Writers Friendship, Lucy, Richard, Dan, Alan…

Trip on Sunday to Oakland for brunch with Lucy Day and Richard Levine and their friends, Dan Langton, a poet who teaches at San Francisco State, and his wife Eve, plus poet Alan Goldfarb and his wife Arlene.


There are times when things just really click and one can only give thanks… thanks to one’s friends for extending an invitation and taking the time to prepare and put together an event, eight people in all, five of them writers.


The event: Middle Eastern food, drink and a memorable sharing of poems, e.g., Richard and Lucy each reading a villanelle.* The poems (Lucy’s “Color of the Universe” and Richard’s “A Blessing in Beige”) so complement one another I found myself imagining each villanelle being asked in turn, “Do you, “Color of the Universe,” take “A Blessing…” to be your lawfully wedded wife/husband, and each responding… “I do.” Turns out these were indeed Richard and Lucy’s wedding poems.


[*Note: poems by Dan Langton and Alan Goldfarb to follow.]


By way of intro I should say: Lucy Day (aka Lucille Lang Day) is the author of eight poetry collections and chapbooks. Richard Levine is a journalist who is now writing fiction. Their wedding villanelles first appeared in Blue Unicorn and are included in Lucy's latest poetry collection, The Curvature of Blue (Cervena Barva, 2009).



COLOR OF THE UNIVERSE



The universe is really beige. Get used to it.

John Noble Wilford

The New York Times



For Richard



I can't believe the universe is tan,

Not red or green or lavender or blue.

I feel carnelian when you take my hand—



Not beige like lima beans from a can,

But a splendid, electrifying hue.

I can't believe the universe is tan.



Rose and gold are what I understand

When I think of waking up each day with you.

I feel carnelian when I take your hand,



And like the universe my love expands,

Surrounding us with turquoise and chartreuse.

Can you believe the universe is tan,



A color desolate as lunar sand

And homely as a peanut or cashew?

I feel carnelian when we're hand in hand,



Listening to Perahia play Chopin.

The stars all turn cerulean on cue.

I don't care if the universe is tan:

I feel carnelian as you take my hand.



—Lucille Lang Day




A BLESSING IN BEIGE



The universe is really beige. Get used to it.

John Noble Wilford

The New York Times



For Lucy



Some stars burn brighter as they age

Like maple leaves and apple trees flaming up from green.

Alas, the color of the universe is beige,



Not peach or pearl or the palest shade of sage,

Not turquoise, as they once thought—so serene.

Some stars burn brighter as they age.



The love that we have is harder to gauge

But it too burns brighter the later it seems.

Does it matter so much if the universe is beige?



As a poet breathes sound onto a silent page

Your love bathes my days in aquamarine.

Some stars burn brighter as they age.



Let them light up our lives as we leave this stage

And fill our hearts with their triumphant sheen.

Who cares if the color of the universe is beige?



A bird in flight outshines its silver cage.

If the sky’s too bright the stars shine unseen.

May our stars burn brighter as we age.

Hurray, the color of the universe is beige!



— Richard Michael Levine




[see also:
http://www.redroom.com/blog/robert-sward/writers-friendship-lucy-day-and-friends]

Doug McClellan - Writers' Friendship / Writers' Group(s)

T.S. Eliot, "Shrine," by Doug McClellan

by Doug McClellan

The group had been meeting for several years when I joined as something of a wild card: I had only started writing poetry when I retired from teaching and after a full career as a visual artist. My métier had been collage and assemblage. Years spent haunting garage sales and flea markets for material to be pasted or nailed into some anti-narrative context was on all counts a seriously non-linear activity. Writing (as I saw it and practiced it when necessary) being much a more sequential business and a craft I found difficult. There are limits to paste and scissors. Only when the Macintosh entered my life did my collage instincts find their writing machine. This uncorked a reservoir of things itching to be written.

As a graduate student, and later as a budding painter, I would get together with other artists for talk but we seldom discussed our work, we kept the conversation more to the comings and goings of the art world. The macho climate of the '50s art movements had marketed a distrust of verbal analysis. Statements like, "I see you're using that new red, I hear it's crap" were as close as we got to penetrating critique.

Joining the writing group with something of a second language problem ("Sorry, I don't speak literature")––my tools for dealing with a poem when it was laid open on the table were meager. This meant that I benefited much more from the group than I felt able to contribute. At the outset I also discovered what a haphazard reader I was and that I was very close to being one of those dopes I had battled with for ages, one who could say "I don't know anything about X, but I know what I like" and mean it. Time and tolerance on the part of my peers made the transition painless and to my delight, I had finally found colleagues who were willing (yea eager) to discuss each other's work.

Before the group addresses individual poems there is a short but valuable period of tea-making, general conversation and shoptalk. As a standard procedure for new poems, the poet will read his/her new piece; this is followed by another reading by a fellow member. To me this is consistently valuable. The second physical voice often relocates the poem into another poetic voice, as well as serves to catch rough terrain and line break problems along the way. Hearing my own words read by another voice, often a woman's, is invariably illuminating in that it breaks the poem free from an internal mumble that accompanies me when I write. The 'read and then shut up' rule, though not universally observed, seems to suit my needs. To have various members quiz each other about my fresh words, and to come up with such diverse (and may I say, irrational?) readings can lead to both deflation and clarification. But it always leads to a next step.

The machinery of groups, their boons and tribulations, are well known and I can't add much that's new. Rules and protocol vary: experience levels vary. I think we all agree that it is the collective, the stock company if you will, that makes things productive. As a collection of poets we are virtually an anti-school. All over the stylistic map. This seems to have great advantages, my earlier experience in brushes with art 'colonies' that have become hothouses producing a cloned product, convinces me that our differences are a genuine strength. As critics we all seem quite able to step out of our own armor and engage the poem at hand. Some groups may be more overtly supportive in style while others may dispense with foreplay entirely; we fall somewhere in between. Individual roles derive from our individual needs-hopes-dreams-fears, whatever––obviously we all have our angle of approach to a new work. But it is a diversity that can work because of an overall quality of trust and fellow feeling that has developed and continues to develop, assisted by an occasional potluck supper.

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Douglas McClellan––1950 to present: MFA painting. Exhibited nationally and internationally. Professor of Art: Scripps College, Claremont (CA) Graduate University; Univ. of California, Santa Cruz. Dean Otis Art Inst. (LA) Six volumes of poetry, largely self-published. Currently working on digital fusion of words and image. For a sample of Doug's work, T.S. Eliot "Shrine," see above.

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