No rest for the villainess, Part II: The Festival

So, back from the Skagit River Poetry Festival, which was a lot of fun…but now I’m completely exhausted. I loved talking with the 150 or so high school kids (I heard 500 were there, but that’s as many as I talked to) about superhero poetry and, for “Poetry on the Edge,” edgy feminist poets like Denise Duhamel and Dana Levin, and they seemed to respond pretty well to the poems I read them from my book. One girl told me she had been writing since the 6th grade and asked how to find her “style.” I told her to read as many contemporary women poets as possible, and wrote up a list of books for her. I felt useful! So yay for that. The reading with Tim McNulty, Gerald Stern and Lorraine Ferra I thought went well too – they were all wonderful performers, I thought, not a touch of poetry voice in the group. There must have been over a hundred people there, but I was less nervous than I had been for the Open Books reading. I had a weird sense after my fifteen minutes, that feeling of being wholly connected to other people, to yourself. OK, enough weird mystic talk. On the downside, I was so busy doing panels and stuff (which were simultaneous with my friends’ – including the lovely and talented Kelli Agodon, Peter Pereira, Kathleen Flenniken, Elizabeth Austen, etc – panels and workshops) that I didn’t get a lot of down time or time to see other writers – I saw a panel with Anne Marie Macari, Tess Gallagher, and Allen Braden on how to make a poem memorable, and a lot of good readings at night – Linda Hogan, who was fantastic, Tess Gallagher and Billy Collins, Gerald Stern (a lovable curmudgeonly Jewish-grandfather type? Although I think he shocked our PC Northwestern crowd with a few utterances) and a really beautifully-voiced slam poet named Sekou Sundiata. I did get to talk a little bit with Canadian poet Rachel Rose, who was great, and meet Nance van Winkel and her husband, and hear funny stories about Billy Collins. (Just don’t get between him and a case of wine! I’m just kidding…or am I?) Also, I stayed in a B&B that was really dusty and kept running out of hot water whenever I wanted a shower, and since I have a hot water fetish and asthma, I was pretty miserable there. Also I don’t think I slept at all last week, hence the two days of sleeping recovery before this blog entry. I have got to get less keyed up about these performances. The festival’s organizers were pretty great, keeping us fed and watered all weekend, which was really nice. There was always yogurt and fruit in a basket in the “Poets Lounge,” and they gave husband G. a volunteer badge so he could see my reading and panels and carry the 1000 pounds of books I kept needing. Sweet!
The last comment – one of the panels was in the Museum for Northwest Art, which had a really striking exhibit by poet Jeff Crandall, including one piece that looked like glass shards of an egg resting on pieces of slate, with bits of poems about breaking inscribed on them. Jeff, I couldn’t get over the high-school kids’ enthusiasm about this piece, about which they kept saying “How cool is that?” Poet-glass art. Cool.
Pop Culture Commentaries:
Notes on the Da Vinci Code: The movie was a dumbed-down version of the book, which wasn’t all that smart in the first place. They took out most of the art-history and math-cryptography parts, which were my favorite parts of the book anyway, which left the two main characters with very little to do. Here’s some interesting links on why Dan Brown, by making Mary Magdalene Jesus’ wife, may be downplaying her importance as an apostle: From Newsweek: An Inconvenient Woman. Also, a Slate article complaining about the historical information in the movie, especially re: the Gnostics (and, FYI, if you want a good Gnostic movie, just watch the Matrix trilogy.)
Notes on the Alias Series Finale: But they didn’t explain WHY Sydney’s mom suddenly wanted to destroy two cities and had become all power mad? What exactly was the Horizon? So many unanswered questions…Although Sloane’s beyond-the-grave punishment by Jack was very cool. Jack was always my favorite character, along with Irina. Best line of the night went to Sark: “Michael, it’s not exactly my dream to be participating in global destruction.” Does this mean the end for female superhero types on television? No Buffy, No Alias. Hrmph. I may just turn off my set for a while.