Beautiful Letters

A week of literature and irony here in Buffalo. Not to mention the first lake effect snow of the season.
On Wednesday I went to a reading of two poets at Buffalo State. The reading was part of the college’s Rooftop Poetry Club, which I recently joined. The featured readers were two women and at the end there was an open reading. Another open reading on politics and poetry was scheduled for the following afternoon and I decided to attend and read something myself. I dug out an older, previously published poem written about two Latina maids in Malibu who were left behind during a wildfire. Not an overtly political poem per se, but I’d been thinking about the recent fires in Southern California and newstories about the number of “illegals” who were caught hiding in the brush by the blazes, about the fact that Bush responded so quickly in an area where the demographic is nearly the observe of the one affected in New Orleans, about the fact that after the election of Schwarzenegger to the governorship there was discussion of introducing an amendment to the constitutional requirement that the president be someone native-born, about the recent controversy here in New York and the western part of the state in particular over immigrants and drivers’ licenses. These historical ironies politicized the poem, so I read it, followed by a poem called “I Am Your Waiter Tonight and My Name Is Dmitri” from the new collection Time and Materials by Robert Hass. He was scheduled to read the following night at UB, and I’d forgotten that he spent so much time in Buffalo. The poem even mentions Buffalo, but I read it because it was slyly political, because there was a serendipitous correspondence between his poem and mine, because it mentions restaurant work (I was a waiter for too many years), and because Mr. Hass and his work have become a model for what I aspire to in my own poetry. That hasn't always been the case, but I knew him when I was a student at Berkeley. One evening right after I’d graduated and was applying to MFA programs, including the famous one at Iowa, Mr. Hass and his wife Brenda Hillman and the writer Frank Conroy came into the Zuni Café on Market Street, where I was then working. I didn’t know what Conroy, the director of the Iowa program, looked like, and when I mentioned to Mr. Hass that I’d just applied there, he said, “Well, let me introduce you to Frank Conroy.” I didn’t get into Iowa and ended up at Columbia instead.
Later that same night, after the political poetry event, I went to the Orhan Pamuk reading sponsored by Just Buffalo. Pamuk was delightful, more winsome than I’d expected him to be. He read an essay from Other Colors on the art and nature of the novel, and was captivating. The following night I went to the Hass reading. It was a sublime event: I forget how he was once seen as a kind of nature writer, but as I overheard someone at the reading mention, there can often be an implicit ecological agenda in American nature writing. (Sometimes not so implicit.) Hass’s more personal and political work have captured some part of my spirit; his poem “My Mother’s Nipples” is one of the most beautiful long haibun (a poetic form that interests me lately) I have ever read. He read “I Am Your Waiter…” as well, and I was amused to see that the challenges of its digressive structure made his reading of it something of a high-wire act. Mine was more low-wire. Afterward I said hello and reminded him of that encounter at Zuni Café. But believe it or not, my first meeting with him dates back to the early Eighties, at a workshop at Foothill College. So here I am, listening to him once again, but taking—and able to take—deeper inspiration and (moral, political, personal, spiritual) stimulation from his work. Here, so far, as he inscribed in my copy of his book, “away from Market Street and Zuni Café…”