I was lucky to have my guest Yan Li from Shanghai and some family members from Seattle join me for the Walla Walla Poetry Party (Nov.13-15). We had three evenings packed with poetry, and afternoons devoted to socializing. Each morning we shared impressions over breakfast. I will give some short impressions of each of the visiting poets.

Stephen Thomas is a founding father of “spoken word” poetry in Seattle, having hosted the Cabaret Hegel in the Eighties. Seattle poetry lovers are familiar with his book Journeyman, but here we heard all new work about the deaths of his father and sister. He described the last ebullient two-step shuffle danced by his father during a remission from cancer. I wondered how he kept from choking up when reading about his sister, who died at the hands of a drunken driver. After the reading I heard Stephen replying to this very question: “I am giving a reading, and I want the audience to carry away certain things. I want to be invited back to give other readings. As an artist I have to be aware of my presentation.” Stephen's poem reminded me of Rilke's “Requiem for a Friend,” but his philosophical mind takes the poem into a series of questions about how presences remain in the world.

Paul Nelson is a radio impresario whose “Focus” & "Northwestern Exposure" are heard on 15 stations. He is also founder of the Superbowl of Poetry, held on the same day as the football Superbowl each year. When I am around Paul, I feel a breath of beatnik poetry living on. It is not because he has imitated a style, but he has caught some fire from Ginsberg and McClure and jazz. He has been absorbing the local history and atmosphere of Auburn, Washington (doing what Charles Olson called a “saturation job.”) Out of this he is crafting a remarkable new epic about the Northwest in microcosm, past and present. He read to us from this work-in-progress called A Time before Slaughter. This title is based on the old name for Auburn. I especially love the poem about the Japanese dairy farmer whose barn was torched by xenophobic arsonists. They told him to get out, but he buried the cow carcasses and, with the help of the Nihonjin-kai, got to work building a new barn.

Our Poetry Party was supposed to feature Travis Catsull, the sparkplug behind a loose arts collective in Austin, Texas known as Business Deal Entertainment. Travis ran the Club Minivan in the Temple Bookstore building for two years, and many veterans of that scene were hoping for his return. Unfortunately, Travis is doing jail time on weekends in Texas. He could not appear, but he sent a long letter and poem, which were read out loud by Charles Potts.

Amalio Madueño ('Hyper-Mex') was president of the Taos Poetry Circus during the Nineties. He is the man who was responsible for setting up the Circus as an independent non-profit organization. He was a staff member at United Farm Workers' headquarters in the Seventies and later became a lobbyist for farm-worker issues, in which capacity he served as Caesar Chavez' personal host in Washington, D.C. He is now a large-scale organizer for community development in the Southwest. His poetry reflects the wiliness of a “coyote” who rose from native, farm-worker roots, and never stops extracting beauty from his life of engagement. I instantly recognized his “Tribute to the Newly Dead” as a personally useful poem for me.

klipshutz works as a legal writer in San Fransisco, but he constantly makes deals with his bosses to free up chunks of time for reading tours. He is a wise-cracking practitioner of seriously funny post-lyrical poetry. He maxes out the media-saturated vernacular to reveal the ghosts haunting its interior. He borrows the ecstatic fluidity of the ghazal form to lend his irony new wings. Check out his book The Twilight of the Male Ego (Tsunami Inc.), and his Erection of Scaffolding for the Re-Painting of Heaven by the Lowest Bidder.

Yours truly, Denis Mair, was also a featured reading at this Party. I have been in residence at Temple Bookstore since August and have read from my book Man Cut in Wood. Our string of exciting visitors, coming each weekend this fall, have shaken loose some new poems from my cobwebs as well. When Barbara LaMorticella hosted me at the Portland Public Library the previous week, she wanted to hear my poem “Longqing Gorge,” but I worried about taking up too much time. Finally this Party gave me a chance to read the whole thing. I was glad to see my Tai Chi teacher Nick D'Antoni in the audience, nodding recognition at my snapshots of the Chinese national character. As a martial artist, Nick will someday make a pilgrimage to China's Guangping County and Wudang Mtn., but we all know what kind of real world our pilgrimage sites are in.

Suzanne Lummis was our high-profile guest from Los Angeles. She is an organizer of the Los Angeles Poetry Festival, and she edited a weighty, important anthology of L.A. poetry called Grand Passion: The Poetry of Los Angeles and Beyond. She brought to us a tough, savvy noir voice (tender despite the attitude), that could only have matured in a huge city. Charles Potts often reads her poems aloud to people who visit his bookstore and his booktable at the Walla Walla Farmers' Market. Thus, Suzanne had a group of fans waiting for her in the audience. I asked her to read the one about how news arrives at her door, and she did. She also read an exquisitely raffish poem about a no-account boyfriend. As I listen to her complex voice, I begin to hear overtones: she is a wised-up woman, but---at the same time---she is a little girl playing with a tea set and telling stories to her playmates.

