Juneteenth

/2 Comments/in , , /by

I am at the Stafford Challenge Conference at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and having a wonderful time. Naomi Shihab Nye is here, and she is one of my favorite all-time poets, so that’s a joy. I’m also enjoying getting to know Kim Stafford and looking forward to his workshop this morning.

If you’ve no idea what the Stafford Challenge is, please visit the website — lots of information about William Stafford, about the challenge to write a poem a day for a year, and about the founder of this terrific challenge, Brian Rohr.

 

Another poet here, brand new to me, is Emmett Wheatfall. (New to me, she said, out of the well of her incredible ignorance. This guy has done and is doing SO much!)

If there is one thing I would do differently at this wonderful conference (if I were in charge of this conference, and other worries), I would begin the welcome on June 19 with “I, Too, Am America,” by Langston Hughes. And I would ask Emmett Wheatfall to read one or two of his poems.

Luckily, Wheatfall was part of the program at last night’s reading. He is a big poet with a big voice and I would love to have more people, at this moment in history, hear that voice.

In My Country ‘Tis of Thee

In My Country,
‘Tis of Thee
I’m still not free.
Far be it from me
is my Sweet land of liberty.
I’ve lost the will to sing
Of thee I sing.
Yes, Land where my fathers died,
and I’m still not free.
I’m a descendent of slaves,
so I know nothing of
the pilgrims’ pride.
Black bodies
if stacked
rise From ev’ry mountainside.
I for damn sure am not free.
Let freedom ring
from the cracked Liberty Bell
in Philadelphia.
I live in the broken state
being the United States
where here
I’m still not free.

—Emmett Wheatfall, from Contradictions from an Uncertain Silence (Fernwood Press, 2025)

Contradictions has as its epigraph a line from Jean-Paul Sartre, “Every word has consequences. Every silence, too.” The book is dedicated “To all the poets who dare speak their mind….” One of his poems is a couplet, “If the 45th President Is Reelected”: “we will not have knocked the meteor out of the night sky / we will have punched a hole in that Founding piece of paper.”

“Every word has consequences. Every silence, too.” — Emmett Wheatfall

Wheatfall ended his reading last night by declaring (throwing out his arms like a Pentecostal preacher) “I love America!,” and then reciting “America the Beautiful.” Have you really looked at those words lately? How are we honoring them? How can we honor them better?

I want to add that, when I was able to talk with Emmett later in the day, he told me he was glad he wasn’t asked to be the voice for Juneteenth — three black people here, and, you know, he said. I also attended his workshop on performance and had my eyes opened — not only to all the performing he has done — but the possibilities for his workshop students to step up their own performance. You can learn more about Emmett Wheatfall at the Oregon Library Association website, or his personal website. Be sure to explore some of the links he offers.

And let me throw in some additional information about Juneteenth and this moment in our country’s history. I hope you read Robert Reich’s “The Truth about Juneteenth” and our current political situation (catch it here). Or see Heather Cox Richardson’s Juneteenth Substack.

William Stafford might advise us:

For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid

There is a country to cross you will
find in the corner of your eye, in
the quick slip of your foot — air far
down, a snap that might have caught.
And maybe for you, for me, a high, passing
voice that finds its way by being
afraid. That country is there, for us,
carried as it is crossed. What you fear
will not go away: it will take you into
yourself and bless you and keep you.
That’s the world, and we all live there.

—William Stafford (1914-1993)

(Poem used in Christopher Luna’s workshop on writing a political poem.)

These are messages that we can amplify.

On my walk this morning I saw a sign at a house across from the Lewis & Clark campus: Whoever you are and wherever you are from, I am glad you here.

So am I.

Bethany

 

Lana Hechtman Ayers, STILL LIFE WITH SORROW & JOY

/0 Comments/in /by

Still Life with Sorrow & Joy, Lana Hechtman Ayers, The Poetry Box, 2026

What a lucky thing to have poet-friends.

I had two big deadlines at the end of May (didn’t quite make them, but almost);  I’m teaching another Creative Retirement Institute Class (on William Stafford, and it’s going beautifully); and I seem to have forgotten all about being a blogger. But then comes this package in the mail, two books from none other than the Lana Hechtman Ayers, managing editor (and one-woman dynamo) of the Concrete Wolf Poetry Series, MoonPath Press, and World Enough Writers.

As a bonus, Lana will be reading for Poem After Poem, on Zoom this Sunday afternoon, with Donna Hilbert. I’ll be there. You can join by pre-registering at https://lanaayers.com/News.htm.

Penelope Scambly Schott calls Still Life with Sorrow & Joy ” a joyous celebration,” full of both grief and delights. The collection plays with form, pays tribute to other poets, dreams wildly, and blends paeans to beloved pets with longing for lost two-legged loved ones. The poems are all about love, though at times they keen over our failure to love enough. In the very short, “Night Vision Goggles,” we get these three bare lines: “All we do not understand / could fill battlefields — // and does.”

Here’s one more:

“The Words We Speak Become the House We Live In”

— Hafiz

The first speech is apology.
House of fractured glass,
roof of Van Gogh nebula
that allows in all weather.

