OCTOBER 2011 NEWSLETTER

CONTENTS

WHAT'S NEWS

POEMS OF THE MONTH
 

Steve Kowit wows participants with writing prompts and his vast knowledge of poetry at Casa De Maria September 9, 2011
 

CPITS Symposium in Santa Barbara

Perie Longo and Steve Kowit, our featured readers
for our Friday night poetry reading at Casa de Maria.

The following day, there were a variety of workshops offered including performance poetry, the ghazal form, and bookmaking.  The evening culminated in an open-mic reading for our participants hosted by San Diego poet, Brandon Cesmat. Post reading, Brandon and Neil O Neil of Alameda brought out their guitars and fine voices and created music for those who stayed up to sing and dance. For more photos view
http://picasaweb.google.com/103957738685020792197/Symposium2011ForCPITSNewsletter

blake more, Claire Blotter, Brandon Cesmat, Penelope Montague, Neil O’Neil , Judy Bebelaar and Jill Moses
tear up the dance floor at Casa de Maria on Saturday night of the symposium.
 

Message from Steve Kowit:

I spent Saturday, September 10, at the La Casa de Maria Retreat Center in Montecito facilitating a poetry workshop for the California Poets in the Schools teachers. I don’t recall ever before having taught a poetry workshop for a group of experienced, accomplished poets who are themselves in the business of teaching the intoxicating pleasures of writing poetry.  An absolutely wonderful bunch of poets, most of whom I was meeting for the first time—though there were a few people in the group who were old friends. Among them Shelley Savren, an old dear friend I hadn’t seen in many years. Mo Hurley and I spent a good hour trying to figure out where we had known each other and been friends, realizing at last that it was way back at the Napa poetry conferences in the mid 80s. Jill Moses and Jackleen Holton and Anna DiMartino were friends from San Diego and so too was Brandon Cesmat: he and I had done a reading together a week earlier. We’ve been friends for a good 25 years.
 
I had brought as model poems wonderful work by Kim Addonizio, Blaga Dimitrova, Rhina Espaillat, Marie Howe, Dorianne Laux, Tom Lux, Nicanor Parra, Linda Pastan William Stafford, and Austin Straus —along with writing prompts based on those model poems. So in four hours everyone at the workshop wrote first drafts of three poems and I think most everyone had a lovely time doing it, there in that beautiful setting. The whole atmosphere—thanks surely in large measure to Terri and Tina—was fun and relaxed and the right space for people to open themselves to their own lives, their own memories, their own deepest feelings, and out of those memories and feelings create poetry. In the evening I had the pleasure of reading with Perie Longo, formerly the Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara. Perie’s poems were charming and spirited, clever and funny, and she had everyone laughing from the first poem to the last. At one point, while I was reading, I looked up and there in the back of the room, smiling broadly, was my dear friend Seretta Martin, another fellow San Diego poet, who had just arrived.
 
The whole experience at the CPITS retreat was framed for me by a fellow I bumped into Friday evening, one of the people running the retreat center. He told me the story of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart who own the property, an order at one time of habited nuns who had courageously, four decades ago, refused to let the bishop of Los Angeles dictate what work they could and couldn’t do and what clothing they could and couldn’t wear. Inspired by the liberating spirit of the second Vatican Council, they broke from Archbishop McIntyre of Los Angeles in 1970 and transformed themselves into the nonprofit Immaculate Heart Community, its membership opened to men and women, single or married. Nowadays, among other service, they fund neonatal care and hospice services, a women’s college prep school and a half-way house for the homeless. The notion of an order of nuns not just refusing to follow the dictates of the Archbishop but breaking with the church itself and going their own enlightened way is mind boggling! I believe the Latin term for that is chutzpah—and chutzpah of the most noble and courageous kind! For me, their spirit permeated the day and the love and devotion I felt from the CPITS folks seemed of that same high order. I drove home the next morning utterly exhausted and wonderfully pleased. For me the day I’d spent at the 2011 CPITS conference had been an absolute joy!

 

River of Words Joins the Center for Environmental Literacy

WATCH YOUR MAIL BOX FOR YOUR COPY OF THE 2011 CPITS STATEWIDE ANTHOLOGY, PARTING THE FUTURE!

Congratulations to the Editor in Chief, Karen Lewis and the designer blake more, and the Field Editors, Dan Levinson, Claire Blotter, Dana Lomax and Jackleen Holton.
 
Tina, Joy and volunteers in the office are mailing the books to all donors and members of CPITS as well as to the poet teachers and especially to the young poets whose fabulous poems make this spectacular collection.

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