In her second recently released poetry book, Suck on the Marrow (Red Hen Press, 2010), Dungy explores the experiences of self-emancipated bondswomen, kidnapped Northern-born blacks, free people of color, and the slaves of a large plantation and small household. The book uses interconnected narratives of fictionalized historical characters during one of the most trying times in African-American history. Like Trethewey, whose Native Guard combined personal history and Mississippi’s past and was honored with the 2007 Pulitzer Prize, Dungy has stepped away from the strictly subjective to give voice to individuals--and even ancestors--who had no access or opportunity to share their worlds with a larger American audience. Yusef Komunyakaa says Suck on the Marrow “exhumes a troublesome history through imagery and . . . plots a path back to the Southern soil, to common people, back to a double-binding pathos of pain and beauty through language.”
Lucy Lang Day
Entrekin has lived mostly in the East Bay, although for a few years he and Gail were settled in Nevada City. They recently returned to the San Francisco Bay Area to be closer to medical facilities and their families, settling in a beautiful home on an Orinda hillside where they are surrounded by art and books, green foliage, a mini-orchard, and birdfeeders. And, no, it wasn’t poetry or even teaching that purchased the house; for years, Entrekin has also been an entrepreneur, setting up and running computer and Internet start-up businesses. He realized years ago that if he wanted to have a car and raise a family, he would need to earn a decent living; he has long been able to ride the crest of the digital revolution that has centered in this area.
Before cancer, Entrekin said he had felt few limitations. He had even been planning a sequel to his first novel. "I used to think that if I wanted to do something, I just had to set my mind on it and do it." He no longer believes he holds all the reins to his life. "I have had to learn to surrender," he says. To help cope with the experience, he has been studying Buddhist philosophy and practicing meditation with his wife. Gail has been marvelous, he says; he has been amazed at her "willingness to identify with my struggle," to the point where she shaved her head when he underwent chemotherapy.
The Harts are among our many unsung Bay Area poets and poetry teachers who became known as successful teachers and poetic visionaries outside of mainstream institutions. The Lawrence Hart Institute is their legacy, and John Hart continues to teach poetry in seminars using tried-and-true methods that his father originated and that he has adapted in his own unique style.
Lawrence Harts term for his ideas about writing poetry, and the writers who followed him, was Activist, and he wasnt referring to the carrying of placards or wearing tea bags on straw hats. John explains that the term was perhaps not the most viable in a region known for its engagement in politics and social movements, especially since the Activist Group were not political poets of any stripe. Nevertheless, the label stuck.
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Lawrence (pictured at left) was born at the beginning of the 20th century, the son of a Colorado pioneer family. He worked hard in a variety of physically-demanding jobs throughout the West, until he came to California. He worked as Joseph Henry Jacksons go-fer at the San Francisco Chronicle for a time. (Jackson's name has become synonymous with an important literary award.) Although Lawrence was backwards in many ways, he read voraciously and widely, especially the work of poets; he read their entire oeuvres, from their first lines to their last, marking pages and memorizing passages, studying what made the best poems tick.
He settled in the old Monkey block of San Francisco, an informal artists colony where the TransAmerica Pyramid now stands. This was in the late 1920s and Hart was embarked on several years as a one-man band, writing poetry and criticism, and producing a literary magazine called Talisman that lasted for two issues (not bad as small-press lit zines go). When President Franklin Rooselvelt's New Deal and Works Progress Administration (WPA) came along, Hart applied for and received a poetry teaching post; he continued to teach throughout his lifetime.
Lawrence visited several times with Yvor Winters (at left) who was teaching at Stanford; when Hart dared to show the famed literary critic a few of his own poems, John Hart says that Winters ripped my father up one side and down the other, telling him essentially that he didnt know squat. But then Winters turned Hart on to many contemporary poets and the Modernist movement: Robinson Jeffers, W.H. Auden, Edward Arlington Robinson, Archibald MacLeish, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot; even Emily Dickinson was a new poet for most readers at this time.
Hart embraced the Modernist poets although he soon found weakness in many of the their most celebrated poems. According to John, his father insisted that only some passages in poetry are actually satisfying. He was attracted to boldness of imagery, the expansion of content and what people could write about, and to the poetic handling of ideas and abstractions.
As Hart expanded his teaching method, he decided he could best help students by showing them that each line in a poem should achieve a certain intensity, that each line should be active and never sag into the prosaic or the predictable. All of his writing exercises and examples served this goal. His method was severe but welcoming, says John Hart, and Lawrence had a reputation of not being snobbish or exclusive; he believed talent was widespread, that almost anyone could learn to write good poetry using his disciplined approach.
