Jaipur Literature Festival -- Nonfiction

JLF at Boulder

September 15-17, 2017

“When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.” -- Maya Angelou.

One need not be 'young' and trying to gain a sense of themself in the world. I think we all experience days when our sense of self has abandoned us. We wake up and look at the same day ahead of us that we lived through yesterday and the day before -- the same responsibilities, the same dishes to wash, the same route to work, the same "how are you," and the same "fine," when we're not so sure we're fine at all. 

That's when Maya Angelou is right all over again. Literature, whatever our choice, takes us out of ourself. Helps us see the world from a different perspective, offers us alternatives, requires nothing more from us than we are willing to give. It gives us a soft place to land when we need one.

And there is a whole world of literature out there.

The Jaipur Free Literature Festival, the world's largest free literature festival, began in Jaipur, India in 2006. In 2014 it expanded to London. And this will be its third year in Boulder, Colorado. Mark September 15 through 17 on your calendar and come to Colorado.

The primary venue will be the Boulder Public Library which stands at the foot of the Flat Iron Mountains.

Admission is free, but you do need to preregister. If you'd rather stay in Denver, Boulder is less than an hour away along a scenic drive complete with wildlife.

Food at the festival is reasonably priced and easily available -- not to mention that there's a Lucile's Creole Cafe in Boulder open from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. (8 a.m. on Saturdays and Sundays.)

My favorite place in the library to meet friends

The library is spacious and beautiful with plenty of venues for the various panels. There is ample opportunity to ask questions following the panel discussions and the presenters, who are from all over the world, are gracious and accessible between sessions.

A major concept that I came away with from one of last year's panels was the difference between immigrants and refugees. The panel was especially focused on the Vietnam War and featured Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer last year's Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction. And Andrew Lam, a PBS correspondent and Vietnamese refugee.

It was from them that I came to understand that an immigrant to this country, or indeed to whatever country, planned to come here. They did research. They sold whatever they had in their old country and saved their money to invest in their new country. They dreamed of the possibilities. They chose to come.

A refugee, on the other hand, ended up wherever they ended up because they could no longer expect to survive in their old country. They very often were not allowed to bring anything with them, other than what they might sneak out of their old country. There would be little or no preparation, no dreams, just get out as best they could to whatever country would let them in. They truly have to "depend on the kindness of strangers."

Come to the Jaipur Literature Festival in Boulder, touch the world, and let the world touch you through its many and varied literary traditions.

Introduction to Poetry or Why I Am Not an English Teacher

No! Wait! Oh, my goodness. I don't know where to start.

I know you think you don't like poetry.

It's too foo-foo -- a fuzzy poodle clipped into topiary.

It's too obscure, too much naval-gazing. No one, besides the poet who wrote it, can understand it. Or, for that matter, gives a frak.

And even people who like poetry, don't like this modern stuff. Half the time it doesn't even rhyme.

Beginning in elementary school, I wrote poetry. Even got some of it published. Had to give up the getting published part though. Too expensive.

That was in the days before cell phones when you had to pay long distance to call any prefix outside your area code and even most inside it. The phone prefix in the U.S. is the three numbers immediately following the area code. (For those of you too young to remember, prefixes once had names like Windsor which was dialed 946 and Melrose 635, etc. In old movies phone numbers began with the prefix 555, because there was no prefix 555 and that just gave one less reason to get sued. Some things don't change.)

Also, if your poem were published, payment generally consisted of two free copies of the issue your poem appeared in.

All this meant that if my poem was published, I had to pay long distance to call all my friends and relatives to tell them the good news. AND buy extra copies of the issue my poem appeared in, because I had friends and relatives who wanted to see it themselves. Then there was the expense of snail mail because not all my friends and relatives lived within easy driving distance.

But I digress.

You notice I said I gave up the getting published part. The writing of poetry I continued for a very long time. It was my way of understanding myself and the chaotic world I lived in. I read other people's poetry for the same reason.

