San Jose State University’s Legacy of Poetry Festival created by Director of Creative Writing Program, Alan Soldofsky, focused on bringing scientists, engineers and poets together this year, 2019. I was proud to be part of the symposium, joining the faculty, current MFA students, and Alumni peers in reading our individual eco-poems about water and fire.
The symposium on water and fire also featured poets Forrest Gander, Arthur Sze, Craig Clements, and Eugene Cordero. I was fortunate to see the first two poets on this list. “Forrest Gander is the recipient of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his most recent collection Be With. Considered one of the nation’s leading ecopoets.” I loved listening to his specificity on the growth and ancient life of lichen, these were new poems in development that the audience was fortunate enough to be present to. Arthur Sze read a whirlwind of life moments that he strung together inspired by an ancient calligraphy practice that now is hitting street artists. Street artists break out with bowls of water and calligraphy brushes to paint the parks' sidewalks, as the sun heats up the sidewalk these stories or poems fade away. “Arthur Sze is a poet and translator, Winner of the 2013 Jackson Prize from Poets & Writers magazine and a Finalist for a 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his collection Compass Rose. His newest collection Sight Lines was just published."
Sally Ashton read from her new book, The Behavior of Clocks. The poems were inspired by her readings about Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity. It was refreshing! I enjoyed her readings about the various perspectives people can have in one moment in time although "time" seems to be inconsistent and non-chronological.
Here is my reading (Introduction by Santa Clara Poet Laureate, Mighty Mike McGee):
IN AMERICA’S WILD
By KMart
I.
My Love Lies Bleeding
where my garden meets concrete
Paradise is gone
Charred bones of horses and goats
sunk where they last followed
the wind’s gust of wintery past,
Paradise is gone
The foothills poured
waters from the Feather River
into bowls, cool stone soup
for our bodies to remember
the summer season, positioned upwards, submerged
we reflected the pines in our watery eyes,
we were so in love
we were so high
II.
My Love Lies Bleeding
in America’s wild
Gripping the morphine button
I was told, “We are the
parasites eating our own mass.”
Tubed in electrical and tied up
so as to not stand his last stand,
Die in grace old man, in your plastic diaper,
on your styrofoam bed with metal
piped legs, rolling on linoleum,
not even touching the ground,
pacing the pale yellow ceiling,
We are the cancer you
are dying from,
And you, just wanting to be laid out
on the spongy moss earth in a forest
or an open starlit hilltop for that last
rattle, to share the quake of earth’s last
breath, together
III.
My Love Lies Bleeding
in the amber waves of corporate greeding,
our purple mountains beat up by acid rains
We have traded a Whit-man for a Twit-man
He who disassembles all unions,
keeping in his shorn grass bordered by a concrete,
white, picket-fence, racketeering for race
riots so as to create the unnecessary chaos and
the avoidance to the earth’s unnecessary end
This is our state of being, Simulacrum,
Our brains are in jars,
floating in the virtual realities
that twist earth into fantasy,
There is no center to the Universe,
there is no direction in Space,
We’re not going to land on Mars safely,
outlining who has what with our big chalk sticks,
It will be war and war will continue
as long as We do.
In the same vein as Jeffers,
nature doesn’t judge, she just does, to survive,
so see the Bella Donna for what she is,
curl up by the Kittentail, let the Yellow Harlequin tickle,
let the Leopard Lily giggle,
let the Love Vine choke the Honeysuckle
my love lies bleeding in this wild Wild.