SPECIAL NOTE: Rhina’s new poetry collection, "Her Place in These Designs," is due for publication THIS MONTH, from Truman State University Press.

Intro:
Rhina Espaillat was born in the Dominican Republic in 1932. She was seven years old when her father, fearing that his political protests against the Dominican dictator, Trujillo, were endangering his family, moved them to New York City in 1939.

Upon graduating from Hunter College with a degree in English Literature, Rhina married the sculptor and teacher, Alfred Moskowitz, and set out to teach high school English in the public schools of Queens. After their retirement from teaching, Rhina and Alfred moved to Newburyport, MA. They have three sons and three grandchildren.

For fourteen years Rhina coordinated the Newburyport Art Association's Annual Poetry Contest. She is a member of the Powow River Poets, which she co-founded. She has been instrumental in bringing about bilingual poetry readings in the North of Boston area, and bilingual activities shared by the high school students of Lawrence and Newburyport. She is a frequent reader and speaker in the Boston area, and conducts workshops at colleges and universities out of state as well. She was one of the eighty writers invited to participate in the National Book Festival sponsored jointly by the Library of Congress and the First Lady, and held in Washington DC on October 4, 2003.

Rhina has published ten collections, including: Lapsing to Grace (Bennett & Kitchel, 1992); Where Horizons Go (Truman State University Press, 1998), which won the 1998 T. S. Eliot Prize; Rehearsing Absence (University of Evansville Press), which won the 2001 Richard Wilbur Award; "Mundo y Palabra/The World and the Word" (Oyster River Press); The Shadow I Dress In (David Robert Books, 2004), winner of the 2003 Stanzas Prize; Playing at Stillness (Truman State University Press, 2005); a bilingual collection of poems and essays titled Agua de dos rios (Water from Two Rivers) (Editora Nacional, 2006), published under the auspices of the Dominican Republic’s Ministry of Culture (Editora Buho, Santo Domingo, 2006); and a bilingual collection of short stories titled El olor de la memoria/The Scent of Memory (CEDIBIL, Santo Domingo, 2007).

Her awards include the Sparrow Sonnet Prize; three yearly prizes from the Poetry Society of America; the Der-Hovanessian Translation Prize, the Barbara Bradley Award and the May Sarton Award from the New England Poetry Club; the Oberon Prize; the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award sponsored by The Formalist; the “Tree at My Window” Award from the Robert Frost Foundation (specifically for her Spanish translations of Robert Frost, and her English translations of Saint John of the Cross and the Dominican poet Cesar Sanchez Beras); the Dominican Republic's Salome Ureña de Henríquez Award for service to Dominican culture and education; a recognition award from the Dominican Studies Association and Division of Academic Affairs of Eugenio Maria de Hostos Community College, and another from the Commissioner of Dominican Cultural Affairs in the United States; an award for services to Dominican letters, presented to her as one of the honorees at the Tenth International Book Fair held in Santo Domingo in 2007; a recognition as Distinguished Alumna from Hunter College, CUNY; and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Salem State College in 2008.

Like Tim Murphy, I, too, have had the unforgettable pleasure of Rhina’s Newburyport hospitality. I recounted the visit and discussed Rhina’s life and work in the article I wrote for Mezzo Cammin, Vol. 2, Issue 1, which may be viewed at: www.mezzocammin.com/iambic.phpvol=2007&iss=1&cat=criticism&page=monsou r

Rhina has written some of my vary favorite sonnets. The first two I include here have, as their protagonista, the “mother’s mother,” who seems to be a Dominican incarnation of one of Frost’s New Englanders.

“FIND WORK”

I tie my Hat—I crease my Shawl—
Life’s little duties do—precisely
As the very least
Were infinite—to me—
Emily Dickinson, #443

My mother’s mother, widowed very young
of her first love, and of that love’s first fruit,
moved through her father’s farm, her country tongue
and country heart anaesthetized and mute
with labor. So her kind was taught to do—
“Find work,” she would reply to every grief—
and her one dictum, whether false or true,
tolled heavy with her passionate belief.
Widowed again, with children, in her prime,
she spoke so little it was hard to bear
so much composure, such a truce with time
spent in the lifelong practice of despair.
But I recall her floors, scrubbed white as bone,
Her dishes, and how painfully they shone.