One exercise he particularly liked to spring on new students was a technique of direct sensory reporting that limited the use of adjectives and encouraged sharp impressions. He felt this was an important cleanser that helped people remove clichs and find fresh imagery. In the early phases of his methodology, he asked students to remove any hint of metaphor. Later, he would re-introduce the use of metaphor and urge students to explore vivid, original language in the manner of Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca (above or the Frenchman St. Jean Perse.
Hart continued to teach throughout his life, in private workshops in his home, as well as through the University of California Extension program, at Mills college, and at local night schools for adult education. He developed special programming to work with children and created an anthology of Modernist poetry for kids. He created a serious cadre of poets willing to question each line in a poem, to discriminate between what was a powerful and moving image and what was doggerel-in-disguise. Among the students he trained, were Robert Horan, his wife Jeanne McGahey, Rosalie Moore, Robert Barlow, and Walnut Creek poet Fred Ostrander. Horan and Moore were both selected in the 1948 and 1949 Yale Series of Younger Poets respectively, and Ostrander continues to work with John. For several years in the 1950s, the Activist group published Number, a literary journal to showcase their work. Later on, from 1983-1986, Hart and his McGahey, with support from the San Francisco Foundation, published a free periodical called The Poetry Letter.
By the late 1950s, the Beat poets were taking center stage with their rough-and-rowdy poetics, and the fashion for carefully crafted poetry in a European tradition fell from fashion, at least on the West Coast. Lawrence Hart critiqued the Beat poets but it is clear who won the place at the podium. George T. Wright, who became an English scholar and specialist in the field of metrics and Shakespeare studies, recalls that in 1951 he signed up for a class at the UC Extension in San Francisco on fiction writing but found it to be an obscene thing and changed to the poetry class taught by Lawrence Hart. He didnt know Harts history at first (for instance, that the teacher was largely self-taught) but he recognized that Hart had done some deep thinking about poetry and had techniques for writing verse that was alive. Hart was doing things in poetry that no one else was doing . . . I was completely taken with the class.
Until I learned of Lawrence Hart, I would have thought that the Beats were the only poetry movement in the Bay Area at this time, at least until the Feminist and political movement poets started publishing. I was surprised to learn of the Lawrence Hart Institute and methods of teaching, and wish I could have experienced some of Harts techniques from the man himself. There are still Activist poets pursuing Lawrence Harts vision, studying with John Hart in San Rafael and the East Bay. This makes the workshops that Lawrence Hart began in the 1930s the oldest, continuously running writing program in the Bay Area.
John Hart, who was born in Berkeley and raised in San Rafael, started to write at age 8 in classes that his father was teaching for kids in Marin County. John says that his parents did not pressure him to be a writer; as a child he wanted instead to be a scientist. His experiences in the outdoors--his family camped a lot when he was young--have contributed greatly to the kinds of things he has written about: climbing and mountaineering are themes in his work.
John was appointed advisory editor for the long-running Blue Unicorn literary journal in 1995, and has been a full editor since 2002. He currently runs workshops throughout the Bay Area. He also leads classes on reading and critiquing poetry at Book Passage in Corte Madera, and elsewhere. In addition, John Hart writes about the environment and wilderness travel for Bay Nature magazine and other publications, and has authored a number of books published by the University of California Press and Sierra Club Books. His book of poems, The Climbers, was selected for the 1978 University of Pittsburghs Pitt Poetry Series.
Hart says he is a bit frustrated with the contemporary poetry scene. Since there is so much being published, both in print media and online, theres an enormous filtering problem to find where the good poems are located. He still uses many of his fathers pioneering teaching methods and feels he is also in the Modernist mode, which plays with the continuum between sense and sensory detail on the one hand, and a world of chaos and confusion at the other end. According to John, Modernism provides a system of organization that can be non-logical but still coherent; it provides an aesthetic order that often permits the reader to draw a moral.
John Hart doesnt care much for the Language school of poetry, which he finds doesnt offer many rewards to the reader and is often arid in its linguistic puzzlements. His recent and current reading list includes: Jack Gilbert, Louise Glck, Gabrielle Calvocoressi (pictured at right), Kay Ryan, Glyn Maxwell (a British poet), Scottish poet Robin Robertson, and Yves Bonnefoy (a French poet, pictured below left). Pablo Neruda is one of his all-time favorites.
