Discussing iambs and ‘sharpening the self’

Judging by the paucity of double bylines, poetry is a lonely art.

But this week in Idyllwild, poets are emerging from their customary solitude to share the shoptalk that has been knocking about in their heads in search of a sympathetic listener.

Writing workshops abound, and programs like the Los Angeles Poetry Festival bring practitioners together. But the Idyllwild festival is distinguished by its length -- a week -- and its bucolic setting, with musicians, actors and painters practicing their crafts just down the road.

Summer Poetry in Idyllwild, part of the Idyllwild Arts Summer Program, started Sunday and continues into this weekend with more workshops, lectures and readings.

“Obviously it draws wonderful poets, but there’s also a sense of community. It draws primarily from California, so I can go back to L.A. and continue to work with these poets there,” says Lynne Thompson, an established presence on the local poetry scene who is attending the festival for the third time.

Novices like retired engineer R.T. Sedgwick, who only began exercising “the other side of his brain” a few years ago after his wife died, listen to Maxine Kumin, a Pulitzer Prize winner and a grande dame of American poetry, read her work and discuss its origins.

Likewise, Kumin and this summer’s other visiting poet, Robert Wrigley, are often in the audience when students present their own poems at the festival’s nightly open-mike events.

Idyllwild is unusual among major poetry festivals because it does not require students to submit work samples -- anyone who can afford $465 for one weekend or $765 for the entire week can claim a slot. To ensure that the festival is not the sole province of the well-heeled, a dozen of the program’s 60 students are up-and-coming minority poets on full scholarships.

“I believe in access to art, keeping the door open,” Wrigley says. “The nation at large would be better served if people at least knew how to read poetry.”

If talk of process and form, stanzas and iambs is best left to the poets, the public can at least get a taste of the results. Many of the events, including Saturday’s jazz-infused Festival of Poetry, are open to anyone willing to drive up the mountain.

Budding poets at Idyllwild are expected to work hard. Scheduled events take more than six hours each day, and there are homework assignments. But absent is the Darwinian weeding-out that was common in literary workshops a few generations ago. What matters at Idyllwild is not so much the result as the self-knowledge that comes from attempting to state one’s deepest thoughts in a compelling and economical way.

“It’s about leading people into being more precise about their feelings and thoughts -- sharpening the self,” says Eloise Klein Healy, a faculty member at Antioch College who has taught at the Idyllwild program since its inception in 1999.

At a question-and-answer session on the festival’s opening day, Kumin spoke of how she was nearly weeded out of the profession during a writing workshop at Radcliffe College in the 1940s. The instructor -- none other than Wallace Stegner -- wrote a cutting critique on a sheaf of Kumin’s youthful love poems: “Say it with flowers, but for God’s sake, don’t write any more poems about it.”

Kumin followed that advice for almost a decade. Then came a period where she wrote but showed her work to no one. Finally, she signed up for a poetry workshop, where she met Anne Sexton and began what was to be a fruitful and famous friendship.

“I learned my craft in workshops. I’m very pro-workshop,” Kumin says. “They’re social events for very solitary people, a way for the solitaries to come together, especially in a place like this where it’s not just a community of academics but where poetry lovers and secret poetry writers can find common ground.”

Idyllwild is perhaps still best known for its summer youth music festival, but the poetry event was the cornerstone of an effort in the 1990s to revive the adult programs that had fallen by the wayside as the children’s sector expanded.

Visitors to Idyllwild this summer will find people of all ages practicing Shostakovich or Shakespeare, making jewelry, Navajo baskets or bronze sculptures, dancing hip-hop or ballet.

The proximity of these other arts sets Idyllwild apart from other poetry retreats such as Squaw Valley and Napa Valley, organizers say.

“We do have people from the other programs coming to poetry readings and poets going to recitals. It makes for a richer experience,” says Cecilia Woloch, director of the summer poetry program and one of its six poets-in-residence.

The seven students in Healy’s Sunday morning workshop were representative of the broad mix of skill levels and professional backgrounds. In addition to the retired engineer Sedgwick, the class included a retired lawyer, a psychotherapist and a literature graduate student with several publications to her name.

“I would like to be able to approach a sensitive subject obliquely,” Sedgwick told his classmates. “I’d like to write something that’s not about war but would still be an antiwar poem.”

Healy ended the three-hour session with an exercise that tested the writing reflexes of novices and veterans alike -- write a narrative poem or a dialogue about something that happened to you recently in only half an hour.

After Lee Ben-Yehuda, a therapist from San Diego, read her short-order poem about a close relative who was seriously ill in the hospital, the class stayed silent for a few seconds, briefly breaking what had been a lighthearted mood.

“This gets me stimulated to write again, because in between, I’m not very self-disciplined,” she said. “When I get into a structured situation, I get inspired again.”

*

Summer Poetry in Idyllwild

Where: Idyllwild Arts campus, Idyllwild

When: Now through Saturday

Remaining events:

* Friday: 2:15 p.m., a talk by Robert Wrigley; 7 p.m., open-mike reading; 7:30 p.m., readings by Maxine Kumin and Charles Harper Webb. All events are free.

* Saturday, 4 to 7 p.m.: Readings by Maxine Kumin, Robert Wrigley and others. Live jazz. Admission is $15.

Info: (951) 659-2171, Ext. 2365; www.idyllwildarts.org