BUTCHERING

My mother’s mother, toughened by the farm,
hardened by infants’ burials, used a knife
and swung an axe as if her woman’s arm
wielded a man’s hard will. Inured to life
and death alike, “What ails you now?” she’d say
ungently to the sick. She fed them too,
roughly but well, and took the blood away—
and washed the dead, if there was that to do.
She told us children how the cows could sense
when their own calves were marked for butchering,
and how they lowed, their wordless eloquence
impossible to still with anything—
sweet clover, or her unremitting care.
She told it simply, but she faltered there.


CONTINGENCIES

As if it mattered: still, you probe to trace
precisely when it was fate took and tossed
and overwhelmed you, find the very place
it was you stood on when you found—or lost—
the thing that mattered. When the envelope
slid through the slot, innocent as a stone;
what you were scrubbing when you wiped the soap
hastily on your apron, took the phone
and left the water running, out of breath
with interruptions, slow to grasp the news:
the baby’s birthweight, say, or time of death,
or diagnosis, casual as a fuse;
or in some public room, the stranger’s name
half-heard, and nothing afterward the same.


I love the little “shrug” at the end of this poem:
FOR EVAN, WHO SAYS I AM TOO TIDY

On grandson’s lips, “tidy” is pretty dire:
it smacks of age and tameness, of desire
banked by gray prudence, waiting for commands,
forced to endure the scrubbing of both hands.

But tidy sets the table, mends the toys,
lays out clean bedding and such minor joys
as underpin contentment and at least
nourish with daily bread, if not with feast.

Tidy’s been blamed for everything we suffer
from guilt to prisons. But free-wheeling’s rougher,
less wary not to fracture laws and bones,
much less adept with statutes than with stones.

True, tidy seldom goes where genius goes,
but then how many do? And heaven knows
there’s work for us who watch the time, the purse,
the washing of small hands. I’ve been called worse.


If Robert Burns had been a car mechanic and his mother, a poet:
RAT IN THE ENGINE

This is the story, as you tell it, flat,
in few words: he’d made a nest in some warm
nook of your engine, sensed you meant no harm,
and learned to watch you do the things you do
with wires; you liked his whiskers; then the fan
belt caught him, broke his neck, and that was that.

We trade more news, love’s noise, across the phone’s
thin, gritty bridge, and then the miles clang down
again between us. But I hear you still,
your voice warm in my ear that leaned to you
before you had a voice. Sifting the tones,
the words, I find you, son, a gentle man
wiser than books have made you, or the town
with its clipped hedges and its grid of streets.
In these hard times not every man one meets
mourns for his one involuntary kill,
or moves with care, like you, my grown-up child,
to share what room he has with something wild.


BIENVENIDA, RHINA! What makes women's poetry tick?

Gracias, Leslie! This is going to be fun!

As for what makes women's poetry tick--when it does--I suspect it's the same factors that make the poetry of guys tick, when that does. But I also think we've been at it longer--at least lyric poetry, anyway--and all of that very personal, plangent early stuff by Anonymous supports that notion.

I'm thinking of the "Mother, I cannot mind my wheel" kind of thing that turns up not only in English but in just about every language, in which women--often nameless--engage in "trouble talk" about the guy who ran off, or the guy away at war, or the child who died, or the cruelty of rules and traditions that curb personal ambition, or the pregnancy that will now have to be explained to stern parents....so forth and so forth.

I've been reading a wonderful collection titled "Women Poets from Antiquity to Now," edited by Alike Barnstone and Willis barnstone. The section on Spain alone is worth the whole book, but there are also poems from various African languages, the Middle East, Asia, and all of Europe.

Of course a lot of it has the sound of women's "trouble talk" today, because that's part of what our lives have always given us. It's not that women are "built that way," but that our circumstances have encouraged those precise
preoccupations. It will be interesting to see how--if-- the poetry of women as a group changes now that some of us are CEOs and prison inmates and candidates for high public office, among other things.

The other point to remember is that theme and subject are not the same thing. A writer's subjects--the pots and pans or test-tubes or weapons or flowers that comprise his/her metaphors--may be limited by the circumstances of that writer's life, but the themes are not necessrily so limited. Any poet may use an entire range of subjects, drawn from almost any context, to evoke very different
themes. Think of all the poems--by both men and women--that pretend to be about trees but are really meditations on memory, or the relationship between human beings and the rest of nature, or the passage of time, or...the list goes on.

