Poetry again
Last night Peter, Aviva, Jay and I went to the opening dinner for the annual Poetry Festival in Sharon Springs. I wrote about this terrific event last year and it was such fun to be back for a second time. Once again, the food and the setting were perfect. Paul Muldoon, the founder of the festival, was there again as the charming and witty emcee. I didn’t know two of the poets at all, Ellen Bass, a woman around our age, and Michael Dickman, a young man. I knew of the third poet, Erica Jong, but hadn’t known she was a poet.
After the delicious fennel and spinach soup had been cleared Ellen Bass read my favorite poem of the evening, “Ode to the Pork Chop”. It was more charming and funny in her voice than it seems on the page. It ends with this reflection:
“As meat sears and butter bubbles,
I’m carried back to a time when this scent
meant survival—we’d see
another day. That deep craving for grease
that’s stuffed into every cell of our bodies,
that sizzling smell that tells us
all will be well, we’ll be fat enough to release
an egg, to suckle a baby. With all its
murder and mayhem, life will go on.”
I’m pretty sure it’s the only time I’ve seen grease mentioned favorably in a poem. After the quinoa, citrus and almond salad, Michael Dickman started off by teaching us a poem titled The Last Poem in the World by Hayden Carruth. He had us repeat the lines, and they’ve stayed with me.
Would I write it, if I could?
Bet your glitzy ass I would.
It was a fun way to involve us.
Before the main course was served, the lone African American man in the place (and probably for miles around) was introduced. I knew him only as the hotel receptionist and he helped waiting tables at this event. He told us that he was leaving for North Carolina the next day to attend the funeral of the matriarch of his family, and he sang for us the beautiful song he was going to sing there. He had a stunning voice, and a rich, emotional delivery. It was another reminder of the amazing talent that is hidden in plain sight in these small towns.
When we attended this event last year (without Aviva, who was away) we felt like such new comers. And by the standards of folks whose families have been here for generations, we’ll always be newcomers. But going back to the Poetry Festival for the second time at the edge of our third winter here, I feel settled, part of the community, part of the rhythm of local life. The Film Festival is coming up in a couple of weeks, and the winter concert series is starting. The parking meters were covered for the winter after Columbus Day, and Cooperstown belongs to the citizens again until the tourists return at Memorial Day.
The other fair weather visitors are gone too, the song birds and the geese. A few geese, late heading south, still drop in at the pond for a break, but the last of them will be gone soon. The glossy black crows will be our main avian neighbors for the winter. We’ll still see bluejays and get occasional red flashes of cardinals, but the crows will dominate. With a couple of cold, rainy, windy days it’s clear that winter is on the way. We’ve had a beautiful fall – not spectacular, but lots of great color. A lot of the bright yellow, orange and red leaves that shone in the sun along the road and up in the hills have yielded to the force of the wind and lie in carpets under the trees now. When I drive down Gulf Road they swirl up behind me.
We’ve ordered two tons of pellets to feed the stove through the winter, and setting the stove up for the morning has become part of my nightly routine again. Jay was talking to the poet Ellen Bass after dinner last night. She lives in Santa Cruz, and was a little mystified to learn that we’d moved here from California. Isn’t everyone moving in the other direction, she asked. Certainly, people who need jobs are moving out of the countryside in large numbers, and a lot of people our age are seeking warmer homes for all or part of the year. But we’ve found peace and a warm community here. If Paul Muldoon held a poetry festival in Palo Alto, it would have been in some huge venue with tickets costing a small fortune. We would have thought about parking and traffic, and would never have gone. But here, we drove through the rainy fall twilight over quiet country roads, had a delicious dinner in a wonderful old hotel that has been lovingly restored, met friends, and sat close enough to the poets for an after dinner chat. I don’t think of winter as the price we pay for this, I think of it as part of what we gain by living here. The price we’ve paid is distance from family and dear friends, and that’s a steep price. But we’ve bought a way of life that we love, the poetry of Ellen Bass, the poetry of falling leaves, the poetry of crows.