poetry – pottery – puppetry

I went to a poetry reading this week featuring my friend Ralph Nazareth. He closed with “A Question for Vaclav Havel,” a short prose poem wherein he tries to ask Vaclav Havel whether poetry can save the world. Because he passes the question on a napkin in a cafe, it is distorted by a smudge of water. Poetry becomes “pottery.”

Later at the open mike, another witty friend, Robert Masterson, remarked that he had once asked the president of Malta whether puppetry could save the world.

“Can Poetry Save the Earth?” A Panel with Sandra Alcosser, Brenda Iijima, Leonard Schwartz, & Jonathan Skinner, Poets House @ the 2010 AWP Conference in Denver, April 10, 2010, 4:30 – 5:45 pm

Robert Grenier’s essay in Ecopoetry 1 includes transcriptions, in handwriting, of two Emily Dickinson poems. They are identified by the number entered at the top: 1068 and 742. Then there is commentary.

I’m not completely getting it, but I think he is telling me how he lives with poems. I’d like to read more writing in “ecopoetry” about how to live with poems.