The second speech is question.
Swaying Schrödinger rope bridge
that may or may not collapse
above a black hole of assumption.

The third speech is desire.
Longing for blue lake and fog,
worldly wiles of musk,
the way crows caw at dusk.

Fourth speech is tongue-tied.
Apple that bobbles into
your palm bruised,
battered with sweetness.

The fifth speech is easy song.
Salmon shapeshifting along
upstream, lyrical shivering scales,
and the pale, pale riverboat sky.

The final speech is goodbye.
Shudder of butterfly wings,
sigh of fire that alters
the glint in God’s eyes.

— Lana Hechtman Ayers

Again, here is the link to see more information on Lana’s Poem After Poem reading this Sunday at 3 p.m. Pacific Time.

Edward Harkness, CREEK WATER: NEW & SELECTED POEMS

/0 Comments/in , /by

CREEK WATER: NEW & SELECTED POEMS, Edward Harkness, Empty Bowl, 2025.

National Poetry Month is slipping away, but if I lower the bar a bit, I think I can get in two more books for you.

And it was such a pleasure to spend time this morning with northwest poet Ed Harkness’s Creek Water. In his many poems celebrating the natural world, but also when he turns his attention to our difficult politically- and violence-charged news stories, his is a faithful and a reliable witness. Ann Pitkin calls Creek Water  “a rich, generous-hearted collection, moving testament by a man of passionate conscience.” Amen.

When Should We Say Something

I don’t know. Yesterday.
Elsewhere, in a school classroom,
a missile strike
erases our future

in some far-off country
always elsewhere. I don’t know
how to reach out
to touch your cheek. The cosmos

you planted nod Ah, yes.
I don’t know anything as
delicate as
those silky lavender blades

radiant from gold hubs.
In the late light of summer,
the last garden
tomatoes droop like blood moons.

On a sunflower crown,
a nuthatch clicks and winces,
a sound I love,
akin to a wagon wheel

in need of oil. Elsewhere,
a tank shell finds the bedroom
window of two
sisters asleep, neither one

yet twelve. Their bed explodes.
Elsewhere, two sisters pass by
on the sidewalk,
neither one yet twelve, chatting

to the clack of skateboards
on the pavements gray. Dear ones,
make a new world.
I’ve spent my voice. It’s your turn.

—Edward Harkness

To learn more about Harkness and how to purchase Creek Water, visit Empty Bowl. I also found him at Artist Trust, and reading two poems at Terrain.com. I previously reviewed his work here.

Two Books by Susan Landgraf

/0 Comments/in /by

JOURNEY OF TREES, Susan Landgraf, The Poetry Box Publishing, 2024. Finalist for the 2023 Poetry Box Chapbook Prize.

THE INSPIRED POET: WRITING EXERCISES TO SPARK NEW WORK, Susan Landgraf, Two Sylvias Press, 2019.

In the words of Jane Wong, the poems in Journey of Trees are “fed by the kindling of myth and lyrical curiosity.” Sati Mookherjee tells us the poems “show how we story-tell our way into truth-telling.” More proof that poetry is a good path for us to find ourselves on.

I purchased both of these books in June of 2024, right before my life began unraveling. They have waited patiently on my shelf for me to rediscover them, and National Poetry Month provides a perfect time to have done so.

The 37 exercises in The Inspired Poet include “Writing into Our Fears,” “Leaping Poetry,” “It’s a Piece of Cake,” acrostics, list poems, and “Thinking in Similes.” Each exercise offers example poems, for instance the simile-rich “Love Poem Without a Drop of Hyperbole in It,” from Traci Brimhall; the final poem in the book is Samuel Green’s brilliant “Some Reasons Why I Became a Poet.”

Landgraf is a long-time teacher of poetry and workshop leader herself, and, in short, this book is well worth your attention.

One poem from Journey of Trees— 

The Ten Stations of Worship

This is the hand held for safety’s sake,
palms raised to show the most traveled paths.

This is the foot, bunioned and mud-stained—Russian
steppes, ice caves, olive groves.

This is the leg, striding or curved, lotus-like
in the California poppies.

This is the eye of curled ferns and symbols.
This is the eye of permission. Amen.

This is the lap, a nest of goose down.
We’ve learned to fold and to wait.

This is the breast we come to and come to—
our need for suckle and beauty and grace.

This is the seed pod moist
with rain.

This is the other mouth
we depend on—the telling and retelling

in this temple of trees.

—Susan Landgraf

 I recently came across (again) the words of Wislawa Szymborska:  “I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems” (from her poem, “Possibilities”). I’ve been questioning why I wanted to do so many reviews in April (when I have plenty else to keep me busy), and why I over-indulged on Independent Bookstore Day and bought a bunch more poetry books. Szymborska helps me understand myself, and this quote, from the great Grace Paley, shared by Landgraf (p. 177), helps, too:

The best training is to read and write, no matter what. Don’t live with a lover or roommate who doesn’t respect your work. Don’t lie, [but] buy time, borrow to buy time. Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.

(Interview from The Paris Review, 1992)

It’s not your obsession, Bethany, it’s your passion. (And such good company on the journey.)