What you call sacred I call good eatin'

photo by LaVerne Harrell Clark Arizona Daily Wildcat Charles Bernstein

"Sacred" first appeared in Old English as the past participle of sacre, a verb which means to set apart or consecrate. Among Shakespeare's uses of "sacred," as listed in the Harvard Concordance, is in describing "paths" and "rooms," "blood" and "beauty," "vow" and "name."

Photo by Chris Felver Arizona Daily Wildcat David & Daniel Shapiro. David is the poet.

Arizona Daily Wildcat Jane Hirshfield

photo by Douglas Ryder Arizona Daily Wildcat Robert Bly

photo by Steve Northrup Arizona Daily Wildcat Pat Mora

Arizona Daily Wildcat Ramson Lomatewama

As Shakespeare illustrates, anything, no matter how base or divine, which instills one with an almost indescribable reverence is sacred. A sacred thing starts as a mundane original which our mind or heart transforms into a peerless essence. It's a Being we do not see though we approximate its existence in earthly enthusiasm and give its ineffable name capital letters. The sacred's meaning circulates under the skin like a thin flame and makes us speak as if with a broken tongue.

Poets in the past have given sacred significance to more things than we can name. Nature. Deities. Cows. This year's Tucson Poetry Festival explores the many shapes of this slippery term, "The Sacred," in the poetry of a few of our best living poets. On the docket to give us examples of the sacred in today's world are poets of diverse backgrounds: professors of poetry, art and creative writing, protesters of the war in Vietnam, an artist who dabbles in a variety of media and a proponent of cultural conservation.

The first, David Shapiro, is a musician, former professor of poetry and/or art at Columbia University, Princeton, Brooklyn College and Brown University and currently teaches art history at William Paterson University. He took part in protests against the war in Vietnam as an undergraduate at Columbia University in 1968. His rebelliousness lives itself out still in his works of poetry. "I hate the world of poetry," he says. "But I love poetry."

Shapiro's poetry shares much of the same love of words as the "language poets," a post-modern movement in poetry that gives the same attention to the word itself as Georgia O'Keefe gave to solitary flowers, a movement to which poet Charles Bernstein is also an adherent.

Bernstein is the David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters at the State University of New York at Buffalo, a founding member of the Poetics Program and an associate member of the Comparative Literature Program. He is one of the most visible poets of our time and, in fact, can currently be seen in a TV advertisement for the Yellow Pages. He states that he is "attracted to the way phone books are organized: Alphabetically and also by category." He calls such compendiums magical sources for nonnarrative and nonexpository ordering. And he shares with Shapiro an architectural sensitivity that organizes words into ordered structures whose meaning is always in transition.

The first poet featured on Saturday is Jane Hirshfield. Hirshfield is a former visiting associate professor at UC Berkeley and lecturer in the University of San Francisco's Master in Writing Program. She is currently on the faculty of Bennington Writing Seminars and has put together an ambitious anthology of poetry, Women in Praise of the Sacred. As a practicing Zen Buddhist, she finds a meeting place where the unconscious and conscious mind gather but only tentatively greet each other. Her poetry reveals a stage of perception akin to this, a stage, as she says, "before coherence and self-knowledge have announced themselves."

She is appropriately followed by Robert Bly, who, like herself, conceives of two brands of consciousness that poetry brings to the page. Bly calls these types of perception "that which brings news of the human mind" and "that which brings news of the universe." His poetry attempts to make these two levels of awareness occur simultaneously. Critic Charles Altieri calls it an insistence that the moment immediately and intensely experienced restore one to harmony with the world. It appears less insistently in his "Looking into a Face" as an oceanic fluidity between two people:

Conversation brings us so close! Opening
The surfs of the body

On Sunday, two southwestern poets read; one from Arizona, one from New Mexico. Ramson Lomatewama, a Hopi residing on a farm near Flagstaff, Arizona, is a consultant of creative writing, glass art and cultural anthropology. His poetry is a speculative jargon about his role among other forces of creation. He travels extensively in order to share his creative talents and will have a display of his visual art at the Temple of Music and Art during the festival.

He is joined by Pat Mora, who with Lomatewama, shares a drive to preserve the heritage of her culture. Mora received a Kellogg National Fellowship for the study of cultural conservation issues. Her work earned her the praise of The New Mexican, which called her "one of the most significant Chicana poets of our time." About her work as a cultural conservationist, she says that a lot of the Hispanic heritage can be recovered in one's home. Her poetry strives to place Hispanic culture more firmly within the literary heritage.

The Tucson Poetry Festival attempts to create a dialogue about this important topic, what we can discover about "the sacred" through poetry and also in discussion. So they will hold a panel discussion with all the poets, moderated by Poet Laureate of Tucson William Pitt Root. The panel promises to get ornery about this topic, so reserve your tickets in advance. They will meet on Saturday, March 27 at 2 p.m. at the Temple of Music and Art.