Charles Potts was the man who made our Party happen. A veteran of the poetry scene in Berkeley circa 1966, he helped organize the Seattle Free University (part of the anti-Vietnam War movement in the late Sixties.) Now he has metamorphosed into a businessman in Walla Walla. He has received non-profit status for the Temple Bookstore and Poetry School. He is working to transform this old Masonic lodge into a church devoted to lifting the human spirit through poetry, art, and ecumenical religious inquiry. He has prepared a residence for visiting writers upstairs of the bookstore. This building also hosts two different dance studios, Tai Chi classes, a rock music hangout for underage youths, and various evening lecture series. Charles was our polished M.C. for two nights during the Party. On Friday night, when he was a featured reader, yours truly served as M.C. Charles read some poems from his work of poetic-historical geography: Across the North Pacific. A favorite of mine is “Pahsimeroi Eki,” in which he merges his boyhood in mountainous Idaho with his sojourn in Japan to describe a hybrid destination, a fictional train station which is really a state of mind---the mind of a Pacific Rim citizen. Charles also sang a moving song in real old cowboy style (not 'country-western') about his journey from farm boy to fiery young poet to real estate owner, family man, and poetry patron.

Edward Smith was born in China, and he served as a Vietnamese linguist in Vietnam and the Philippines. He was also an anti-war activist on the Vietnam Committee at the University of Washington. His appearance at our party proved that poetry preserves friendship across time and space. In the Sixties Edward attended Charles' class on poetry in the Free University of Seattle. In the Seventies, Charles published Edward's poetry in Salt Lake City (The Flutes of Gama, Litmus Inc.), while Edward went on to become a Christian minister and an insurance broker. He and Charles did not see each other for 25 years, but since re-establishing contact a few years ago, they have exchanged a flood of letters. At this Party, Edward's reading spanned the phases of his life and expressed his renewal of passion for poetry, which life's pressing concerns had forced him to put aside. Edward Smith's voice started with an avant garde edge. Now it is seasoned by hard knocks and his erudition in the subject of history.

Linda Andrews and Dan Lamberton were the bookends of our Poetry Party: Dan read first on Thursday and Linda read last on Saturday. This couple read some fine poems about their love for each other. Linda teaches at Walla Walla Community College, and many of her loyal students were in the audience. Dan is head of the Humanities Program at Walla Walla College, and his poetry reflects his broad learning. Linda won a Washington Governor's Award for her book Escape of the Bird Women (Blue Begonia Press). Her poems reflect the experience of growing up in an East European enclave of Detroit. She also read a poem about the Flood of 1994 in Walla Walla. Her handling of this flood makes it a many-sided metaphor: people making do in their habit-bound lives suddenly see their surroundings engulfed by inhuman forces. (This especially telling in light of what America is experiencing now. Consider the news we heard in early November: 100 more people will be called to Iraq in February from the National Guard Post in Walla Walla!)

My friend Yan Li made the scene from Shanghai, by way of a recently completed residency at Iowa's International Writers' Program. The program gave him money for a reading tour, so I met him in Seattle and we made a little circuit. (The complete story of a poetry party must include what each participant does while traveling to the Party!) We read at the PoetsWest venue in Seattle, which gave us a chance to visit my former housemate (the artist) Z.Z.Wei. Then we headed down to Evergreen College, where newly-hired English prof Leonard Schwarz arranged a party and a reading before 100 students. Our co-feature was the Egyptian poet Maged Kaher, who has been published in Exquisite Corpse, and who now writes in English. We had a tremendous party at Leonard's; I got so immersed talking about the I CHING that I didn't hear people calling me.

From there Yan Li and I went to Portland, where we had dinner with my friend Barbara LaMorticella, the performance poet Leanne Grabill, and Walt Curtis---a member of the Oregon Historical Commission. We read to 60+ people in the rotunda of the Public Library. Walt Curtis read a poem about the fengshui of Portland city (reflecting his great-hearted receptivity to Chinese culture), and poems about his hardworking youth on a farm. Barbara told us that Walt had spent some wild years as a “street poet.” His hard living has taken a toll, but on this visit the young Walt Curtis reappeared. It was heartening to see him healthy and wild and afire with inspiration. Barbara (an original member of the San Fransisco Mime Troupe) treated us to her authentic teachings as an elder of the Portland counterculture. She has lived for almost 30 years in a forested area outside of Portland. The rough paws of her husband are testimony to the great effort they have made to live in harmony with the earth. We adjourned to a literary dive called the Shanghai Tunnel and reveled in Walt Curtis' waterfall of impressions and ideas.

