I was fortunate to be invited to teach spontaneous poetry methods at Holden Village, which is a spiritual retreat in the North Cascades. It is a former mining town and is a 45 minute drive from the Lucerne Landing on Lake Chelan, which itself is a 4 hour boat ride from the town of Chelan. With the Pioneer Fire burning, there were some days where the air quality reminded us that we live in the Anthropocene, but other than that and the warmer than normal temperatures, everything was not only quite pleasant, but transformational.

My workshops were well-received with groups of 18, 20, 33 and 16 for the four sessions and we talked about Charles Olson, poetry postcards, Joanne Kyger, the Fully-Developed Bard and wrote collaborate poems and poems based on participants interviewing each other. I was delighted that the Holden Village folks allowed me to be accompanied by Bhakti Watts, and she would love to return to the village next year and lead discussions on death and end-of-life-doula possibilities.

In addition to meeting some incredibly warm and perceptive people, being part of a Vespers service with the other faculty (said by one to be the best faculty vespers she had ever witnessed) the highlights for me included a workshop on the geology of Holden Village (& the North Cascades and plate tectonics) as well as a discussion of Social Acceleration. This is essentially a speeding up of modern life so that everything exists at the speed of capital. Social media and especially algorithms designed to addict people is at the core of this, as is plain, old-fashioned greed. Daniel Castillo and Paul Griffith led the four sessions, starting with the bleak facts that screen addiction is changing the neurology of a generation of people, and ending with examples of how humans can operate at different cultural speeds by having unplugged meals with family, among other things.

Well, of course the Poetry Postcard Fest is an antidote to the speed of capital. First off, poetry is a losing proposition financially, which is in its favor in this situation. Add to the mix the fact that you have to mail poems by way of what is sometimes derisively known as “snail mail” and you have a good start of a bulwark against Social Acceleration at least for 56 days each year. (Now if we could only convince the people at the Postcard Fest Facebook page to unplug from that for a few weeks!)

The “Friends of Attention” are on to this issue of Social Acceleration and published a wonderful article on the subject in the New York Times and also have published their TWELVE THESES ON ATTENTION which includes such nuggets as:

V. An attentional path is the trace left by a free mind. To submit to the attentional path of another, to retrace it, is a form of attention. Retracing the attentional path of a free mind is one of the keenest pleasures we can take in each other and in the world.

Does this sound like poetry to you? Poetry composed spontaneously, as Philip Whalen put it: “my poetry is a graph or map of my mind moving” is exactly, it seems to me, this path of attention and yet another way the Poetry Postcard Fest works its magic in the world. That we have 608 people in 10 countries registered to write and send poetry postcards this summer is an enormous blessing and perhaps a recognition that, in some ways, slowing down is just what we need. Thank you Holden Village, for welcoming Bhakti and I with such grace. Thank you Daniel Castillo, Paul Griffith and all the folks who participated in my workshops. Thank you Lana Ayers for helping me create the Poetry Postcard Fest and thanks to every postcard poet!