LEES FERRY RAINBOW

THANK YOU, EARTH

TOR HOUSE NEEDS A NEW ROOF

Robinson Jeffers' iconic Tor House needs a new roof and the Tor House Foundation would like our help raising the funds. If you follow the link in the previous sentence you'll learn how you can help and see my photo of the Tor House at the top of their page.

Ginger Mayerson spotted my photo in a blog posting here at These Rivers, Footsteps of the Masters, and asked permission to use it. I was honored to grant permission, and pleased to see myself credited for the photo and described as "poet and photographer."

It's been years--no, decades--since I've thought of myself as a photographer but there was a time photography was my art. I majored in Studio Art at Arizona State University (and geography, but that's another story, sort of) and came to love everything about cameras and how they helped me see the world.

Minor White described it this way, "...innocence of eye has a quality of its own. It means to see as a child sees, with freshness and acknowledgment of the wonder; it also means to see as an adult sees who has gone full circle and once again sees as a child - with freshness and an even deeper sense of wonder."

ASU had especially good photographers on its faculty but there is one to whom I'll be forever grateful for helping me discover that poetry was, in fact, my art. That photographer was Jack Stuler.

I'd been writing since I was a boy and, because it came naturally, I didn't appreciate that it was an art that required the same amount of discipline and intention as arts newer to me, like photography, did.

Things changed---after many semesters spent walking Tempe, Arizona's desert edges with a 4x5 view camera on my shoulder---when I came inside to create in the studio, aka my studio apartment, and started constructing scenes to be photographed. It started with objects I'd found during those desert walks and brought home. A seed pod. Cactus thorn. An abandoned doll's eye.

Then came the words. And more words. And then to showing my latest efforts to Jack in his office one afternoon, and Jack's observation, over his unlit pipe that, maybe, I was writing poetry.

Jack offered me several (actually, many) hours of independent study credit during the last semester of my senior year to explore poetry. I was tasked to read it, write it, every day, and drop in during office hours once a week to chat with him about whatever was on our creative minds. It was simple and informal.

You see, Jack was a working artist. He taught, and led, by example. He treated his students as working artists, too. We rose to his expectations. And I became a working poet.

HALFPOUNDERS

It's spring break at Toby Johnson Middle School and there are spring-run steelhead in our river. My nephew and I took advantage of this coincidence to wake up even earlier than he would on a school day. He's been eyeing my 6 weight spey rod for a while now so spring break seemed like an excellent time to focus on his fly-fishing education.

I can sum up our day, in part, with the words of Roderick Haig-Brown: "I have fished through fishless days that I remember happily without regret." And with a minor variation on the words of Professor Higgins: "By Jove, I think he's got it."

TRUST THE PROCESS

It had been a long time since I'd connected with a steelhead and I found myself, once again, wondering if I might never catch another one of those beautiful, wild creatures. The same feeling comes over me when I haven't written a new poem in a while. Be grateful for the fish and poems you landed, I tell myself. Count your blessings. At a certain point, though, there's no consolation. I need to write a poem, catch a steelhead.

Last week, I went back to square one: the sketch book en plein air. Drawing always gets me seeing again which starts me writing again. Once I'm seeing and writing I start hearing and tasting and feeling, intensely, again. My senses renewed, I wrote a new poem. I needed that poem even more than I thought I did.

This morning, at first light, I went back to square one for a steelhead: spey rod rigged with a Scandi head and floating polyleader, a soft-hackle fly swung down and across on my local waters. Once I find the rhythm of casting, swinging, and stepping downstream, I start reading the water again, seeing and feeling those soft spots that hold steelhead. Once again, I learn to trust the process.

"MY NAKED BRAIN" BY LEOPOLDO MARIA PANERO

"I have not forgotten the confused feelings of fascination and revulsion that Panero's poetry--at once violent and vile, beautiful and lyrical, insane and cogent--produced in me. I felt not a little disturbed by the fact that I could be drawn so powerfully by his starkly brutal imagery and raving expressions of tortured misery.

"I knew almost immediately that I had to translate him into English."

--Arturo Mantecon, from the Translator's Note.

"OTHER SUNS" BY PATRICIA KILLELEA

Jim DenBoer is the managing editor at Swan Scythe Press, a fine poet, and a friend of mine. We've had lots of fun figuring out how to make short videos using a Flip camera and iMovie software to promote books of poems newly-released from Swan Scythe. We've managed to create yet another one (our first featured poet was Burlee Vang and his book The Dead I Know).

This video features Patricia Killelea reading from her book, Other Suns, and introduces original music by my friend Clemon Charles. This is my second collaboration with Clemon, an extremely talented singer, songwriter, and acoustic guitarist.

To celebrate the release of my new chapbook of poems last fall, Clemon and I put together a set of songs, poems and acoustical transitions that we performed at the Urban Hive in Midtown Sacramento. It was an absolute delight to collaborate and perform with Clemon. Out of that collaboration came many original, musical phrasings. One of which we tapped for use as the theme music for our poetry videos.

Enjoy.