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Today, at the Rutgers-Camden Summer Writer's Conference, I'll be asking the students to reflect on the color of life, a prompt inspired by the wholly moving Gerald Stern poem, "Eggshell."

Among the readings will be a brief passage excerpted from the Rebecca Solnit essay, "The Blue of Distance." Solnit writes from a place of knowing toward a place of wonder. An excerpt here:

The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light,the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance.  This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.

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I left the Big Blue Marble Bookstore Saturday afternoon seeking a little time alone (it is my habit) and a walk through a day that was slowly gaining shimmer.  If you get the chance, go down into the Wissahickon near the Kitchen's Lane entrance, a friend had written.  It's quite lovely, if you've never been.

I wasn't at all sure where I was, but I did begin to walk and soon was up on Ellet Street, across Sherman, and into Carpenter's Woods.  It was quiet there; the blue tips of brown butterflies were rising and falling like leaves in a wind.  I had a big bag with me and the wrong shoes.  I was wearing a white-as-winter jacket.  Nevertheless, I walked across the stony paths and the still-deciding trees until I came upon a woman with a hat, a serious walking stick, and an appropriate dark coat.  Which way to the stream or the springs? I asked, and soon she was telling me all about these woods—their woodpeckers, warblers, thrushes, owls; the fat toads that sing; the migratory habits of its birds.  She had, in fact, some literature with her—a map, a brochure with pictures she had taken—and she took her time explaining.  Come back in a month, she invited, and you will hear this place sing.

I may just do that. For it is peaceful there, in this tip of Fairmount Park, this century-old bird sanctuary.  And besides, as I later read in the literature, Carpenter's Woods is rich with legacy.  In the early 19th century, for example, the land belonged to the gentleman-collector George Carpenter, who built his own natural history museum, not to mention greenhouses, among the springs and trees.  A century later, in the wake of grotesque plume hunters and, at last, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the land was fiercely loved by a certain school principal named Caroline Moffett.  The Carpenter's Woods brochure tells us this:

Every spring from 1921 to 1936, as part of her mission to educate the public in the protection of bird-life, Moffett and the teachers and students of Henry School staged Percy Mackaye's Sanctuary:  A Bird Masque, a grand pageant in Carpenter's Woods with many children in bird costume.  In the pantomime the children and birds are saddened when a cardinal is shot by plume hunters, but the Spirit of Education persuades the hunters to throw down their weapons.

Gerald Stern, the genius poet, has written a poem, "In Carpenter's Woods."  I share its final lines with you here, in honor of this month of poetry and of the Woods themselves:

... I tell you that world is as large as the one you sigh and tremble over;
that it is also invulnerable and intricate and pleasurable;
that it has a serious history;
that it was always there, from the beginning.

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Poets & Writers has named James Richardson as the winner of this year’s $50,000 Jackson Poetry Prize.

Here’s more from the release: “Richardson’s most recent books are By the Numbers: Poems and Aphorisms (Copper Canyon, 2010), which was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award,Interglacial: New and Selected Poems and Aphorisms(Ausable, 2004), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays (Ausable, 2001).”

This award honors talented poets, giving them time and encouragement to write. Mark Doty, Rita Dove, and Gerald Stern served as this year’s judges.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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I joined my father on an errand to Lambertville, New Jersey, yesterday—a very beautiful, very hip little place with just the right balance of old and new.  "You know," I said, as we drove down one narrow street, "I once interviewed Gerald Stern in a house right near here."  As I was saying the words, recalling that lovely afternoon with the National Book Award-winning poet whose fluid, smart, resonant work has actually been known to cure my migraines, I found myself looking at Gerald Stern himself—on his front porch, in a wide chair, deep in a happy conversation with what appeared to be neighborly kids. 

"Don't stop!" I told my father, but still I craned my head, and later I walked the canal path behind the garden of Stern's house, remembering the conversation we once had. Butterflies were out in force.  The spill of gardens toward rain-soaked gulleys. The white horizontals of brief bridges.

Do you know Gerald Stern's work?  For if you don't, you must.  The opening lines of "He Said," from This Time, here:

Thank God for summer, he said, and thank God the window
was to his right and there was a wavy motion
behind him and a moon in the upper right corner
only four days old and still not either blowsy
or soupy.....

(find the poem, read on)

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I first became aware of the power of that one word ruin when reading the poetry of Gerald Stern. It seems the very opposite of beauty, and yet how close the two words are often found on a page—how near and next of kin are beauty and ruin. Yesterday, reading Colum McCann on the train, there was that word again, often. When Michael Ondaatje speaks the word it is all shush and reverence.

"When we contemplate ruins, we contemplate our own future," Christopher Woodward wrote in In Ruins.

Is that how it is for you, or is it just this thing that happens to the incurably love-riddled melancholy?

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It was a movie weekend—"Slumdog Millionaire" at ten on Friday night, "Frost/Nixon" at 4:15 Sunday, "Mongol," courtesy of Netflix, in between, late Saturday afternoon. And then the Oscars, a tradition strong as Christmas here—a semi-glamorous meal delivered picnic style while the "barely mint" dresses float by. The Oscars always make me cry. Call me a sentimental fool (you won't be the first), but I like seeing dreams fulfilled. I like the idea that it's possible.

In between, I was walking about my humble abode feeling knocked-down grateful for all the book recommendations that came my way via Looking for Book Love, for all the passion that is out there, still, for stories that cling to the page. While I considered the titles that came in, I read essays on writing and craft—re-read them, I should say, in preparation for Tuesday, when I'll spend a chunk of the day in a coffee shop with aspiring young writers. Sven Birkerts, Natalia Ginzburg, Mary Oliver, Jack Gilbert, Gerald Stern, Stanley Kunitz, Forrest Gander, and of course Pablo Neruda will keep me and the girls company throughout a day that will also be spent collecting and sorting the details we hunt down with our cameras.

We'll yield to six exercises, which I've named the following way. I plan to write right alongside the girls, for I am not the sort of writer who believes she definitively knows. I'm the sort who keeps trying to find out. Who learns as she teaches, and as she goes.

The class in brief (should you wish to write along...):

Leveraging Involuntary Memory
The Perceiving I
The Hunt for Character
The Fair Release of Story
The Act of Autobiography
Vulnerable Fictions

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I was deeply saddened yesterday to learn, through my agent and friend Amy Rennert, that Carol Houck Smith, the long-time editor at W.W. Norton, had passed away. I met her only once, in 1998, when she escorted Gerald Stern to the National Book Awards, and sat with me and chatted, as if we were lifelong friends. As if I deserved to be there. I emailed with her just occasionally.

But you didn't have to be in her physical presence to feel her emanating goodness, to know that the world was a better place because she lived within it. She edited Andrea Barrett, Rita Dove, Stanley Kunitz, Ron Carlson, Rick Bass, Joan Silber. She was, wrote Andrea Barrett in a statement printed by the Washington Post, the sort of editor who did "the simplest (and hardest) task: she asked questions. Questions that presumed the characters created on the page were actual persons, the actions real and consequential, the meanings a matter of life and death." She was the sort who made you feel welcome at her table, who wrote, once, to say that she had "just finished The House of Mirth, if you can believe that. I needed a respite from this century."

Of the books that she edited, I hold as most special The Wild Braid, that magnificent end-of-life collage by Stanley Kunitz. It was so perfectly odd, so uncontained, a spill of garden, words, living, conversation, photographs, and a nearly final page that seems just rightly quotable, this day, in which so many of us are fondly remembering Carol Houck Smith:

When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself. And I think the world tends to forget that this is the ultimate significance of the body of work each artist produces. That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitude for the gift of life.

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