You
whom I could not save
Listen
to me.
Try
to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another.
I
swear, there is in me no wizardry of words.
I
speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree. – Dedication, Czeslaw Milosz
With
these words, poet Melanie Perish opened our open mic in celebration of
100 Thousand
Poets
for Change at Sundance Bookstore in Reno September 26. About 35 people, readers
and writers, gathered for our first annual event which included a panel
discussion of poetry and change followed
by an open mic reading.
Reno
Poet Laureate Gailmarie Pahmeier and UNR professors and scholars Ann Keniston
and Steve Gehrke discussed how poetry can enact change as well as be the change
itself. The words of Juan Felipe Herrera, the US Poet Laureate, set the tone
for the panel:
“Poetry is a call to
action and it also is action.
Sometimes we say, "This tragedy, it happened far away. I don't know what
to do. I'm concerned but I'm just dangling in space." A poem can lead you through
that, and it is made of action because you're giving your whole life to it in
that moment. And then the poem — you give it to everyone. Not that we're going
to change somebody's mind — no, we're going to change that small, three-minute
moment. And someone will listen. That's the best we can do.” - Juan
Felipe Herrera
Gailmarie
Pahmeier encouraged the audience to read widely. She read from a new edition of Kim
Addonizio’s Jimmy & Rita and the poem Instead of a Shotgun by Carey Salerno, promoting caring for animals
and the homeless.
As each reader
stood at the podium to share a poem that spoke to them personally of change or political awareness, I relished the experience of being in a
room of people busy with paying attention to the poem and sharing a compassion
for others.
Steve
Gerhke read The Nail by CK Williams:
it’s
we who do such things, we who set the slant, embed the tip, lift the sledge and
drive the nail,
drive
the nail which is the axis upon which turns the brutal human world upon the
world. - The Nail, CK
Williams
Poet Ann Keniston read Dedications by Adrienne Riche and spoke about
the tension between the wish to change people’s minds via poetry and the sense
of the difficulty of doing that—as something that energizes and animates a lot
of recent poems by herself and others.
What I love about a reading at
Sundance Books is letting my eyes wander the spines and titles of books
surrounding me as I listen to the reading. Outside Sundance Books roared Reno’s
leather-studded motorcycles and their riders.
A gust of wind blew leaves off the trees in the courtyard outside the
Victorian building that houses Sundance.
When Michael Branch read these lines from Stephen Dobyns’ poem How To Like It, I wondered at how this
poet could write so well about my own unsettled desire and restlessness:
These are the
first days of fall. The wind
at evening smells of roads still to be traveled,
while the sound of leaves blowing across the lawns
is like an unsettled feeling in the blood,
the desire to get in a car and just keep driving. – Stephen Dobyns, How To Like It
at evening smells of roads still to be traveled,
while the sound of leaves blowing across the lawns
is like an unsettled feeling in the blood,
the desire to get in a car and just keep driving. – Stephen Dobyns, How To Like It
I
realized that the poems we had heard, poems of change, political poems, shared
this restlessness, dissatisfaction, and sincerity while resisting
cynicism. Everyone who participated in
Reno’s Poets for Change event is already brainstorming ideas for next year’s
celebration, excited to see where we can go with 100Thousand Poets for Change.
