Lisa Starr will read and present at the 2020 Virtual Sierra Poetry Festival 4/18/20

Lisa Starr will be reading at the 2020 Virtual Sierra Poetry Festival on April 18^th

Lisa is a Rhode Island Poet Laureate Emerita and spent the last thirty years running an inn (The Hygeia House) and The Block Island Poetry Project, and raising two amazing children on a small island off the coast of Rhode Island. The business sold, the kids grew up, and Lisa relocated to Westerly, where she is at work on her next collection, Pot Luck, a book of poems about children.

In a beautifully written essay in Parabola in 2019, Lisa described what her friendship with Mary Oliver felt like while taking care of Mary in the end of her life. You can read Lisa’s full essay in Parabola.

“In the days following Mary’s death, as we slowly tidied up the bedroom and tried to get used to the startling absence of her tiny body, surely we each took our own inventory of that spare room where she slept and worked for the last three years of her life—the work table and the typewriter, the twin bed and the night stand with her well-worn copy of A Year With Rumi, and the small yellow legal pad on which she wrote the words and phrases that still came, though to her great dismay, with less and less frequency.  They don’t come around much, she said, but when they do I always let them in. “ – Lisa Starr

Lisa Starr’s poem What It Takes was published also in Parabola. I loved using this poem as a model for my own writing. I’ve included the writing prompt below if you want to generate some new writing with this poem’s inspiration:

What It Takes
All it takes is one blue rowboat tied to a buoy,
and its reflection, and this moment
for me to go remembering everything.
Then a murmur, the sound of water lapping,
the breeze snapping, and the way the leaves
resist the letting go, or don’t…
the wheels of a bicycle soaring downhill
with some gravity-glad rider—
all of it, all of it complicit.
What I’m talking about is the sheer, shimmering
faith of the rope that connects the boat to the buoy
and the hands that tied the knot, and the fathers
who teach their sons and daughters
these simple things I see all day
and sometimes, not at all.
Moments like this become miracle, oracle,
and my heart knows again that the whole world—
this one—is just my own face in the mirror,
and I know that I am the boat and the buoy
and the rope—and like faith, that holy smoke—
I am brilliant, and bobbing, and blue.

Prompt using elements of this poem: Describe an image visually in your memory of some vehicle of transportation – a boat, bike, car, airplane, motorcycle, skateboard, etc. Include descriptions of auditory images surrounding this vehicle and your associated memories. Half way through your writing, write “What I’m talking about is…” and begin to answer that statement. Close the poem by writing “I know I am…” and continue to this vein to create a metaphor.

The Poet Laureate of Rhode Island from 2008-2013, a two-time recipient of the Rhode Island fellowship for poetry, a former college instructor, waitress, freelance writer and publicist, Lisa has published three full-length collections of poetry: Days of Dogs and Driftwood (1993), This Place Here (2001), and Mad with Yellow (2009). I look forward to hearing her read at our Virtual event April 18^th!

#9 Physical Distancing Prompt: Write an Ode

The Sierra Poetry Festival 2020 will be Virtual! Our keynote speaker is the wonderful Ellen Bass, a generous poet and teacher. Listen to her read the poem below here.

Ode to Zeke by Ellen Bass

O breathing drum, O cask of dark
waters, O decaying star, my
barking heart, my breaking brother,
what will seep into the space
your body leaves? O huge
eighteen-muscled ears, oscillating
ossicles and cochlea, your busy canals
now hollow caves of quiet. I have said
your fur is black, but you are
silvered, rimed with frost.
You are the new moon.
You are light in the dark house.
How long will I see your shadow?
O heavy hunk of existence, O great flank
I have rested my head upon
when I was too weak for human touch.
Sleek leading man, you debonair dog,
how people on the avenue stopped to swoon.
O splaying legs once faster than rabbits,
canines slashing flesh. Urgent thug,
unstoppable thrust. O happy snapping
at the wind. What do you remember
now that you are mud slide, glacier
melting, cliff collapsing into the sea?
I have memorized your milky breath,
your ballet leaps and whirly-gigging.
Your princely patience, as the children
dressed you—Soccer Zeke
in jersey and shorts, one paw on the ball.
Snorkel Zeke with mask and fins.
Bar Mitzvah Zeke in a yarmulke
and my father’s silk tallit. O my text
of decrepitude, my usher to death,
companion of ten thousand years,
I’ll fry you a fish. I’ll sit by your bowl.
Eat from my hand. I have nowhere to go.

Prompt #2 using elements of this poem: an ode is a praise to a person, place, object, or creature. Address your subject directly. How did you serve, love, how did you remember, how did time change the relationship? Use lists of comparisons that you can transform into metaphors. To close, return to a concrete image from a memory.

#8 Physical Distancing Prompt: Reading Ellen Bass

 

























Ellen Bass is our keynote speaker for the 2020 Virtual Sierra PoetryFestival. She will also be leading a workshop at the virtual event April 18th. A Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Bass founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and the Santa Cruz, California jails, and teaches in the MFA writing program at Pacific University. If you sign up for her newsletter, she will email you a poem!

Listen here to the poem read by Tracy K. Smith, who served as the 22nd United States Poet Laureate from 2017 to 2019, and is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Ordinary Light and several books of poetry, including her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Life on Mars. She is the director of the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University, and hosts the podcast TheSlowdown.

Mammogram Call Back with Ultra Sound by Ellen Bass
So this is what I’m here for, to see inside
the mute weight of my right breast, heavy handful
of treasure I longed for as a girl when I cried
behind the curtain in the Guerlaine sisters’ corset shop.
Those tender spinsters could hardly bear
my tears, as they adjusted the straps
on a padded lace bra. I had to wait another year
before my breasts swelled like wind-filled sails
and many were the explorers carried away,
searching for perfumes and spices,
the nerve-laden nipples singing through the wires.
But never has there been a joy like this
as I lay in the pale green cool of radiology.
The lineage of death has swerved around me.
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
As the wand of the ultrasound glides over my flesh,
revealed is a river of light, a bright
undulant tangle of lobules and milk ducts,
ligaments and tissue, harmless and radiant
against the black fat. I could be looking up
at the night sky, this wispy band of brilliance,
a shining spur of the milky way galaxy,
and I, in my infinitesimal life, will,
at least for tonight, keep these lovely atoms
before I must return them to the stars.

Writing prompt using elements of this poem: Freewrite for 20 minutes. Begin with the now “So this” of an event that may involve a part of your body, move back in time to describe two memories, make a turn at line 12 “But”, praise with wonder and joy.