Thank you for each of your poems

Carolyn,

With mild tardiness and many thank yous for each of your poems. They were thoughtfully moving and earned caring attention – most seriously wrapped around them, they remain surprises and wonderfully arrived at positives gathered with passionate devotion.

With a large thank you again,

Bill Scharf

PS Cover was a fine painting!

A Collage of Impressions from Experiencing Bob Dylan

August 23, 2010
at the Monterey County Fairgrounds, August 21, 2010

Bob Dylan set off a haunted feeling within me. He appears like an enigma, as in his great movie, “Masked and Anonymous.” An existential clown, minstrel, magician, and ultimate Daemon-Flame, he shares the fire of his mercurial pulse with us thirsty souls that need him to sing it for us. And as he says himself, “I’m just a singer of songs.” He is like a museum, and a rare and sublime, spectacular vintage wine. His band is awesomely perfected, as he is – one organism rocking out, there under the blooming moon of August.

To partially quote a dearest friend, dramatist, and poet, John Dotson, “And I found a vast loneliness there in the midst, an abyss of non-connection.”

Carolyn Mary Kleefeld

Comment from Vince Clemente

“You have no idea of your creative genius, reverential pleaching of worlds, yet always the human caress in voice and vision.”

Vince Clemente

Big Sur Sculptor Edmund Kara’s Derelict Cabin (for Carolyn)

from Peter Thabit Jones

Time and again,
On my daily walks,
I’m drawn to your home,
Your workshop lodged
Just above the Pacific.

It’s as if I’m called,
Pulled by the bare soul
Of a broken place,
A shrine of dark wood,
Quickly eroding
On the nerves of the weather,
In the slow mouth
Of time as it gnaws.

I walk down the path
Once worn by your shadow
Today, as I approach,
It looks even sadder;
As I enter one door
Another one whines
Through its old wound
To the heart–aching sea,
Which is crashing away
Relentlessly
At this world where you hid.

Fragments of the windows
Litter the deck floor;
They’re as sharp as the tools
You once used to shape
Truths into wood:
And wood into truths.

The fireplace, it seems,
Is waiting for the flames
To warm a dead room
With a sudden hearth’s blaze.

You became a recluse,
Shunning art’s game
And the ego’s long thirst,
Like a castaway
On an island
Alone with his dream.

Outside, I pass
The stark KEEP OUT,
Which the dangerous
And determined
Elements ignore.

Peter Thabit Jones©

Cabin, Big Sur: May 2010

Note:
Edmund  Kara, sculptor, is particularly famous for his nude sculpture
of Elizabeth Taylor, which is featured in the film THE SANDPIPER, starring
her  and Richard Burton.

Excerpts from Vince Clemente’s Letter

You stay well, younger sister never for a moment doubting that you, there in Big Sur, remain this enduring Poet-Painter, this Inspiration, God–sent solemn Spirit – and my dear Friend…
…I will send your letters and volume to Rochester University, Their good fortune to have you there.

With Love, Friendship, deepening Affection,
Vince

Thank you for Vagabond Dawns

March 11, 2010

Dear Carolyn Mary Kleefeld,

How do I begin to thank you for Vagabond Dawns, this gift of self, this return of American poetry of “The Emotive Imagination,” my lost world of Big Sur, indeed the vice I first heard in Peter Thabit Jones, The Seventh Quarry Interview. You are the poet who sees clearly, even celebrates, life’s solemn evanescence. I love your profound simplicity: always the human voice, human yearning, need to wed inner/outer selves. I read the poems with breathless joy as you record both “the heartbreak at the heart of things,” and what my mentor – spiritual father, John Ciardi, there in my volume John Coardi: Measure of the Man, meant by, “The poem must always be, this prayer behind the prayer.”

Your poems are always “prayerful” before life’s Enigma. Of course, I have in mind a poem like, I’ll Meet You There,” its final quatrain: “Somehow I’ll meet you there,/beloved pagan companion,/where all lost lovers meet –/ in the arms of eternity.” And a poem like, “Behind Our Masks,” where you remind us, “All we are/ is a bag of bones,/blood and water.” Yet something always beyond that, as our Solemn evanescence, indeed becomes something holy other : transcendence and flight of the soul, bleached with the natural world: “And the seeds they collect/ will ultimately flower/ the emerald meadows/ of our hidden dreams.” Reading your poems, I am reminded of a line in Emerson, Yeat’s favorite line in all of poetry, as he told Robert Frost in 1912, Frost there at the Yeats home in London’s Woburn Place, how, “The stars, the stars are fugitives also.” I would one day – whenever I am “healthy” again – attempt a long essay about this remarkable volume…

… So pleased we are in touch, as Peter is my dearest friend, indeed my “younger Welsh brother.” I continue as this “Writer of Miscellany,” with “The Vince Clemente Papers,” secure, cared for at Rochester University’s Rush Rhees library, one indeed blessed.

Again, my gratitude is soul- deep, the volume, your kind words, this very gift of Self. Sp pleased Peter will be teaching your work, as his very life is this moral – aesthetic pursuit.

In abiding Friendship, Gratitude,

Vince Clemente

Letter from Prof. Dr. Bernfried Nugel

Dear Carolyn,

Thank you for sending me the link to your truly engaging interview, in which, understandably, you have a lot to say about your artistic and poetic faculties: inspiration (wherever it comes from), imagination and deep emotion are justly claimed by you as the formative factors of your art, which has the rare quality of directness, if some degree of directness can at all be achieved by the media of verbal or pictorial representation. Your creativity appears to be a good example of what postmodern citics have called intermediality, a phenomenon that can also be found in most of the artists that you name as your longtime favourites.

Congratulations on expressing so aptly what many other artists were never able to grasp and formulate about their artistic personality! …

…Personally, I found your tribute to Laura (Huxley) most touching — a tribute that you inimitably and perfectly also paid to her in the last poem of your *Vagabond Dawns* (well placed, indeed)!

All best,

Bernfried