Whether you use a steamshovel or a garden trowel or an old spoon, it's all digging, and it's the same earth.

"Rat in the Engine" is a favorite of mine, Leslie.

Here are two more Espaillat poems I admire enormously for their playful and probing metaphysics, for their understanding of the fickleness not only of ephemeral consciousness but of all articulation of dogma, if not of articulation itself.

Negations

Sermons the seasons preach that never quite,
and yet almost persuade, almost deceive--
migrations, the fidelity of light,
those steady habits--want you to believe;

as if the mockingbird set out to say
one thing, but changed its tune and took it back,
as if the wind crossing the pond half way
lifted its sequined veil to show the black,

as if your days were plates of summer fruit
that you may wash and quarter, core and pare
for guests, until you notice they've gone mute,
gone home for good, if they were ever there.


"Hard Sciences"

That's what we call them when we choose, instead,
Botany, soft as Easter after Lent,
which promises translation of our dead
into one green, perpetual testament;
Zoology, that clever joke on time
whose intricate, obsessive play on form
links past and future through the almost-rhyme
of flipper, fin, and finger, swim and swarm.
Those others measure scattered light not ours
to read our fortunes by; they will not bend
maternal over us like funeral flowers.
Those are hard sciences; they never mend
what living breaks. Except as headstones may,
by naming, standing up for what they say.




[This message has been edited by Terese Coe (edited November 07, 2008).]

What I especially admire in Rhina's poetry is her ability to make me forget I am reading a poem. So often I will literally enter her poem, sit beside her on the subway, stand beside her in the kitchen. Only a master craftsman can do that. I think the word is "transported".

I'm going to give my two favorite Rhina poems, too.
There's one for the beginning of life and one for the closing.

THEIR ONLY CHILD

I am the one who didn't get away.
Their blood tumbled with promise, teeming
quicksilver too luminous to stay;
I am their whole catch, landed and streaming

rainbows. Those others they dreamed of - the charmer,
the saint, the tall magnificent son -
circled the wormed hook, but sensing harm
slid on forever. I am the one

who trailed their bait through the film of the ideal
and rose to the flawed light. No more, no less
than actual, like death, I am the real
one, the waking, the caress.

SONG

From hair to horse to house to rose,
her tongue unfastened like her gait,
her gaze, her guise, her ghost, she goes.

She cannot name the thing she knows,
word and its image will no mate.
From hair to horse to house to rose

there is a circle will not close.
She babbles to her dinner plate.
All gaze and gaunt as ghost she goes -

smiling at these, frowning at those,
smoothing the air to make it straight -
from hair to horse to house to rose.

She settles in a thoughtful pose
as if she understood her fate,
her face, her gaze, her ghost. She goes

downstream relentlessly, she flows
where dark forgiving waters wait.
From hair to horse to house to rose,
her gaze, her guise, her ghost, she goes.

I feel tongue-tied even in the (virtual) presence of Rhina, whose grace and elegance I admire so much. But I love what you said about themes and subjects not being the same, Rhina. You are so right--each of us works with the images that have meaning and resonance to us, and our themes flow through those images into our words.

Gotta echo Janice here. The poems I like best--and want to write--are those that are not just read but experienced. Maybe the good lyric poem was the first virtual reality! How would you say you accomplish that, Rhina? I'd also be interested in learning more about your personal arc. Did you write all your life or did you come to it late?

Gail,

"Song" is one of the most lyrical poems I've ever read--by anyone! I've been totally in awe of it since I first laid eyes on it. BTW the two I posted are examples of Rhina's great talent for the metaphysical, but I can't say they're my two "favorites" b/c Rhina has too many moving poems for me to call it that way. And "Song" transports me, is something Ophelia-like and yet far beyond Ophelia.

This was the poem that got me hooked on reading Rhina:

Reservation

As if he has decided on a nap
but feels too pressed for time to find his bed
or even shift the napkin from his lap,
the man across the table drops his head
mid-anecdote, just managing to clear
a basket of warm rolls and butter stacked
like little golden dice beside his ear.
The lady seems embarrassed to attract
such swift attention from the formal stranger
who leaves his dinner, bends as if to wake
the sleeper, seeks a pulse. Others arrange her
coat about her, gather round to take
the plates, the quiet form, her name, her hand.
Now slowly she begins to understand.