Arriving in Walla Walla, Yan Li first gave a slideshow at Whitman College, hosted by the artist Keiko Hara. It was very kind of Keiko to round up so many students during a busy week. We had an audience of 30+ people, including the art professor Mare Blocker. The computer-run projector showed one image every ten seconds. Yan Li led us through half and hour's worth of wildly creative images, and still did not exhaust the scope of his work. He talked about his years with a groundbreaking avant garde group in China---the Star-Star Painting Group.

On Friday night at the Poetry Party Yan Li read two short poems in Chinese and English, with most of his work being read in translation by Jeff Bickle. The poem “Epic” was read in two voices, with Jeff reading the narrative, and Yan Li reading the subliminal chorus. Yan Li's poetry demonstrated that modernism is not a universal leveler. His images are very modern, but not cut from the same mold as Western modernism. They sound quite Asian without sounding traditional. They are very much a part of his Shanghai setting and his life experience which is massively different from ours.

Brandon Follett is a performance poet from Boise, Idaho. With his charged up delivery and great self-deflating gestures, he drew us into his whirlwind feelings of being in and out of love. In one poem he bemoaned his self-soiling of the clean adolescent bed of his mind by a thousand irrelevant, taunting adult thoughts. But he also took heart that he has internalized an inner mother, who diligently cleans the sheets of this same bed.

We had a wonderful art show in a gallery space, heroically remodeled by Temple Board member Jack Whittington in the weeks before the Party. We had artworks on loan from friends of the Temple---Dennis Defoggi, Dan Heitkamp, Robert McNealy and others. The Texans even weighed in, with two strong pieces sent by Smokey Farris. The art exhibit was curated by Daniel Gervais, a young local artist who designed our WW Poetry Party poster. Daniel also used a Yan Li image to create a poster for Yan Li's reading in Portland, and he was creator of a fine computer artwork series on the wall outside the Temple gallery. This series depicts a pagoda voyaging into various alternate realities (like different chapters of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). Upon seeing this series, I begged Daniel to print out a few of my favorites. I want to see that pagoda hanging above my desk while it voyages into those multidimensional blue clouds.

We had some amazing readers on the open mike. Don Shawe, an 86-year-old visitor from Oregon (and 1939 Whitman College graduate) was a guest at the 1990 Poetry Party. This time he read an extended meditation on how people extract meaning from life's encounters. Meaning is crystallized from the welter of sensations and feelings; it is something to be won by ordeals and endeavors, not simply a referent indicated by a sign. Don lives in a land-based collective. He said, “We're not an intentional community. Intentional communities have too many meetings, and we decided not to have any meetings.” Don told my sister how he came by his piece of land. Originally he owned land in Eastern Washington, but ran into many vexations trying to farm it. He met a Hood River farmer who also bemoaned the vexations of working his particular piece of land. The upshot was---the two men decided to swap farms! Don is a colorful figure: he has long white hair, wears a green wool cape, and looks like an angel out of a William Blake picture. He brought three pieces of his folksy Blakean artwork to hang in the gallery. After the Party, Don said to me, “You're welcome to crash for awhile at my place in the woods above Hood River.” To borrow a phrase from Suzanne Lummis' stamping grounds, yours truly is there for sure.

Yours truly's daughter Rebecca Mair read a lovely poem about the flow of life-energy which has carved out the monuments of her life story. Being a dad, while savoring the words I couldn't help thinking: “That's Rebecca, alright. A lot went into those well-honed words, such as plowing through the Laura Wilder books at age six!”

Local pottery artist Shanna Johnson read about a rootless breed that moves about the world, forcing others to buy its wares. Her voice---truly devoted to knitting a local community---is an implicit critique of these hardsell gypsies.

Jen Hawkin made an Arsenic Lobster fall on the back of our collective neck (fittingly enough, since she has just published the fifth issue of her magazine named after that poisonous arthropod). She is a fascinating young woman, an intellectual goth with flavors of Cleopatra. She hit us with a chapter of life-history in which she paid a price for her feminine appeal. After a relationship with a “charismatic alcoholic,” she faced a gut-wrenching choice between getting an abortion and putting a child up for adoption. I'm glad I was touched by her images of motherly dispossession. They relate to all of us, because we all want to nurture many things, and many of us have seen our best possibilities snatched away.