A number of poems in the Activist tradition were featured in San Jose State Universitys Caesura, Spring/Summer 2001, along with an article by John Hart. In it, he states:
Today, for all its bustle of styles and approaches, poetry still seems to be taking that breather; or perhaps the very ambitions of the art have changed. The best-selling model today is the poem-that-almost-reads-like-prose, in which (it is hoped or claimed) great emotional force is nonetheless, somehow, generated. A favorable review will include terms like honest, deceptively simple, unstrained. If work is being done with the language, it is not supposed to show.
The idea of working on poems with craft and intention is still very much a guiding principle in the Hart family teaching tradition. For information about workshops or readings, check out www.lawrencehart.org or write to:
The Lawrence Hart Institute
P.O. Box 4181
San Rafael, CA 94903
415/479-5435
staff@lawrencehart.org
POEMS BY JOHN HART
First Climb of the Season
Up here the trees hold on to stone
as I do, lightly and improbably.
The arms colloquially bent,
the nerves observant in the finger-tips;
the heart abandoned like a calculus
in pieces and lost track of, like a sum.
I look around me, staring at the light.
The blood turns over in a thrill of height.
This is a real mountain, after all,
and I am on it, living with some skill,
doing the one thing only.
I love the books lined up like bread
but for astonishment I need a certain dread
that comes first-hand.
I need the pull of space, the scent of air
and now and then to be brought up against
the ultimatum of the things that are.
Though every such encounter (as it does)
should send me back ashamed
even I
by the fourth or the fifth venture, start to change:
to grow more calm and gentler: to foreswear
a few of the complexities of fear:
to show the keyed emphatic grin
of one who thinks he has a thing to say.
I do not hesitate to call it love
for all its strangeness. The boot is placed,
the hands invested: and they stay!
And all the brittleness is torn away
that formed upon me in the months of rain.
I lift my hands to their embodiment in stone.
****
Jehovah at the Machine
Somewhere I think I see him, god at the machine, the lathe-man, waking. Something is already burring the oiled gold hands. Clanging the copper where the flesh has thinned. Salt it is. What did he dream . . .
This was the first, the planetary Eye: where burned immaculate all the ranges of subviolet desire. And if he was made use of, by what name?
Looks down on his arm (there is no other). The hawsers and great muscles of his gold. Around him the racket of shipyards: the screech of the harps being strung. Looks down upon his labor, and his arm: working for hours already: almost gone. The flesh at once the trestle, and the metal, and the blade. And the filings fall from the thick of him, faint stars.
No further choices, and no second work: This will I use elsewhere, this discard. Will not now make an instrument for Cain, nor reconsider snakes, nor write another law about stairs.
Almighty victim, indigent: oh miscellaneous grand viceroy, burn.
What moved the mighty choice, or ill, or none? What certain is, is that the face is gone: the stars in grandeur stiffen.
And that white implement, the empty page, mocks in the daylight (remnant of that time), all cheaper making.
***
The Rebellion
It is odd that predators eat people, mostly, by accident or in confusion. They ignore us, because we are not their ordinary prey, do not desire their mates, nor mean especially to kill them. What a misguided mercy! If there were a little solidarity, then wolves would have their legendary appetite for children, the viper strike at our feet in every garden; the beaks leave off singing to mob us, off every bathing beach the sharks set up their cordon. The unicorn comes without maiden, with reddened claw the housecat hisses: Run! the deals off. Summon the militias of stinging cells! Call to the breach the green residual powers! For life in its inventive afternoon has brought forth one more creature, poisonous to all.
***
Exercise
How do you pull it out? How do you happen it? How do you make it do?
Suppose I give it up and only try
To build a sound around the lack of sense;
And then reverse to make the sound a sign.
Sound-shape poem. What he tried, Hopkins, try. Try how? Disjoin.
Put where they dont belong. Make stress strike
Stress. Then flare away. Do then flatly some form take: Slicken it under,
around. Mixture of black bread.
As the ski turns,
Hammering, tilting, bearing the bones brash blade
Where the will and the wood press accurate: control
Thats bed in the brain coherent. Ride.
What lode, load, mine? How long then? Dark?
Our rigid riding, and the prayed-with wing.
Poems copyright 2010 by John Hart (San Rafael)
Lucille Lang Day:
Poet, Scientist, Publisher, Mother, Grandmother, Wnderkind
The title of one of Lucille Lang Days books says it all: Wild One. With an adolescence that might have fated her to lifelong poverty and intellectual frustration, the independent spirit and ambition of this Oakland poet forged an incredibly rich life, one to put up against any of your Renaissancy dudes. 
