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At the House of a Friend
The garden’s snowbound.
Jasmine tea’s served inside
in a flat metal pot.
Year’s end approaches.
New Year’s awaits, the same way
poets come to their faith.
Barry Grimes
from Weathered Pages
Poetry takes place in unexpected places. It has to be this way. If poetry’s value could be bought, it wouldn’t be the democratic muse that it is.
If poetry could be controlled, we know who would be in control.
The raising of a poetry pole has consequences for the one who raises it.
There are consequences for one who puts a poem on the pole.
And consequences for those who stop to read the poem.
I can’t tell you what they are. And what about those citizens who drive by on their way to the medical center? What are they after?
Listening is making love. Listening is the deepest penetration.
Listening is a political act.
Poetry brings the news of the other world. This world can be accessed. The principles are basic: extreme sobriety, practicality and courage. In this tradition, in mystical spiritual traditions, truth must be verified by the listener.
If something you hear doesn’t ring true from your experience, then it isn’t true. The invitation is an entry point.
Poetry is service work. But it is not service work in the same sense that one serves the community one lives in. One serves poetry, not the community. There is a business to poetry. The business is poetry. It is a vocation.
Being called to poetry, it seems to me, is being called to listen. It is listening to the deepest sounds. Inside the body. Inside one self. To the quietest impulse. In the many ways of listening. In the way I am called, or you are called, to listen. This is the vocation as I understand it.
It is devotional work. And turning to it, one turns one’s entire being, and in turn, one’s entire consciousness changes everything that a life once was. A devotional act leads to a devotional process. It does not mean that one turns one’s back to the world. It may mean the opposite. It alters one’s relationship to the world. And the world includes a person’s family, including children. Including friends. Including job, or how money is made to pay the way.
Living in solidarity with the world’s peoples is part of the daily work at Blue Begonia Press.
The gift exchange is about something else. It also requires a calling. A hearing. It is asking something from those who make contact. The act of logging onto the Blue Begonia Press Website is a response to a call.
In this website, Karen and I, and the working poets at the press, along with friends of the press, give you our all-or-nothing, our acts of devotional work that reveal the work of poets who have shared their vocational work—their life journeys—with us. We are the go-betweens, the correveidiles, of listening and telling. We are all part of the conversation.
Blue Begonia Press began publishing letterpress poetry broadsides in November, 1981, and trade edition books in 1991. At this time, Karen Bodeen became the book designer and typesetter. She also designed handmade packaging for letterpressed sHADOWmARK broadsides. An independent press, it is in our home and part of our home-making. It occupies a central place in the house and garden where Karen and I are caretakers.
Jim Bodeen
Yakima, Washington
