William O’ Daly and Judy Halebsky
Monday, March 23 at 7:30 PM
1719 25th Street
Host: Tim Kahl
William O’Daly attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, as an economics major but before the end of his freshman year began to study literature and write poetry. At UCSB he studied with poets Kenneth Rexroth, Alan Stephens, Fredrick Turner, and John Ridland, and with modernist critic Hugh Kenner; under friend and mentor Sam Hamill, he served as assistant editor of Spectrum magazine. In 1972 he left UCSB for Denver, Colorado, where he co-founded Copper Canyon Press. His published works include eight books of the late-career and posthumous poetry of Chilean Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda (Still Another Day, The Separate Rose, Winter Garden, The Sea and the Bells, The Yellow Heart, The Book of Questions, The Hands of Day,and World’s End), and a chapbook of his own poems, The Whale in the Web. As a finalist for the 2006 Quill Award in Poetry, he was profiled by NBC news correspondent Mike Leonard on The Today Show. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, his poems, translations, essays, and reviews have been published in a wide range of journals and anthologies. With co-author Han-ping Chin, he recently completed a historical novel, This Earthly Life, set amid the fascinating and deadly Chinese Cultural Revolution. This Earthly Life was selected as a “Finalist” in Narrative magazine’s 2009 Fall Story Contest. Currently a resident of the Sierra foothills of northern California, he has worked as a college professor, a literary and technical editor and writer, and an instructional designer, and has received national and regional honors for literary editing and instructional design.
For Kawamura Yoichi
On the tenth anniversary of your death
the lavish bamboo drops a full moon
of yellow petals, little tongues
singing the ancient songs
to whomever will listen—
the nighthawk gives all he has,
opening his eyes among the blue stars,
Buddha sits among angels beside the wild river
and laughs, touching mountain and cloud,
and a new generation waits to blossom,
with the green rain of distant Samsara.
Judy Halebsky is the author of the poetry collections Sky=Empty and Tree Line, both published by New Issues Poetry & Prose. Her honors include fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Japanese Ministry of Culture as well as the Poets-Under-Forty award from Sixteen Rivers Press. Originally from Halifax, Nova Scotia, she lived in Japan for five years training in Noh theatre and Butoh dance. In 2012, on a Graves Award she traveled to places in Northern Honshu that Basho visited in his travel journal Narrow Road. She now lives in Oakland and teaches at Dominican University of California.
New Year’s Eve I put moss and sand and pebbles in a round glass jar
—to Yuka, after March 11, 2011
Now I see how pictures work
how a painter plants a garden
how houses in the redwoods get no direct sunlight
how streets in Tokyo carve through friendships
how failures lean up one against another
how they put pressure on the fault lines
how earthquakes cause storms underwater that come to land
as waves
how water is not soft and shape-changing
how water can lift cars and take down buildings
how upstream is about which direction I am facing
how I am just strong enough
to paddle with the current
to wait for the echo when I call your name
