Poetry Camp

I'm back from Poetry Camp, the class Robin Chapman and I teach at The Clearing, a wonderful adult education center in Door County, Wisconsin. (Door County is the "thumb" of Wisconsin, a peninsula extending into Lake Michigan.) The Clearing, which was started in the late 1920s by Jens Jensen, a Dane who emigrated to Chicago and became a well-known and influential landscape architect, is modeled on the Danish Folk School idea. He conceived it, originally, as a place to train young landscape architects, much the way Frank Lloyd Wright conceived of Taliesin as a hands-on school for architects. The summer classes at The Clearing these days range from the arts and crafts (writing, water-color painting, glass fusing, photography, weaving, woodworking, etc.) to nature studies (bird watching, plant identification). And more. Check out their catalog on line!

The Clearing's grounds are beautiful--over 100 acres on the Green Bay (western) shore of the peninsula, close to the very tip. The view is much the same as that from my former mother-in-law's cottage, which is just a bit to the south on the shore path. But the grounds, of course, are much more extensive, and include open meadows as well as woods, which this past week were crowded with trillium. The season is about three weeks behind Madison's--it was fun to watch the early spring unfold again as we drove north--and it has been a very cold spring up north, as well as here, so the yellow lady slippers, lovely orchids which usually have appeared en masse by the time we're in Door County (we teach the same week each year), were just beginning to come out as we left. Most of the week was quite chilly, though on Thursday, the temperature climbed above 60 and the sun was warm, so I headed off to the east side of the peninsula and lay on the sand beach, reading, and wearing only a turtleneck and jeans (no fleece) for about an hour and a half. Heaven!

Poetry Camp itself was wonderful: small (there had been several cancellations due to illness), but full of enthusiastic poets whose writing clearly improved over the week. Robin and I do all the exercises along with the students, so I ended up with a few poems that might even have a life beyond camp. One of the advantages of being at a retreat with artists from other genres is a kind of cross-fertilization that goes on, and a Sudoku-inspired quilt, pieced by an independent study resident (the wife of one of the Photoshop class instructors), found its way into one of my poems, much to my surprise.

I'm somewhat reluctant to post the poem (or any unpublished poem) on my blog, since one interpretation of the "rules" of poetry says that posting on the internet constitutes publication and precludes any appearance in a print journal. (And in response to Matthew, who asked in a comment why not self-publish, I have to say that for me there's a constant tension between the desire to have my work "out there" for others to read, and the desire for acknowledgment and acceptance of that work by editors and other gate-keepers of the poetry community, and I generally have resolved that tension in favor of professional validation.)

But I don't want to be a tease, either-- so here's the poem:

Sudoku

Such a bore--digits, no words,
pure exercise of logic and, since
I never cared enough to advance
beyond the easy ones

just a routine of trial-by-error
penciling-in of tiny numbers
in empty squares, erasures,
crossings-out.

But Carol's Sudoku quilt!
Three rows of three squares each,
no color repeated in any column
or row. Nothing to solve

except the problem of creativity:
how one perceives
without either numbers or words.