There are so many of Rhina's poems that I absolutely LOVE and read over and over again, that I'm afraid it would take up too much "cyberspace" to reprint them in my response. Suffice it to say that, had it not been for Rhina Espaillat's poetry and generous encouragement a few years back, I would not have persisted in my writing and certainly would not have had the courage to submit my poems for publication. One of the thrills of my life was meeting Rhina in Newburyport in July 2006.

I was delightfully surprised to see that Leslie had included "Butchering" in her introductory remarks. It is one of my favorites. Others are "Almost", "Through the Window", "Cuttings", "Theme and Variations", and "Unto Each Thing." I could go on an on. Thank you, Rhina!

Rhina's poems combine such a natural musicality and life force that I hesitate to do more than let one poem demonstrate my meaning. She cuts straight to the chase and makes me live the poem. I chose this one in response to Clive Watkins's request for a list of poems we might like to read when we knew our days were numbered.

Rachmaninoff on the Mass Pike


It calls the heart, this music, to a place
more intimate than home, than self, that face
aging in the hall mirror. This is not
music to age by — no sprightly gavotte
or orderly pavane, counting each beat,
confining motion to the pointed feet
and sagely nodding head; not Chopin, wise
enough to keep some distance in his eyes
between perceiver and the thing perceived.
No, this is song that means to be believed,
that quite believes itself, each rising wave
of passionate crescendo wild and brave.
The silly girl who lived inside my skin
once loved this music; its melodic din
was like the voice she dreamed in, sad, intense.
She didn't know a thing, she had no sense;
she scorned — and needed — calendar and clock,
the rules, the steps, the lines, Sebastian Bach;
she wanted life to break her like a tide,
but not too painfully. On either side
the turnpike trundles by, nurseries, farms,
small towns with schools and markets in their arms,
small industry, green spaces now and then.
All the heart wants is to be called again.


Thank you Rhina.

Janet

Thanks so much, all of you who have posted poems and said wonderful things! I'm moved by all of it, precisely because I've never written exclusively for myself but always for some unseen other person I want inside the poem with me. The first experiences I had with poetry--in my grandmother's house, where poetry and music were always shared pleasures, not solitary occupations--taught me to think of it that way, and I think the inability to communicate with others in this country before learning English strengthened the need to invite others in, and to be invited in. To this day the poets I love most are those who open the door, even if the reader is surprised and not entirely at home once he's inside. I'm grateful to those of you who say you find it easy to walk into my poems and stand where I am: that's exactly, exactly what I want the language to do!

What happens after that, of course, is another story, and you're on your own once I have you where I want you. That's what happens with Frost, and one of the things I admire most about his poems. They open the door because the language is apparently just conversation, but then once you're in there he shows you things that sometimes make you wish you were outside again--in "Out, Out--" for instance--but you're better somehow for having been trapped in there. Emily Dickinson does that too, even though she's not really "conversational." She coaxes you in with conspiratorial wit, and then the roof falls in. But by then you're so hooked that you don't mind the roof.

The poetry I like least is the kind that shuts you out with thorny hedges of language so impenetrable that once you get in, no matter what you're offered, even if your eyes tell you it's caviar, you end up thinking, "Is this it? I got all scratched up and bloody for these little crackers with stuff on them?"

I have been trying to identify what it is about Rhina's poems that makes me feel that not only my aesthetic experience but also my life has been enlarged after reading poems of hers. I think her insights are not just human but humane. Something that I had seen without noticing suddenly falls into place, and I both recognize it and understand it. Or the experience is unlike anything I have had, but once she has described it, it is as if it had happened to me. The poems resonate with the mixed feelings that feel so much truer than the unmixed ones that one encounters more often in literature than in life. Her understanding feels hard-won and not static.

Susan

I carry many of Rhina's poems in my heart, but "Their Only Child," posted by Gail, has a special place there. I like to imagine that someday my daughter, also the one who didn’t get away, will see herself in it.

"Practice" is another favorite of mine. "Picture this pair," it begins, and reading the poem is like watching a scene from a film, the characters and their gestures are so deftly drawn. And I love the ending.

