Fall Festival 2015

The Tor House Foundation’s Fall Festival was once again good fun, from the Friday evening social at Tor House to the Sunday morning poetry walk on Carmel River Beach. Saturday featured, “Once Upon a Sunday,” a newly rediscovered film that featured Point Lobos, plus a wonderful new book by Tom Killion. I felt very fortunate to have been given an opportunity to squeeze in a recitation of Jeffers’s gem “Apology for Bad Dreams.” When I’d first been asked if I’d like to read something with a Point Lobos theme, I’d said that I’d like to read “Boats in a Fog.” Fortunate for me, someone had already claimed that one. I was thus forced to choose “Apology,” which is way too long for such an event, but what the Hell. The recitation was a cathartic experience, and many in attendance seemed to enjoy it. Why more people don’t do this sort of thing escapes me.

Fall Festival 2015

The Tor House Foundation’s Fall Festival was once again good fun, from the Friday evening social at Tor House to the Sunday morning poetry walk on Carmel River Beach. Saturday featured, “Once Upon a Sunday,” a newly rediscovered film that featured Point Lobos, plus a wonderful new book by Tom Killion. I felt very fortunate to have been given an opportunity to squeeze in a recitation of Jeffers’s gem “Apology for Bad Dreams.” When I’d first been asked if I’d like to read something with a Point Lobos theme, I’d said that I’d like to read “Boats in a Fog.” Fortunate for me, someone had already claimed that one. I was thus forced to choose “Apology,” which is way too long for such an event, but what the Hell. The recitation was a cathartic experience, and many in attendance seemed to enjoy it. Why more people don’t do this sort of thing escapes me.

Jeffers in Big Sur

Though Robinson Jeffers only visited Big Sur occasionally, yet Big Sur was Jeffers’ stage, his backdrop, and even his protagonist. It deserves our attention as Jeffers enthusiasts. Big Sur, in a very real sense, was the rough wild country that Jeffers’ Carmel could never be.

Some time back, Jean Widaman of the Tor House Foundation was organizing an outdoor event at the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur, and she invited several folks—myself among them—to join Taelen Thomas on the stage to recite some of Jeffers’ poetry. I committed several topical poems to memory for the May 17 event. I’d already stored Boats in a Fog, Night, and others in my head, but this was a Big Sur event, and that called for Big Sur poetry, so I set Oh Lovely Rock, Night Without Sleep, and Return to memory. The mental focus that this demanded helped me to think more about the poems, and I gained a deeper appreciation for them.

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Return to Ventana Creek

Over four months after I broke my foot while crossing the street in San Francisco, I put on my heavy boots and took on Ventana Creek once again.

Emerald Pool on Ventana Creek

Emerald Pool on Ventana Creek

I’d bought the boots years before after spraining my ankle while walking from the front door of my house to my car. I bought them as extra protection, and they did their job, though they’d taken off some toenails as payment. I lost another toenail on this little trip. The return leg was quite painful.

The river was running at about 23 cfs, about the same it was running when I headed up the creek in March of the previous year, and probably about the flow that Robinson Jeffers and his son Garth witnessed in August 1936.

RJA Carmel 2015

This year’s conference began with “an emerging scholars workshop,” which I dutifully missed, being neither emerging nor a scholar. After that a recital by pianist MaryClare Martin was held at Tor House, featuring Una’s newly restored Sterinway.

This was Geneva Gano’s first RJA conference as RJA president. The conference featured presentations by Kathleen Sonntag, Tim Barnes, Dale Ann Stieber, ShauneAnne Tangney, James Karman, Robert Zaller, Brett Colasacco, Kevin Batton, John Cusatis, Steven B. Herrmann, and J.R. Phillips. Rob Kafka read a paper by Ugo Gervasoni.

A tribute to Alex Vardamis was included in the procedings, as well as three performances by Lili Bita.

