The Cascadilla Poets

Sometime in 1999 I joined a writing group that subsequently called itself The Cascadilla Poets. Over the years I’ve been in many informal writing groups and they all degenerated into emotional brawls disguised as aesthetic or even ideological disputes. I guess the fact is most poets are unpleasant people. This group was entirely different. They were all older women with the exception of Bridget Meeds. They were interested in the craft of poetry and their criticisms, which could be incisive and even sometimes severe, always focused on a problem in the poem, the use of a word, an extra syllable, something in the mechanics that blocked the meaning. But criticisms were delivered with humour and often in spare language, or through hints and asides. The proceedings were never rancourous. We drank herb tea flavoured with crystallized ginger and ate dates or cookies. It all sounds very fussy and dainty I suppose. And one of the criticisms emanating from academic experimental poets (see Josh Corey’s blog) of all craft oriented school’s of poetry (as if poets swam in schools) is that they are anti-intellectual. They take their PhD’s and familiarity with whatever the theorist of the year is (currently Zizek, formerly Bordieu…) to be signs of grace, signs of intellectual accomplishment. Craft is just something a person pecks away at at poet summer camp. But these ladies, Peggy Billings, Ann Silsbee and Inta Ezergailis were 3 very serious ladies (a title theft from Jane Bowles, which I note in the hopes someone out there will go and read that book). Peggy retired to her country house after being blinded by macular degeneration. before that she lived in Manhattan and worked as a political activist for a church organisation. She lived for years in the 50’s in Korea and knows men and women there who were tortured for opposing the US supported fascist government of Singman Rhee (read IF Stone’s Hidden History of the Korean War, or the books of Bruce Cummings). Her politics wasn’t a matter of intense posturing and theoretical debate but a lifetime commitment to moral action. Anne was a serious composer and artist and in her last years wrote and published hundreds of poems. She had an incredible ear and a deep, Buddhist spirituality that informed everything she did. Her husband Bob is a physicist. Inta was a professor of German Literature at Cornell and was a Latvian refugee at the end of World War 2. Her husband, Andy, is a historian of the holocaust. All three women were deeply experienced in the world and came to poetry with a quiet, modest and powerful heart and intelligence. What I learned from them at our monthly meetings is immeasurable. By the time I left the group I had lost all patience with my own bullshit. And I am very happy to still meet with Peggy and Bridget, as well as later members, Yi Ping, Lin and Carol Rubenstein, from time to time. Carol is a New Yorker who lived in Borneo for a number of years and translated Dayak poetry. Yi Ping is an important dissident Chinese poet who came to Ithaca with his wife, Lin, and their son, Mao, as part of the City of Asylum program. And Bridget is a highly accomplished, published poet and memoirist. This is the group then. We published a collection of our work shortly before Anne’s death. Had it not been for Anne’s patience and persistence I would never have submitted the poems to them. The book is the labor of her love, as well as Bridget’s, whose husband Kenny Berkowitz edited and published it. It’s called Tracing the Path.