Practice

Picture this pair: eleven-year-old boy,
nine-year-old sister; we old folks ahead,
strolling between azaleas and a bed
of tulips he refuses to enjoy

because she wants him to. She spots a kite
wrestling pine branches; wordlessly, aloof,
he looks the other way, for further proof
of his contempt spins on his heel and right

into the woods we skirt. This walk is her
choice, and he's come against his will, is stone-
dense with fury, wants it to be known,
known and remembered. Old folks who prefer

peace to the truth — in fact, to everything —
we stay ahead. But she persists, looks over
her shoulder, offering feathers, pebbles, clover,
regrets her morning wish to walk in spring

now that he will not warm to her. Poor girl —
I think — transforming even now to suit
some other who draws back, passive and mute
and strong, wielding his silence and the curl

of his small lip — but no, she'll come to learn
to be a little hard herself, need less
another's pleasure than her own, to press
ahead alone and happy and not turn.


from Rehearsing Absence

To Susan McLean, regarding:

"I have been trying to identify what it is about Rhina's poems that makes me feel that not only my aesthetic experience but also my life has been enlarged after reading poems of hers. I think her insights are not just human but humane....Her understanding feels hard-won and not static."

I'm grateful for the thoughtful skill and accuracy of this assessment. I couldn't have said it better.

"Practice" has long been one of my favourites of Rhina's. It touches my own early life experience. I think that if there is a divide between female and male experience Rhina has put her finger on it here. Thank you Catherine for choosing it for this discussion.
Janet

I'd like to add one more poem to Rhina's thread. This one may not be as well known as some of the others, and it's one of my favorites. It appears in The Muse Strikes Back as a “reply” to George Herbert (currently my favorite male poet.) I think not many of us would venture to converse with Herbert in his own medium.

DIALOGUE

My friend George Herbert has been chiding me,
wielding his blend of wit and humor. He
who could have summoned patience to abide
a sword piercing his side
nevertheless
rebukes my thanklessness.

“Give thanks? To whom? For what?” I bridle, knowing
there have been cries like mine forever, going
backward through all our days. I find him still
in that small room pure will
keeps clean of doubt,
sweeping the world's dust out.

“Why, Love, who is our Father,” says my friend,
“whose word is our beginning and our end.
Such thanks are what we owe; Love's debt was paid
by covenant once made
there, on the cross.
Love found, all else is loss.”

Oh, to believe him right! But wrestling with
the difference between history and myth,
our short view down the barrel and the long
perspective of his song,
“Help me to go,”
I beg, “past what I know:

If I, who have three sons, shoot two, will one
on whimsy's lucky side kiss the warm gun
that spared him? I have brothers everywhere
beyond both luck and prayer.
Now for their sake
teach me what sense to make

of such a random love, such fatherhood.”
“Picture a grub who measures every good
by the half inch of soil he curls in. Now
picture, with man's eyes, how
acre by acre
Earth surrounds him. Maker

to creature of his making – grub or man
or angel – is so infinite a span!
Will the grub teach the farmer husbandry?
It is enough to be,
to tend this nest
and trust Love for the rest.”

“For your song's sake – not what you sing to prove -
I will give thanks.” The clock chimes, my hands move,
the books slips from my lap: alone, at night,
unanswered – but not quite,
who at sleep's edge
enjoy such privilege.

I think that this may be the poem that hooked me on Rhina:

Almost

I peer inside it to make sure, and yes,
this is your car beside mine in the lot,
your jacket on the seat, your children's mess
of blankets and stuffed animals: I spot
a letter to be mailed, a shopping list.
Not spotting you, at last I drive away,
framing my joke; how cleverly you missed
lugging your mother's bags on shopping day!
And think how easily — by blindest chance —
this cell or that could have flicked elsewhere, failed
to clasp in that first moment of the dance
that life begins with, how you could have sailed
out of all possibility, downstream,
lost to my flesh forever, like a dream.

Ha! I was coming to post my favorite Espaillat piece, "Song," but I see Gail has beaten me to it.

When considering Rhina's poems, the phrase which perpetually arises forefront to my mind is expert craftsmanship.

Or craftpersonship, as you like it.

I found Rhina's Lapsing to Grace in a used book store in 1994 before I had the privilege of meeting her, and I was hooked by that book. It's been nothing but wonderful gravy since.

Rhina:

I want to ask you a very different kind of question. You've helped two poetry groups blossom, and the second, the Powow River Poets, has incubated a number of amazing poets. Can you talk a little about that and what you would say to others about starting and maintaining such groups?

Thanks!

