Flying back on Sunday night from New Jersey where I’d spent the last four days immersed in the 11th biannual Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival I sat on the plane alternately watching the unspeakably abysmal Click (yes, I got a little teary there near the end and I wanted to gouge out my traitor eyes) and thinking about some of the poets I’d seen and heard.

I. Stars as Food

Poetry is the autobiography of the soul that can never rest. — Ko Un

When Korea was occupied by the Japanese, 73-year-old Korean poet Ko Un tells us through is translator, the government confiscated everything. His family grew rice, which was taken from them after the harvest. They were always hungry. Some nights, his mother would make the long walk to the sea where she would collect seaweed to bring back to her children.

One night, Ko Un sat with his grandmother, waiting for his mother to return. It was the first time he remembers seeing a star. There were so many of them and, in the darkness, they seemed so close. Ravenous, he imagined he could eat them and asked his grandmother to pluck one from the sky.

Everything, he says, his ancient hands cutting through the air like knives—everything in this life should be looked at with this kind of desperateness. Look at a flower the way a hungry man looks at food.

He stops. His hands settle in his lap and he looks around the room. I wonder if he knows that however much we try, we cannot fully understand. It seems, though, that some of us are trying. What will we see in the sky tonight?

[More after the break for those who don’t dislike it too much…]

II. Heaven for Stanley

This is the year of the death of Stanley Kunitz, the wise old man of American poetry. He died this past May, just short of his 101st birthday. Though few talk about it, you can feel his absence here—we are all somewhat off our moorings. He was the spirit of this place—the poet Kurtis Lamkin remembers how just a few years ago, well into his 90s, Stanley almost ran up the stairs to the stage, so excited to be reading his poems, which he did in his indomitable, quaking-aspen voice.

And on that last day, Mark Doty suggested three reasons for his longevity: insatiable curiosity about the world, passion for his small garden, and love of extraordinarily strong martinis. Then he read this poem:

Heaven for Stanley

For his birthday, I gave Stanley a hyacinth bean,
an annual, so he wouldn't have to wait for the flowers.

He said, Mark, I have just the place for it!
as if he'd spent ninety-eight years

anticipating the arrival of this particular vine.

I thought poetry a brace against time,
the hours held up for study in a voice's cool saline,

but his allegiance is not to permanent forms.
His garden's all furious change,

budding and rot and then the coming up again;

why prefer any single part of the round?
I don't know that he'd change a word of it;

I think he could be forever pleased
to participate in motion. Something opens.

He writes it down. Heave steadies
and concentrates near the lavender. He's already there.

III. Mise en scène

It is fall in New Jersey, which can mean anything. The rhythms of the festival follow the patterns of the rain. When it pours, chill and grey, we huddle inside tents, eyes closed, listening to the counterpoint each drop makes with the voices of the poems. When it slackens, the sky lightens and we emerge into the cleansed air, taking the first few tentative steps through the puddles that have formed between the flagstones. As it clears, we all become more brave and walk around as if the entire world, or at least this corner of northwest New Jersey, were completely ours.

The moon, when it is not raining, rises like a harvest sickle. The stars are not exactly like food, but at times they seem so close even a very short grandmother could pluck a few. And always as a backdrop the silent clapboard buildings; the sawmill, the carriage barn, the church. Uninhabited now, except by these fleeting, filling words.

IV. Sleep and Tea

I am here with my family who are all growing old. We get colder faster and take longer to warm up. We could sleep all day but instead drink coffee and Diet Pepsi and try to stay awake.

I, too, am growing older. There is more grey than I would like in my hair. My left knee hurts with a strange pain that seems to come from everywhere at once. At night, sometimes, my teeth ache.

Taha Muhammad Ali is 75 years old. In 1948 when he was 17, he and his family were forced to flee their home in Galilee during heavy bombardment in the Arab-Israeli war. A year later, he re-crossed the border and settled in Nazareth where he still lives, tending a small store and writing poems like these:

Tea and Sleep

If, over this world, there's a ruler
Who holds in his hand bestowal and seizure,
At whose command seeds are sown,
As with his will the harvest ripens,
I turn in prayer, asking him
To decree for the hour of my demise,
When my days draw to an end,
That I'll be sitting and taking a sip
Of weak tea with a little sugar
From my favorite glass
In the gentlest shade of the late afternoon
During the summer.
And if not tea and afternoon,
Then let it be the hour
Of my sweet sleep just after dawn.

—

And may my compensation be—
If in fact I see compensation—
I who during my time in this world
Didn't split open an ant's belly,
And never deprived an orphan of money,
Didn't cheat on measures of oil
Or violate a swallow's veil;
Who always lit a lamp
At the shrine of our lord, Shihab a-Din,
On Friday evenings,
And never sought to beat my friends
Or neighbors at games,
Or even those I simply knew;
I who stole neither wheat nor grain
And did not pilfer tools
Would ask—
That now, for me, it be ordained
That once a month,
Or every other,
I be allowed to see
The one may vision has been denied—
Since that day I parted
From her when we were young.

—

But as for the pleasures of the world to come,
All I'll ask
Of them will be—
The bliss of sleep, and tea.

Taha Muhammad Ali reads with his translator Peter Cole at St. Mark's Cathedral on October 7 at 7:30 p.m.

V. Where Are the Songs of Spring?

Perhaps the most indelible memory from the festival will be the magisterial Jorie Graham disassembling Keats's "Ode to Autumn� word by word until the familiar poem seemed filled with a new and terrible fear of the almost-unspeakable horror of mortality.

Keats wrote it when he was 24 while his lungs were succumbing to tuberculosis, each breath coming harder and harder. There is that desperation in the poem, the fear of the body's imminent betrayal. And yet in the end it is also a poem of consolation, a poem of the mind (as Wallace Stevens says) in the act of finding what will suffice.

Ode to Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'erbrimmed their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, -
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

It is too early to say what else I'll take from these four days (beyond the still-more-indelible image of Adam Sandler as a 400-pound man), but I expect it will be more than enough to last the two years until the next festival.

And I'll end with a little piece of Jorie Graham's poem "Prayer� that she read one night. These lines have haunted me for the past few days.

...this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed.