Denise Levertov and Kaveh Akbar on language

watercolor and masking tape, collage with noxious weeds and stamps on watercolor paper

“And language? Rhythms/of echo and interruption?/that’s/a way of breathing.” wrote Denise Levertov, who lived the last part of her life at the south end of Lake Washington, with a view of and poems about Mt. Rainier. Her poem title, “Looking, Walking, Being” pretty much sums it up for me – alive on the move.

And language. And Kaveh Akbar last night, first SAL Poet of the season read at Hugo House. We watched remotely, still feeling unsafe in crowds. He celebrated the Bushwick Book Club composer/violist/singer Alex Guy and past Youth Poet Laureate and author of “Motherland” Bitaniya Giday, as his first on-stage act, so that I liked him from the get-go. He read from “Pilgrim Bell”, his second book, stretching a leg back, lifting up on his toes so that he loomed high above the mic, twirling his amazement of thick dark hair. He conjured, sang, lamented, pled, questioned, in English and the Farsi he said he does not speak, magical and affecting. Not affected. I will never think of the punctuation mark the period at the end of a sentence in the same way. Did I mean to declare? Demand through imperative?

Morning After Mary Ruefle at SAL

I dig out my Golden Treasury of Poetry, edited by Louis Untermeyer…

The illustrated frontispiece of my Golden Treasury of Poetry, with a dedication in my mom's handwriting from my parents to me. I was ten. Just.
Oh but I love the illustrated frontispiece!
And the dedication in my mother’s handwriting
from my parents to me. I was ten. Just.

At Tin Table before her reading, Mary and I talked
about our shared childhood favorite author,
Laura Ingalls Wilder, of the Little House books.
Mary had visited her late life house
in Nebraska?
in the Ozarks we both nodded,
having seen a sign driving past
traveling with a group of writers
who didn’t understand when Mary cried,
“Stop the car! Stop the car!”
I was awed and excited and said so.
Told Mary about reading Laura’s books
to my young daughters, who had no taste
for Pa and his fiddle, the rope in the snowstorm,
and how I’d forgotten, but the girls reminded me
I had tortured them further by recording myself
reading the books so they could listen
when I wasn’t there.
Mary clasped my hand the whole time
as I clasped hers.