Ragil Sukriwul

GEOFF MULVIHILL

2006-09-30T17:20:00.000-07:00

GEOFF MULVIHILL,
Associated Press Writer Fri Sep 29, 8:35 AM ET
STANHOPE, N.J. - You won't find any volumes of poetry in Don Scheidt's house.

A retired tax collector who is quick to point out that the IRS is not a very poetic organization, Scheidt does not enjoy reading haiku, iambic pentameter or free verse.
But every other year, he spends a long autumn weekend listening to the stuff read aloud at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, which bills itself as the largest gathering of its type in North America.
If you think that a non-poet would be disinterested in questions of the day such as "How often does the spirit come?" you're wrong.
"People here are so creative and insightful," explained Scheidt, 60, an Andover resident who shelled out $78 for a four-day pass to the festival, a veritable versapalooza whose 11th edition opened Thursday and runs through Sunday. It's being held in Waterloo Village, Stanhope, N.J., which is about 50 miles from New York City.
Organizers were expecting 20,000 people to come to this year's festival at a site that has hosted events from beer festivals to, well, Lollapalooza, the 1990s traveling music festival.
It was the first time there for Linda Gregg, who has written eight volumes of poetry and won a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Walking through the festival Thursday after talking with a group consisting mostly of high school students, Gregg stepped aside for a strolling mariachi band.
It reminded her a bit, she acknowledged, of San Francisco's Haight-Asbury neighborhood, where she lived in the 1960s.
"It has a very democratic feel," she said.
Not far away, high school students were taking turns improvising raps and some adults were reading aloud the works of Walt Whitman.
In a dozen tents — the kind you'd see at a fancy wedding, not a campground — poets were reading, pontificating and fielding questions.
And in moments that poets might find inspiring, leaves were falling and the aroma of pulled pork filled the air.
Many of the people attending are poets. It's been said, after all, that more people are writing poetry that reading it.
Salesman/poet Kevin Burris and his fiancee, office manager/poet Katie Phillips, drove from the Chicago suburbs for the festival.
Burris said when he's been there in the past, highlights have come when poets on panels have debated the meaning of their art. "Watching geeks argue about some obscure matter of poetry is fun," he said, "to other geeks."
For 15-year-old Nick Davis, who might be the laureate of the sophomore class at Morristown High School, it was thrilling to see big names such as Andrew Motion, who definitely is the poet laureate of England.
"I think it's a good opportunity for me to hear other peoples' work," said Davis, who keeps his poems in a Green Day notebook and aspires to making sure people don't think poetry is only for "sissies."
The festival's organizers were expecting a big response from a program scheduled for Saturday night in which several nearly two dozen renowned poets were to answer Gwendolyn Brooks' poetic question, "How is the truth to be said?"
When Gregg talked, she answered the question about when her spirit — her muse — is there to inspire her to produce.
"It feels like the spirit is always there, always, always, always," she said. "The thing that's confusing to me is: Why, if that's true, am I sometimes inspired but sometimes not?"
Poetry, indeed.
___
On the Net:
Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival: http://www.dodgepoetryfestival.org

War cry against literary angst

2006-09-30T16:39:00.000-07:00

A young intellectual sets out to prove that happiness can be interesting.
By Yvonne Zipp The canon of iconic first lines is a pretty select one. We're talking opening sentences that are so well known a person doesn't need to have read the book to be able to quote them. Among them I'd include Genesis, "Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen, "A Tale of Two Cities" and "David Copperfield" by Charles Dickens, and "Anna Karenina" by Leo Tolstoy.
That last has become a sop to survivors of dysfunctional families everywhere: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." The only problem? It isn't true, says Rachel Kadish, in her new novel Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story. "Nothing against Tolstoy. I'm an admirer. I simply happen to believe he's responsible for the most widely quoted whopper in world literature," her heroine Tracy Farber, a 30-something literature professor, opines. "Happiness, according to this witticism of Tolstoy's, is not a plant with spikes and gnarled roots; it is a daisy in a field of a thousand daisies. It is for lovers of kitsch and those with subpar intelligence."

