Let us remember. . .that in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both.

Christian Wiman, Editor
Poetry Magazine

(note from Poet Laureate: What do you think?)

Leave a comment

Filed under On Poetry

by | June 6, 2011 · 3:50 am

Christopher R. Moylan: A favorite poem

(note from Poet Laureate: This poem was selected simultaneously by two different community leaders, appearing earlier as Sal Pizzaro’s favorite. However, each choice is both personally and uniquely different, and I decided to bookend these “notable” contributions rather than list them together. Here, our final installation from a local elected official, Christopher R. Moylan, with much appreciation to all who contributed their thoughts during the project kickoff. More news on the beginning of community postings to follow).

The Second Coming
William Butler Yeats

It sure is hard to pick one favorite poem.  It is very tempting to pick one of the great poems that seem to be about poetry itself, such as “The Red Wheelbarrow” by Williams, or “Anecdote of the Jar” by Stevens (particularly since Stevens had two careers, insurance executive and poet, just like many of us city councilmembers who have a day job and then a half-time government job).  I have always loved Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” and it is a cautionary tale for those of us who are serving in government.

But given the times we live in, the one that most resonates with me as a local elected official, particularly one of Irish descent, is “The Second Coming” by Yeats.  Over and over these days, I find, like Yeats, that “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”  Unless those of us who have been selected for this duty can keep our heads, things will indeed fall apart and the center will not hold.

Christopher R. Moylan
Council Member, City of Sunnyvale


The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)



Leave a comment

Filed under Favorites of Local Leaders

by | June 4, 2011 · 4:15 am

6 o’clock news tonight: KNTV

I had the privilege of being interviewed by Mike Anderson, a talented young photo journalist with NBC and an SJSU graduate, for a TV segment on interesting jobs. I got last minute word it would be aired tonight, and was able to catch it, the first time I’ve been on TV since I was on the Captain Delta children’s show in the Sacramento area when I was quite young. I think I cried when the good Captain thrust the microphone in my face as I sat in the bleachers…

Here I come across more at ease. Anderson asked good questions, and I post the interview for your review.

http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/poet-laureate-123065763.html

 

Leave a comment

Filed under Laureate's News