Wild One she was: the circumstances of her early life are described with relentless candor in her 2000 book of that name. Married in Reno and pregnant at age 14, she dropped out of school, worked shit jobs, divorced and remarried, then divorced again. She was the phone girl at Chicken Delight on MacArthur Boulevard in Oakland, where she took orders and stapled lids to paper plates for take-out meals, not trusted with anything as responsible as handling the food or making change. She went on welfare and returned to school with her mothers help in rearing her two daughters. Any of these events might have triggered a lifetime of dependency and depression.
I danced on the slanted cellar roof
to make it rattle, and when Uncle Dick
yelled, Stop! I climbed the fence and ran
toward the creek, cutting through backyards
and hiding between houses. Geronimo!
he called, following with long strides,
Come back! I slid down the bank, grabbing
at twigs and horsetails, and crossed quickly,
balancing on stones. One foot on the trunk
of my favorite oak, I pulled myself up
into scaly branches, as Uncle Dick,
hands on hips, approached the creek.
That childs a wild one, he said,
shaking his head. . . .
Something stirred: Day knew she was a writer. Not that she would one day be a writer, but that she was one. I had no notion of going to school to become a writer. Inner knowing at a young age results from passion, a word too often, and too simply used, for it denotes strong feeling certainly, but also the strong feeling that springs back from suffering. Resolve, resilience, and passion are qualities of survivors, which Day surely is although this is not how she presents herself. To the contrary, as Director of Berkeleys famed Hall of Health, as sole proprietor of a small publishing company, Scarlet Tanager Books, and as the author of several books of poetry, Day is a model of success. She is artist and scientist, as well as mother, grandmother, and wife. These accomplishments arrived well beyond her teen-aged pregnancy.
There is something about Day that is reminiscent of Dorothea Langes photographs of Depression-era women, migrant farm-workers whose fragile appearances belie an underlying strength. In Day, the strength has been nurtured by an inner stream of self-confidence and grace, an enviable assuredness about what life can hold.
Day had to drop out of junior high school and didnt complete the work for her diploma until she was past 17. A biography of Madame Curie inspired her to study the sciences. Eventually, with the help of scholarships and grants and her mothers willingness to care for her young daughters, Day earned a Ph.D. in science and mathematics education from the University of California Berkeley, but she never lost sight of herself as a poet. Infinities, published in 2002, introduces you to the science-lover that she is. 
In her most recent book, The Curvature of Blue, Day develops her inventive segues between science and art and expands to include her interest in social justice, history, and spirituality. For this book, she uses a collage technique to incorporate found language from science journals, newspapers, the Bible and other literature, mixing in imagery from nature and social experiences.
I wanted to explore the arc of personal moments more intuitively than logically, she says.
Set theory says there is
an infinite number
of infinities of different sizes,
but as each leaf curls
and one by one
the petals let go,
I wonder if omega might equal one
and the stars might slow
and dim like fireflies.
No! Let the universe
shrink to a pinhead,
then explode in flames
where possibilities bloom
endlessly again
among blue-striped roses
in new time and space.
In 1999, Day launched Scarlet Tanager Books because she saw the need for small presses that publish poetry and had learned a lot about how to put a book together. To date, Scarlet Tanager has published twelve books: ten are poetry, including a recent work by Zack Rogow (reviewed in this issue).
At Scarlet Tanager, Day has been a one-woman band, finding authors, helping them edit their books, coordinating with typographers and printers, and handling the promotion and distribution of the books she has selected. A labor of love, but definitely a labor, she is taking a break from her heavy production schedule; for now, she is not reviewing manuscripts. Instead she says she wants to focus on her own work and spend time with her daughters and grandchildren.
At 61, with three grandchildren to cherish and a memoir, poems, essays and stories to write--all on top of a full work schedule--it is understandable that Day might want to take off one of her hats for awhile. I predict it will be back on before long.
Article by Jannie M. Dresser
Publications by Lucille Lang Day
Books
The Curvature of Blue (2009)
Infinities (2002)
Wild One (2000)
Fire in the Garden (1997)
Self-Portrait with Hand Microscope (1982),
Winner of the Joseph Henry Jackson Award for poetry as selected by Robert Pinsky, David Littlejohn, and Michael Rubin
Chain Letter (a childrens book, published in 2005)
Chapbooks
God of the Jellyfish (2007)
The Book of Answers (2006)
Lucille Lang Day: Greatest Hits, 1975-2000 (2001)
Scarlet Tanager can be found on the web at: http://www.scarlettanager.com/books.