Jeremy Gaulke, who is a resident poet and fully enrolled protégé at the Temple Bookstore, read the title poem from his collection The Ghost of Harrison Sheets during his featured reading. This modern-day Wordsworthian poem about parting with one's childhood self shows Jeremy's sure lyrical touch. And as open-mike host for our three-night relay of poetry, Jeremy handed off the microphone/baton with aplomb.

The audience is what made this Party. There is no such thing as a poem unless it is heard or read. And we had a cultured, thoughtful audience that spurred the poets on. They also bought a decent number of poetry books. All the connections we established with the audience (and each other) are unfinished conversations which will help us take our writing further. Sherm Clow came from Salt Lake City to run the sound system, bringing along Charles' roots of poetry activism during the Seventies. Judith Cosby, our benign bookselling competitor from Earthlight Books in Walla Walla, set out a full spread of munchables each evening, and read her work informed by the sensibility of Marge Piercy and other women poets. Cheri Valentine is a performance poet based in Seattle who came along with Paul Nelson. She shared breakfasts and wine-tastings with those of us who slept upstairs of the bookstore, and we were treated to an impromptu recital en route to Walla Walla Vintners. On open mike Cheri read a fine poem about stories which could be told by her grandfather's hands. Over breakfast she told us about her young womanhood in Missouri, where she raised five children on food that she grew in her backyard garden.

My sister and brother-in-law made the trip from Seattle and booked a hotel room for three days. They were my sounding board for reacting to the poems I heard. We shared impressions and news, because three pairs of ears going into various conversations can bring home more news than one. My brother-in-law Dan Heitkamp has been one of my poetry teachers, operating in the genre of free-form lyrical conversation. He is a visual artist, so his responses to the poetry were interestingly different from mine.

In the wee hours of Friday morning, many of us gathered at the trailhead near Mill Creek. We walked three miles in the dark to the Rook Park Reservoir. Charles had it timed so we would reach the reservoir at dawn, and that was when he broke out his bagful of oranges, apples, and bananas. Walking along the trail, we had a series of shifting conversations. I was diligently doing my homework for my M.C. role that night, so I tried to "get the lowdown" on Amalio Madueño and Edward Smith. After Amalio hit me with about 10 facets of his life, each rivaling the size of an arroyo, I begin to get nervous about introducing a guy like this.

On Friday Yan Li and I went to tour the Whitman Mission, in the company of my family members. We carried that heavy tale of dispossession and deculturation with us to the Friday night reading. My brother-in-law often experiments with viewing things in various frames. He visualized Friday night's reading as a tribunal, where the audience members were judges, and the readers were stating their own case. He cast me (the M.C.) as a settler, pleading innocence and extolling all the good that I was bringing to the area. He cast Amalio Madueño and Yan Li as the dispossessed natives. By coincidence, both Amalio and Yan Li referred to the damage of colonization in their works. Dan even visualized a calvaryman's hat on Edward Smith's head, and he saw Charles Potts as a preacher. (Charles is indeed a minister of our non-profit spiritual organization!) On Saturday morning when I went out walking at 7:00am down a quiet street, I swear that I heard a Cayuse war cry in the wind!

All the visiting poets and many regulars of Saturday night Temple readings went to Charles' house for a late Saturday party-within-the-Party. A splendid wine tasting was provided for all by Sherm Clow and open-mike reader Aaron Hughes. Suzanne Lummis stayed a few days after the Party and kept the feeling of a special event going. She had dinner with the Lambertons and gave a reading at Walla Walla College on Monday night. She had discussions with Charles Potts and yours truly about the Temple Bookstore's future. What sort of classes can be taught? What can a poet-in-residence do? Charles also shared a good deal of information about the works of Charles Olson, and Suzanne spoke to us about Phillip Levine.

I can't even begin to tell about all the other colorful characters who listened to readings and talked with the poets afterwards. As for the cast of characters on open mike, I need them to send me samples of their work so memory can bring them into focus. Right now I'm trying to digest the Party as a whole and transmute it for my own inspiration. I would like to thank all the people who came. I would even like to thank everyone who wanted to come but couldn't. All the great bodhisattva assemblies (like in the Lotus Sutra) have indefinite edges shading into an infinite congregation. As we address one another expressively, our inspiration reaches toward those with whom we have not yet spoken.

I hope you enjoy these fleeting impressions, this account book written in water.

Yours Truly, Denis Mair