From Mother Foucault's Fourth Annual Airstream Poetry Festival & Fellowship

The 4th Annual Airstream Poetry Festival was held at the Sou'wester Lodge and Trailer Park in Seaview, Washington, not to be confused with Seaside, Oregon as I had confused the two when explaining to friends and family where I was going to attend the festival, seaview and seaside being similar words if not in the same places.

The night before the 'festival' officially began I had a dream: the world had run out of words, words had exhausted themselves, and people opening their mouths to speak were only able to produce small muffled screams or moans. I thought I might get a poem out of this dream, and a title was supplied--Bandaged Headphones--but when I woke from the dream I thought better of making a poem of it, thinking that the link to global warming (the exhaustion of species, golden frogs and red sea urchins and coral reefs etc.) was too obvious to be rendered poetically. So I made motel coffee--the best motel coffee in the world is available at motels in the Pacific Northwest--and then walked over to the festival grounds.  

The first person I saw there at the Sou'wester had a small tattoo of a redwood tree on her ankle. She's a poet, I thought. Then other poets came in waves, poet after poet after poet, mostly, if not all, young poets, poets younger than their publishers, poets much younger than me. Not only were they poets, they all looked like poets, if I had to pick poets out of a lineup of random people I'd pick the boys and girls, men and women, I was seeing that first morning at the festival.

Craig, the festival founder, owner of Mother Foucault's Bookstore in Portland, Oregon, was making omelets for everyone at the outdoor kitchen, while holding a large tumbler containing a very ripe Bloody Mary. Craig makes a good omelet, exactly to your order, and he and his friend Adam were able to turn the chaos of omelet requests made by hungry poets into something like the order Robert Frost demanded of a poem--there were actual momentary stays of confusion, and everyone seemed happy.

At breakfast I started making a list of the poets I was meeting--Will, Bo, Adam, Melissa, Sean, Karolinn, John, Kara, Erica, Audrey, Sophia, Zach, Marilyn, Ryan--and I then stopped: my omelet had arrived, as announced by Adam who works closely with Craig.

For the next two days there were presentations and readings, some at the main lodge and some in the elegant Airstream trailers that are positioned in and around the property. Both the poet John Dooley (Bukowski/Dr. Seuss/Rabelais) and a young woman named Erica at a reading in an Airstream trailer who made pieces of girl/woman/word/picture power that tried to be poems and actually were poems, made an impression on me.

Earlier in the day I myself gave a presentation in the Sou'wester lodge, sitting in front of the stone fireplace of which I think no adjective could describe, a presentation I'd proposed months ago and then forgot about--The Publishing Secrets of Gertrude Stein--informed by festival organizers that my proposal had been accepted some months after I'd forgotten about it. I'd have to wing it, as I knew I would all along, winging it being the very thing poets are made of. And so I did wing it with two other publishers before a nice big group of mostly young poets who seemed interested in what we were saying abd who asked good questions.

Afterwards I took a long walk on the beach with several other poets, walking south toward Cape Disappointment which could be seen in the immediate distance.

From the author's notebook, 2003, while he was living in France and just starting to think about writing a novel, after writing poems for over 20 years, learning that the best he could ever do is to try to write a poem, just now starting to think he could try to write a novel...

..it seems that I must have thought there was a poem there in the notebook that eventually became a novel; and looking at it now, by the way I set the language 'off' on it's own, assigning it a place only it could occupy, indenting a block of language and capitalizing the first word of the first two stanzas so that they drew attention to themselves, I see that it is a poem all by itself and not the novel it would become.