The theme for the 2015 RJA conference was “Humanizing Jeffers: Father, Son, Neighbor, Friend, Lover.” I was skeptical about where this theme was likely to lead, as I doubted that anyone would attempt anything controversial, but to my pleasant surprise, a writer whom I had only known of through a blog presented an astonishingly frank argument against Everson’s Mal Paso hypothesis. I didn’t expect such a breath of fresh air because the author, Mick McAllister, (1) does not use his name much online, and (2) gave his presentation a rather innocuous title: “Intruding on Jeffers: Some Notes on Biographical Mythology.” The corresponding blog entry, the Mal Paso Misstep, is available on Mr. McAllister’s Jeffers blog, Alma Venus.

The Golf Course

Carmel Pine Cone, February 3, 1915

“The Carmel golf course is situated south of the village and follows the ocean front from the end of the beach to the mouth of the Carmel river.

“It is a ten hole course which for scenic beauty and interesting natural hazard cannot be surpassed. Philip Wilson, the manager, laid out the course, and his claim is that this course, excepting the old turf, contains better golfing possibilities than any in Scotland.

“A club-house is a feature maintained by the management.”

Elijah

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. … I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. — Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonour! Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation! — Father Mapple , Moby-Dick

Back in college, I experienced a surge of interest in poetry after having lost my faith in God, etc. Like many others, I’d been raised in a context wherein particular words were believed to have meditative, restorative, and spiritual power. In addition, I was raised in an Iranian religion wherein prayer and scripture were infused with the poetic heritage of Sufi mysticism. Having removed myself from that context, I felt a an understandable need for a secular substitute.

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Rolling Reference Frames

One of the great debates around Robinson Jeffers regards whether his verse was free or, uh, not completely free. Because Jeffers identified expressly as an anti-modernist, it would not do for him to admit to having followed Walt Whitman down the rabbit hole of free verse. To do so would be to confess to immitation, and also be tantamount to laziness and lack of poetic discipline, in the eyes of some (including Jeffers himself). To this day, Jeffers apologists in odd colleges here and there seem convinced that if patterns can be found in Jeffers’ work, he can then be redeemed as a serious poet. I would like to note here that some Jeffers enthusiasts feel no such need.

It’s quite clear that Jeffers, in his mature years (35+) paid little attention to line length, meter, or rhyme. But there are those that have observed that patterns can be detected by counting stresses in each line. Because these patterns are so variable, these anomaly hunters have pointed to variations as signs of inventiveness. Perhaps that is so, but I think it more likely these verse-scholars are simply detecting subconscious rhythms that have surfaced in Jeffers’ verse. The variability that they so admire is just a sign that Jeffers did not consciously lay the patterns out.

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Fall Fest 2014

Every October, the Tor House Foundation sponsors a three-day weekend event. I hadn’t been aware of this until 2013, in spite of the fact that I’d certainly read about it. Last year I skipped the Saturday portion because I wasn’t excited about the theme. This October, I attended both the Sunset Celebration and the Saturday conference. The whole family came along Friday night. We arrived about an hour late, thanks to some lovely weekend escape traffic. The weather was beautiful, as was the sunset, bright coral and untouched by cloud or fog. There was a big crowd (a good thing), and our reader kept us all engaged during the reading, though a few of us were distracted by the performance of show-stealing hummingbird. I was predictably clumsy and uncomfortable, but at the end of the day even I had a good time.

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Robinson Jeffers Examines a Yoyo

Here’s a profound and humorous reflection on how Robinson Jeffers sees mystical magnificence and predatory violence in the most mundane of things, by California poet Kevin Jones:


It is a thing of grace and possibility this dynamic orb:
A metaphor and a microcosm of the earth, its turnings and returnings,
Embodying the Eastern philosophers’ yin and yang, the western theologian’s
Light and dark, and bound all and brought to fruition by this hempen
Umbilical cord—the Great Mother at last freed from eons of mythical
Dreaming and here, here, palpable, bright, useful in my very hand.

For aside from the mystical nature of this ingenious machine, I see
A much more practical aspect. This is not merely a tool for contemplation,
A toy for a spring-fevered and wayward child. No, it has come to me,
Sure as the vision of a hawk when the wind clears the sky off Point Lobos,
This is a tool for the hunt. I see one of the old ones, in a tree, or atop a cliff,
Waiting to drop this on passing prey, giving the animal, or an enemy, the quick
And sacred gift. Yes, I am told the device’s inventors did this very thing.
But I am sure they cooked theirs before they ate it.