On Wednesday, September 15th at 7:30, Steven Nightingale, who lives part of the year in the Santa Cruz Mountains, will fill our world with poetry. We thought we’d ask Steven a series of questions about reading and life. Here are his answers:
On your nightstand now:
The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes; Princess Casamassima by Henry James; Poesia Completa de Ruben Dario; Once in Europa by John Berger
Your top five authors (today):
Emily Dickinson, Idries Shah, Geoffrey Chaucer, Giovanni Boccaccio, Pablo Neruda
Book you’re an evangelist for:
Jean Giono’s Song of the World
Favorite line from a book:
“Paradise is of the option.” –Emily Dickinson
(out of print)
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Walled Garden of Truth, by Hakim Sanai
Favorite spot to read outdoors:
By the side of a wild river.
What’s you favorite constellation?
Any of a number of constellations whose stars are in fact galaxies.
Do you really keep bees? Do you name them? Or maybe just name certain hives?
I am a novice beekeeper. But the strange thing about them is that as soon as you see them, you love them intensely.
What’s the longest you’ve ever simmered wine sauce?
I’m so glad you asked. First one must make the stock—with vegetables and spices and water, bones and a bay leaf and wine, simmering away for hours. Then the stock is reduced down with butter and shallots and red wine. In this second simmering, you taste the sauce as it slowly becomes more savory, more aromatic, more luscious…until suddenly it comes together, the taste changes dramatically, the delectation is there all at once, and you serve it.
It is just this way with sonnets. You combine the ingredients of experience, set them together in the right proportion and combination, and give them the slow fire of attention. Then after hours, when the basic stock of phrases and rhymes and images is present, you bring in fresh ingredients of emotion and idea, and turn up the flame, and finish the poem all at once.
And the intention is the same with wine sauce and sonnets: to give prolonged and surprising pleasure to those you love, to cherish those you love by the work that you do, to give to those you love a gift of mind made sensual, by means of a delicious tradition.
learn more about Steven on his website
Steven Nightingale’s book of sonnets, The Light In Them is Permanent, was published in May by Black Rock Press at the University of Nevada.
“For poet Steven Nightingale, the sonnet is not just a poetic form, it is the form of our dreams: the dream that poetry can take the mind home to original beauties; that the life of each of us is bound to a joy at the midmost of the world; that language can tease a bright reality from the catastrophes of the day; that we may learn to change ourselves, in hopes of becoming hidden sidekicks of light, useful, practical, bemused.”
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Gary Young’s honors include the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of American, grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Vogelstein Foundation, the California Arts Council, and two fellowship grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has received a Pushcart Prize, and his book of poems, The Dream of a Moral Life, won the James D. Phelan Award. He is the author of several other collections of poetry including Hands, Days, Braver Deeds (winner the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize), No Other Life (winner of the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America), and most recently, Pleasure. His New and Selected Poems is forthcoming from White Pine Press. He is the co-editor of The Geography of Home: California’s Poetry of Place, and Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California. He has produced a series of artist’s books, most notably Nine Days: New York, A Throw of the Dice and My Place Here Below. Since 1975 he has designed, illustrated, and printed limited edition books and broadsides at his Greenhouse Review Press. His print work is represented in numerous collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, The Getty Center for the Arts, and special collection libraries throughout the country. He teaches at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and lives in the mountains north of Santa Cruz with his wife and two sons. He was recently named the Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County. 