TOLSTOY LIED: A Love Story By Rachel Kadish Houghton Mifflin 336 pp; $24.00

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Tracy is out to prove Tolstoy wrong - after she gets tenure. Because she's no fool: "Talking about happiness is career suicide." Every semester she struggles to get in just one novel whose plotline won't inspire thoughts of suicide in her students. Tracy is happy with her single life as the novel opens - content to be a devoted friend and a good teacher. She's the kind of professor undergrads dream about. She's devoted to her advisees, especially Elizabeth, a brilliant, eager-to-please Dickinson scholar who's this close to finishing her dissertation. She even scorns the excessive verbiage beloved by holders of PhDs everywhere. "I made a private vow never to say 'simulacrum' if 'cheap imitation' will suffice.... Never to say 'debative quality' when I mean 'argument,' or hedge with 'it might be said' when what I mean is, I believe." (Don't you just want to hug her?)
Then Tracy meets George, a Canadian who works for a nonprofit that fights overcrowding in schools. George is also on a quest for happiness, having broken away from his fundamentalist Christian family after his mother's death. And then Tracy finds herself enmeshed in departmental politics when her colleague Joanne begins interfering with Elizabeth's thesis in a way Tracy finds reprehensible.
Kadish's insistence that happiness deserves serious consideration makes a nice change from the bleakness and suffering that's the default mode of many literary heavyweights. But while Tracy derides romances that end with the "false Happiness in Perpetuity that wraps up Dickens novels. You know - marriage between two characters who can be expected to go cross-eyed with contentment and stay that way until they die," it soon becomes apparent that "Tolstoy Lied" is hewing pretty closely to this format.
The cast of characters is also familiar: There's the love interest, the gay male friend, the pregnant best friend, and the "free spirit" other best friend whose man troubles keep things lively. George's dad is the one-note caricature that seems to be a synonym for "fundamentalist Christian" in much of literature these days. And Joanne's malice is never explained in a way that makes sense. Benign neglect and indifference were all I ever encountered from even the most burned-out professor - they were too busy with lives of their own to plot to submarine a student's fledgling career (especially someone else's advisee).
That said, readers probably will have goofy grins on their faces when reading the early stages of Tracy and George's romance - Kadish excels at making George somebody worth loving, rather than just the handsome bank account that serves as the male lead in many so-called "chick lit" novels. And any bookworm will welcome the discussions of literature that periodically pepper the chapters.
KAREN PRESTON
Finally, it's impossible not to root for a heroine who chooses to fight for the idea of happiness, rather than whine endlessly about her own troubles. "People misunderstand happiness. They think it's the absence of trouble. That's not happiness, that's luck. Happiness is the ability to live well alongside trouble.... Every day brilliant people, people smarter than I, wallow in safe tragedy and pessimism, shying from what really takes guts: recognizing how much courage and labor happiness demands."
Now there's a war cry you don't often hear from modern romances, which frequently insist that "Happily Ever After" means "Getting Everything I Want."
So while Kadish may not have succeeded in her stated goal of giving gravitas to the happy ending, she does manage to inject some needed philosophical heft in the urban romance, nonetheless.

Ina-ama Umbu-rambu

2006-09-28T15:26:00.000-07:00

Di bawah terik sang surya
di atas gersang tanah
batubatu karang dan hamparan pantai
Aku mulai bernafas dan merangkak
berlari bersama Umbu tak lupa Ama merangkul
disanding Ina dan merdunya senandung Rambu
kami berlagu hingga rumputan kering menyegar
menatap keharmonisan itu
Tiba tiba atau mungkin perlahan
kabut pekat menggiring buta sepasukan
awan hitam yang menyirami bumi dengan
angkara bersama kebengisan purba
Rangkulanku renggang terkoyak kepal kayu
nyanyianku tersamar tertutup hati batu
saling menatap gamang kita terpaku kaku
Adakah itu keinginan? Hingga memerah alangalang
O sang maha kuat tendanglah badai ini
usir kepekatan ini
Mari kita hembus nafas perlahan
tenangkan angin
Ama, teruslah berlari umbu kan songsong
dan kita terus berestafet sampai akhir garis
Ina, bawalah selendang seka peluh dan
bersamamu Rambu tuak manis lepas dahaga
kita raih bersama itu kemenangan
dalam kesabaran
20 juli 1999 (pasca kerusuhan Kupang)

Lagu Tidur

2006-09-28T15:08:00.000-07:00

Tidur tidurlah
esokkan datang bersama
matahari yang sinis dan angin masam
Tidur tidurlah
esokkan mampir dengan senyum
ribu batu dan debu
Tidur tidurlah
lelapkan semua mimpi
tentang dongeng esok hari
1999

Melingkar Gundah

2006-09-28T13:26:00.000-07:00

Aku, kau :
Ada
Kau, aku :
Diam
Dibelitan lidah yang melingkar gundah

1999