Mike

Every once in a while, just when I've been grousing impatiently about "boring poems about trees" and other domestic subjects, I'll stumble across something of Rhina's - some brilliant poem that only pretends to be about trees - and have to learn my lesson all over again. It's always a pleasure to be taken to school by her.


[This message has been edited by Rose Kelleher (edited November 17, 2008).]

When I met my girlfriend several years ago at the community college where we both tutored, one of our first conversations was about poetry. A free-verser herself, Rebecca was interested in learning more about the whole "formalist poetry thing" that has been such a major part of my life since college. Well, I knew exactly who she needed to read: Rhina. I ended up lending her three of Rhina's collections that semester, and Rebecca quickly fell in love--with both of us! I recall how she laughed at the condition of the books--each page edged with brown from my thumbs. "My, these books are well-loved!" she exclaimed. They sure are!

Like Roger, "Almost" did it for me. Rhina read that sonnet at Keuka during my junior year, and I've been hooked ever since!

Austin

Rhina's poems are always a real discovery to my Spetses students--the idea that durable art can be made from the overlooked materials of the everyday. She makes excellence seem within reach somehow, though, of course, that is, paradoxically, part her extraordinary skill.

This is one of my all-time favorie syllabic poems--I think Rhina has talked about how syllabics seem natural to her from her Spanish background, and how when Anglophones say they can't "hear" syllabics, it is more from our lack of practice. Anyway, I think this is just super. It always makes me want to do more with syllabics, though I don't seem to be able to control them when they get over 5 or 7 syllables per line, as opposed to these sinuous 11's:


CURRENT

Coiled to spring, newly unplugged from the homely
Percolator, you watch me with tense nostril-
eyes that rivet like fangs, your small motionless
head malignant and useful, angry god that
reached for me once in childhood through a hairpin
probing the wall's secrets, sudden and smoother
than sex or whisky, a licking all over
by fire, a rod of ice in the marrow.
And afterward I hid night after night, but
ah, you found me in dreams, flicking your quick tongue
lewdly from the safety of familiar things;
you crouch in my walls; you ripple your braid of
muscle among dark leaves in the mind's garden.


(PS I forget which book this is from!)

It's in "Where Horizons Go."

And yes, it's a killer poem.

Another favorite of mine that has the virtue of being short enough for a lazy guy to type out:

Variations

Family faces modulate
like variations on a theme,
so that in chordal passages
the decades shift without a seam,

the living echoing the dead
to dress themselves in borrowed grace.
I like to find my father's look
safe in my son's unwounded face.

Such grave harmonics lend us back
the only paradise we know:
an idle game with time, but still
not bad, as resurrections go.


**

The first six lines are merely superb, but the next two lines crank things up, in my opinion, especially L8 and "unwounded." And the final stanza both justifies and belies the "nicey nice" theory of Rhina's poetry, and I think is typical of the sort of thing you find in Rhina's poems, i.e., an optimism that isn't founded on denial of what makes pessimists pessimists.

And while I'm typing, here's the fifth and final strophe of "Impasse: Glose" -- I should type the whole poem, but I'm too lazy:

What's to be done when every Yes
invites a No, entails a loss?
When saintliness incurs a cross
and certainties earn less and less?
The head works hard to sift the mess,
but since the rest is much less smart
it tends to tilt the apple cart
right back to Adam's tiff with Eve:
she wants to know, he to believe.
And yet they cannot live apart.

I like those poems/stanzas a lot, Bob. What collection are they from? I have only one Espaillat book so far and want to buy others.

Rehearsing Absence

--Lovely poem

Several of these poems of Rhina's are new to me. Clearly I need to collect the complete opus. Thanks to everyone who's taken the time to post them.

One of the many things I admire about Rhina's work, as well as Leslie's, is how they transform the quotidian into the transcendent. Not an original thought; others have noted it too. But I feel compelled to say they are constantly reminding me, look closer, you don't need Apollo to remind you that you're wasting your life.

Thank you all, from the heart! And Austin, how long ago that first meeting seems now! Bless you for this warm recollection: I'm very touched by it, and grateful--to you and to Robert Darling, who's done so much to bring young people to poetry, and vice versa.

