Why to These Rocks: 50 Years of Poems from the Community of Writers

By Heyday

Features 138 poets and 142 poems

Poets featured include: Robert Hass, Kazim Ali, Dan Bellm, Galway Kinnell, Rita Dove, Toi Dericotte, Lucille Clifton, Elizabeth Rosner, Sharon Olds, Cornelius Eady, and many many more

Includes a foreword by Robert Hass

Editor Lisa Alvarez lives in Modjeska Canyon in eastern Orange County, CA

• Language: English
• Publisher: Heyday
• Release date: Mar 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9781597145305

Book preview

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Copyright © 2021 by the Community of Writers

All rights reserved. No portion of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from Heyday.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Alvarez, Lisa, editor. | Hass, Robert, writer of foreword. | Community of Writers, publisher.

Title:Why to these rocks : 50 years of poems from the Community of Writers / edited by Lisa Alvarez ; foreword by Robert Hass.

Description: Berkeley, California : Heyday ; Nevada City, California : Community of Writers, [2021]

Identifiers: LCCN 2020043307 (print) | LCCN 2020043308 (ebook) | ISBN 9781597145299 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781597145305 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH:American poetry—21st century. | American poetry—20th century.

Classification: LCC PS326 .W48 2021 (print) | LCC PS326 (ebook) | DDC 811.008/0979438—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043307

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043308

Cover Art:Tom Killion, Moonlit Sierra Pines

Cover and Interior Design/Typesetting: Ashley Ingram

Published by Heyday

P.O. Box 9145, Berkeley, California 94709

[phone]

heydaybooks.com

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Galway Kinnell, for his vision,

and to Lucille Clifton and C.D. Wright,

who taught and wrote poems with us for many years.

Contents

Community of Writers Poetry Staff and Guests: 50 Years

Credits and Acknowledgments

Permissions

Contributor Biographies

Foreword

Robert Hass

It’s a species of bliss. Summer morning in the mountains, scintillant summer air, the vanilla and incense scent of the forest drifting through an open window or door into the living room of a ski cabin, and a group of a dozen or so poets sitting in a circle about to share drafts of poems they’ve written the day, or the night, before or—often enough in my case—earlier that morning.

They have been doing this, or will have been doing this, for seven mornings in a row. Reading to one another new work that they haven’t really had time to have second thoughts about. Some people in the circle are quite experienced and well-published poets who have been at it a long time. Some of them are just out of college and enrolled in master’s degree programs, taking a couple of years to see whether they really are writers, and learning maps of the art, and assembling first tentative manuscripts of their work. Some are middle-aged or older and just come to poetry, or are just returning to it from the busy places to which their lives have taken them. All of them are a little anxious and excited about sharing new work. Usually they begin by introducing themselves to one another. Usually the staff poet, who also has a new draft to present, welcomes them and reminds them that this is not a college creative writing class where poems are submitted to the editorial skills of the group. It’s about hearing new work and spotting what’s alive in it. And then they proceed. The first poet reads a poem that didn’t exist the day before. The others are attentive, curious. There are usually a few minutes for the group to respond, and then a second poet reads.

If the staff poet is me, as it has often been over the years, he is feeling a small hitch at the knowledge that his own poem might seem a little dull, but the feeling is dissolved soon enough by the interest of the poems being read. The point, after all, is to see the world freshly, and being in the group allows you to be grateful that somebody got there, even if you didn’t. And, of course, there is always the chance that someone will like your work better than you do, which can be helpful.

These poetry mornings at the Community of Writers have been going on in this way for more than twenty-five years. The Community itself is celebrating is fiftieth anniversary. Summer gatherings of writers have become part of the rhythm of literary life in North America, beginning, I think, with the Breadloaf Writers Conference, which was founded at Middlebury College in 1926. It was there that Robert Frost held court on summer days before the Second World War. The Community of Writers at Squaw Valley—as it was called in those early years—began in 1969. It was the first to be organized on the West Coast and was the brainchild of two novelists, Oakley Hall and Blair Fuller. The ski resort in the valley had acquired international fame by hosting the 1960 Winter Olympics. In the winter, it was one of the world’s premier destinations for skiers. In summer in the 1960s and 1970s, it was a very sleepy alpine valley—a long grassy meadow with a creek running through it, horses from a riding stable grazing in the summer heat. The mass of the mountain—it was called Squaw Peak—did not match Yosemite in grandeur, but it was grand enough. The winter ski facilities and their inns were mostly empty. The hillsides and roadsides were ablaze with alpine flowers, and brown bears could be seen occasionally ambling from one forested side of the valley to the other. There was a post office. A gondola for the skiers could take hikers from the valley floor at five thousand feet to the top of the mountain at nine thousand feet, where there was a swimming pool, an ice-skating rink (left over from the Olympics), and trailheads leading into the High Sierra backcountry.

Seven miles west on the shores of Lake Tahoe, northern Californians summered, leaving the valley to itself, which made it an ideal place for writers to spend their summers. And a perfectly pleasant place, Oakley Hall and his wife, the photographer Barbara Hall, and Blair Fuller and his wife, the screenwriter Diana Fuller, thought, to gather writers for a week—novelists, essayists, playwrights, screenwriters, poets, journalists, and also editors and literary agents—to talk about their art, share work with one another, and learn something about the business side of writing novels and screenplays. Also, story had it, to party a little and play tennis. It was during this period that the town had renamed itself Olympic Valley. In summer there was a general store called Pretty Good Groceries. Over the years, the ski corporation developed the valley as a summer resort, with a faux alpine village and a mall full of shops and restaurants. It’s crowded now in the summertime—jazz concerts in the evening, a kickoff event for a cycling marathon—and in the course of those years, the Community of Writers had become an institution of West Coast summers, the conferences a place for writers from all over the world, and the grocery store became Alice’s Mountain Market.

The poetry program acquired its special character in the 1980s. From the outset, poets had led workshops, given lectures on craft, held manuscript conferences with beginning poets, and, if they were interested, attended the gatherings for novelists and screenwriters on how to write a sex scene or acquire an agent, skills that were arguably not so relevant to their art. So in the summer of 1985, Galway Kinnell proposed giving the poets a separate week and organizing it to emphasize making rather than critiquing or theorizing about poems or discussing the publishing business. The format was to be simple. The group assembled, wrote a draft of a poem every day, gathered every morning after the first day, and read one another their new work, say, from ten in the morning until noon. Met again at about five o’clock for a glass of wine and an informal talk about poetry and poetics by