Marin County Poet Laureate - Kirsten | Learn English at EnglishCafe

Here is an interview with Albert DeSilver that was published in print and online for the Marin Poetry Center.  DeSilver is  "Poet Laureate" here in Marin County.  That means he is an "ambassador of poetry," who brings an awareness of poetry and poetry events to the public.

 

I have posted a few of his poems at the bottom of the interview

 

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Marin’s Own Poet Laureate - Albert Flynn DeSilver    

 by Kirsten Jones Neff

 

 

MPC: What was your path to writing poetry?  

 

AFD: I was at the SF Art institute in the graduate program in photography and …  I had an art history professor, Bill Berkson, who is a great poet … one night Bill invited me to a reading at the Cowell Theatre. Bill was reading, Diane Di Prima, Ron Piaget, Allice Notley, Michael McClure, Lyn Hijinian … an all-star cast, and I was blown away… I was struck like by a lightning bolt and I started jotting words down for poems.  

 

MPC: What was it in particular that struck you?  

 

AFD: It was an opening  to the possibilities.  Poetry could be funny. It didn’t have to be traditional rhyming.  It was like it could be anything...   It was fun and fascinating and gave me a real sense of possibility, like a gateway into language that I had never realized before.  From that night forward I started writing and jotting things down and photography started receding into the background.   

 

MPC: Was poetry always part of your life?   

 

AFD: No. There were only two poetry books on my mom’s bookshelf when I was growing up.  And there were thousands of books on their bookshelves.  My mom is a total literature junky.  She read everything from Tolstoy to Agatha Christie.  She had the Collected Works of John Dunne and a copy of Ginsberg’s Kaddish and those were the only two books I found on her shelf when I went looking a few years ago.

 

MPC: She didn’t read poetry to you?   

 

AFD: No, they definitely had a sensibility, for art,  but I think it was kind of a shock to them after I graduated and I said, “I don’t want to do photography anymore.”  They were just baffled.

 

MPC: Did you feel baffled?   

 

AFD: Not really.  Well, I was baffled about how I was going to support myself. (laughter)  That was quite baffling. So I got into teaching.  First I taught at Marin Academy in the summer program.  Then I learned about California Poets in the Schools and I started mentoring with Dwayne Big Eagle.   After that I drew up my own curriculum and hit the pavement. [Teaching is] a total dream.  I love connecting with the kids and seeing that spark of creativity.  And celebrating them, really celebrating their innate creativity.  No right or wrong, just wherever you are, jump off from there.  And reading the poems out loud.  Kids are really shy at first and then by the second or third sessions we don’t  have time for everyone who wants to read.   

 

MPC: Tell me about the being the Poet Laureate.   

 

AFD: Well, you’ve heard about the Poetry Chair  (a chair made out of poetry books ; see http://www.marinpoetrychair.org   It’s been a poetry road show.  I love interacting with the community in language, through language.  

 

MPC: Is it difficult for you to promote your own work?   

 

AFD: No, I’m a big self-promoter and I don’t see that as a negative.  I think a lot of people think that poetry is somehow immune to the forces of current socio-politics, and it helps my writing to be out there bouncing my work off of people and learning from them and listening to them and being part of an exchange.  

 

MPC: What do you most enjoy about reading and writing poetry?   

 

AFD: It is the storytelling.  What is poetry if not inspired storytelling?  It allows you to investigate relationships and expand consciousness and understanding.  It is a way to experiment with metaphor,  a way to create unexpected relationships.     

 

I tell my students how [Federico Garcia] Lorca described Walt Whitman’s voice  [as being] “like a pillar of ashes.”  …  That blew me away.  Poetry allows a blending of the senses.  You can marshal the senses together,  like a sensory immersion.  But poetry does take work.  Poetry asks you to sit and cultivate stillness, and in our culture many people aren’t willing to do that work.   

 

MPC: How do you write?   

 

AFD: I have a particular practice of getting quiet and giving time to allow creativity to emerge.  It’s all around us all the time, but it’s a question of quieting yourself enough to receive it. Our lives are so cluttered with opinions and beliefs and appointments.  But when you let all that go, the creativity and the vitality and the energy pour in, and the love and compassion.  It’s all there.

 

MPC: Many say the poets are the “visionaries” or poets are the “seers”… You?  

 

AFD: Those are both good monikers.  Poets tend to ask the big questions, about truth with a capital T and love with a capital L and what those things are really about, or what they can be about in the human sphere.  Any self-respecting shaman is also a storyteller and a poet.  

 

 

TRUTH

 

that mountain

is glyphic shrills—

pick a color.  

I am not

safe in

pieces, keep

me hollow

or whole like

a new

moon.

I am  

a hovering

undeniable

animal of

harbor, your

darling star-ghost

roving

unbound

 

  -Albert Flynn DeSilver

 

 

 

HOPE

 

The poem that is

called the poem

is not the eternal poem

 

the one that can be

read aloud isn’t  

it either

 

the poem that is both written

& unwritten

 

like the spray

painted tag on

the side of the abandoned

Chevy’s Fresh Mex

in charcoal black

saying “yo blamzz”

 

The poem is the origins

of abandonment

and that scattered bag

of diapers on the side of the freeway,

the freeway—the poem

 

is the mother, father, baby sister  

brother cousin of the

10,000 bits of trash and littered

trees I saw blinking by

on the 101 today, the poem

 

ever desireless goes on

poeming in the face of such

trash & trees, the mystery

 

at ease with itself hand in hand

with the poem’s bright

hand, is the gateway

to great understanding.

 

  -Albert Flynn DeSilver

 

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and here is an excerpt "Ode to Walt Whitman" by Lorca, referred to in the interview :   

Not for one moment, beautiful aged Walt Whitman, have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies, nor your shoulders of corduroy worn out by the moon, nor your thighs of virginal Apollo, nor your voice like a pillar of ashes: ancient and beautiful as the mist, you moaned like a bird with the sex transfixed by a needle, enemy of the satyr, enemy of the vine, and lover of bodies under the rough cloth...  

--from “Ode to Walt Whitman”  

   by Federico Garcia Lorca