One of the reasons we have marvelous poets now in their twenties, thirties and forties--both women and men--is that older marvelous poets like Robert have taken time away from their writing lives to go into teaching, and to do with a passion and commitment that spills over into every lesson. Poetry is catching, and apparently incurable too, whether people lucky enough to hear it and learn to love it go on to write it, or simply continue to read it for the rest of their lives.

Mike Juster asked me to say something about one aspect of that process, which is the establishment of poetry workshops. I think of it as the "deliberate infection" of unwary audiences with the poetry bug, not only to turn up people who may have talent and would like to do something with it, but also to develop an audience for poetry, to persuade listeners and readers of something that is true for all of us: that the experience of encountering poetry is a part of life that nobody should miss for lack of opportunity.

I helped to found the Fresh Meadows Poets in Queens, NY in 1986, and it's still going strong, with about 50 members, a long list of services performed for the community--free readings, contests for students, workshops--and a yearly anthology of work by the members. In 1992, I helped to found the Powow River Poets in Newburyport, MA, and that group is also doing very well, with about two dozen members, including poets known to all of you. I've also had a hand in getting other poetry groups going by speaking at their early organizational meetings and issuing a few suggestions, warnings and so forth. All of those groups have developed in different ways, and have ended by focusing on different interests. That's just as it should be, because a literary group should be shaped by the whole membership and the changes they make over time, not the wishes or initial thrust of any one person.

What strikes me as most important is that the entire membership take responsibility for what happens, and that the early founders know enough to set things up, get some kind of process going, and then get out of the way once there are several other people in charge of various aspects of the operation. It's best if there's an understanding in the group as a whole that, like the leadership--and, eventually, the membership--the focus, the very nature of the group, is likely to keep shifting, and nothing is going to harden into immutability.

The only thing the Fresh Meadows Poets and the Powow River Poets have in common is their love of poetry and the of individual members to improve their own work and advance the learning of the other members through useful criticism. Otherwise, everything is different, from the way people become members of each group, to the degree of involvement with the community that each group pursues, and the presence or absence of funding, as well as the source of that funding.

The one thing I've tried hard to inculcate in every group with which I've had anything to do is the need to maintain civility and avoid personal hostility, even through sessions of really, really negative criticism. Those can be made without damage, if the focus remains on the poem and not on the poet, and if all the participants make an effort to leave their egos outside and understand that the poem is separate from the self.

Some of the people I love most in the world are members of those two groups; they are extended family by now. We've learned a lot about each other and our lives, mostly through the poems, but our views of those poems remain objective enough, at workshop after workshop, to keep the criticism useful, and that's the point.

I anybody out there is interested in starting such a group, my advice is round up 3 or 4 people whose work you really love, and agree on just a few working rules for the present: when and where to meet? Dues or no dues? Will anybody who wants to be allowed to come, or will there be a selection committee in charge of screening applicants via a bunch of anonymously-submitted poems? Officers or no officers? Will the same member run each meeting, or will that role rotate? How much--if anything--does the group want to do for the community, and what form will that service take? Will you seek funding, and if so from whom and for what purposes? Who eill work on the aplications?
My advice is to divide tasks early, so everybody feels responsible and the whole group learns right away to depend on each other, not on some one person.

All of that may change over time, so what's decided is not in stone, but you have to start somewhere and learn from mistakes and successes. I'll be happy to answer specific question about this from interested people: my e-mail address is: rpespaillat@verizon.net

I'm sorrier than ever that I didn't think of devising the little interviews for Rhina and Gail when I started hosting this topic. I suddenly came up with the idea when it came time to post Deborah and Alicia. I liked it, and I've stuck with it. As a finale, Julie Kane and Susan McLean will be posted sometime next week. BUT, to have a better idea of where Gail and Rhina have sprung from, I'll just have to re-recommend Julie Kane's article on Gail in Mezzo Cammin, Volume 1, Issue 1; and my piece on Rhina in Mezzo Cammin, Volume 2, Issue 1 (in the archives, under "criticism"). To Rhina & Gail: Next time.

Sounds like valuable advice, Rhina. I notice you have a 'fan' who has posted something in your honor on Metrical.

Anne

Rhina - November is over, and I am trying to pretend it is not, because I know any moment now you will all be gone! Or at least not as accessible as you have been for the last few weeks! So before you dissolve back into the blue, I must tell you that I read 'I Am The Hope' and my heart woke and broke and cried.

Rhina - every poem you write is a meal, and I am so grateful.

Cally