A good poet pays attention to each word, asking if that word is the right word. A good poem, while it uses the exact word, also leaves room for the reader to bring to it their own experience. Room to understand the poem in their own way.

When I went to college, I thought I wanted to be an English teacher. I loved poetry and prose in all their forms, rhymed, free verse, form poems, fiction, nonfiction, plays. I would be surrounded by literature. I would spend my days sharing what I loved with my students. Lunch conversations would expand my own reading opportunities by exploring the literature my fellow teachers read and loved. What better way for me to make my living? And I would have time to write.

Life and reality changed everything. I eventually got to within something like four credit hours of a teaching degree in English. And I couldn't face the possibility of a lifetime of lunches with English teachers.

That said, let me share with you a poem by Billy Collins, who was an English teacher. Probably the kind of English teacher I would enjoy having lunch with. He is described by Wikipedia as "a Distinguished Professor of English." Among many prizes, awards, and honors, he was Poet Laureate of the United States 2001 - 2003.

Introduction to Poetry 

by Billy Collins

                                     I ask them to take a poem
                                     and hold it up to the light
                                     like a color slide

                                     or press an ear against its hive.

                                     I say drop a mouse into a poem
                                     and watch him probe his way out,

                                     or walk inside the poem’s room
                                     and feel the walls for a light switch.

                                     I want them to waterski
                                     across the surface of a poem
                                     waving at the author’s name on the shore.

                                     But all they want to do
                                     is tie the poem to a chair with rope
                                     and torture a confession out of it.

                                     They begin beating it with a hose
                                     to find out what it really means.


And that, dear friends, is why I am not an English teacher.

Art -- An Essay

image from mountainmusictrail.com

The definition of art, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, is "1. Human effort to imitate, supplement, alter, or counteract the work of nature. 2a. The conscious production or arrangement of sounds, colors, forms, movements, or other elements in a manner that affects the sense of beauty, specifically the production of the beautiful in a graphic or plastic medium."

My definition of art is more what it does than what it is. It helps me experience my world.

It takes me places I've never been and where I'll never go. 

 Sometimes beautiful. 

Northern Lights, Iceland, 

photo by John Hilmarsson for National Geographic

Sometimes a disturbing view of a place half-way around the world
but very like where I grew up.
 
Vincent Van Gogh's Wheatfield with Crows

I can read Jack London's The Sea Wolf or watch the movie 'Perfect Storm,' and art will bring me close to experiencing a storm at sea without my ever stepping foot on a ship.

Art helps me feel and find my way within that nature ambiguously referred to as human nature. 

The Rolling Stones' Jumpin' Jack Flash makes me happy. I laugh every time I hear it. And I've never understood the words.

Saturday when the band on Garrison Keillor's radio show, A Prairie Home Companion, played and some in his audience sang La Marseillaise, I cried. And I do not understand the words to that song either. 

It doesn't matter that I don't understand the words, it's the feelings that count. And art does that. It lets the feelings count.

Art helps me find sense, and helps me find a way to accept senselessness if there is no sense to be found. A friend brought me a passage from Stephen P. Kiernan's novel The Hummingbird to help me understand PTSD.

     "If you kill a man," he continued, "whatever the circumstances, he is on your
     conscience for life. Whether you used a tomahawk three centuries ago, a
     bayonet two centuries ago, a rifle one century ago, or a drone last Tuesday,
     his death was violent, premature, and by your hand."

Art, whether it be visual art, music, dance, the theater, or literature, has always helped me understand my world. Sometimes it reinforces my own peculiar understanding. And, sometimes it utterly destroys my understanding, which opens the way for me to embrace a wholly new one. 

Sometimes I get caught up in the science of our world. But that's an art form, too. It's just that the languages of science are not as easily accessible to many of us, whereas the languages of art are. 

We are all artists whether we can draw the proverbial straight line or not. We must be artists to respond to it. And we do. All of us. Maybe not to all art forms. Maybe not to all expressions within any one art form, but we do all get it.

Art is as natural to human beings as breathing.