I feel very fortunate to have successfully navigated another daysong, a day-long poem writing ritual. I set aside Imbolc 2025 to write, as that pagan holiday (& celebration of return of the light) fell on a Saturday this year.

For this poem, I leaned heavily on some new gleanings from my Zen practice. One is the notion of a Dharma Position. Here is a wonderful description of what Dōgen means by the phrase “dharma position”:

A dharma position is a singular moment, state of being, or occurrence that has no fixed duration and about which we intuitively understand something of its particularity. Standing on the highest mountain peak, moving along the ocean floor, being a wrathful deity with three heads and eight arms or a golden buddha of eight or sixteen feet, a staff, a whisk, a pillar, a lantern, Mr. Chang, Mr. Li, the great earth, and the heavens above are all dharma positions.

I love the similarity to the notion Alfred North Whitehead called “occasions of experience.” That OIson died 10-15 before Dōgen’s work developed some penetration in the west is unfortunate. I think Olson would have headed in the direction of Dōgen, as this is as open a philosophy and practice as has ever been developed as far as I can tell. There are few poets who have ever lived who have understood the quest for the open and articulated it and practiced it as well as Olson.

It is one thing to write poems like the daysong. It is another thing to get an opportunity to read them in their entirety. I have written six such poems and have had three occasions to read a whole daysong. Twice these occasions were in Kelowna, BC. Once at the home of Sharon Thesen and Paul Mier and just recently at the University of British Columbia-Okanagan. I was invited to be part of the conference Cascadia: A Braided Land. (My post about the event is here. The main conference webpage is here. Sean Arthur Joyce has written a report of the weekend on his Substack page.) I am grateful to Slava Bart and Harold for inviting me, grateful for the hospitality of Sharon Thesen and Paul Mier, for meeting new friends like Stephan Torre (whose 2nd day reading I taped and posted here), and Kelly Shepherd and Christine McPhee, among others. It is always a joy to hear Sharon Thesen read and she and Lorin Medley gave excellent readings. There may not be another poet as deeply connected to the notion of the place we call Cascadia as Harold Rhenisch and his slide show presentation is a remarkable tour of the bioregion.

The schedule had me listed as doing a talk on Cascadian Mind & The Cascadian Saturation Job Saturday morning and Sunday morning. I had planned on giving the talk once and on doing a reading and I got the approval to read my latest daysong. In truth, it is a saturation job of a specific day in one’s own life. What readings are currently providing inspiration, what weather there is, diet specifics and so on. It is a snapshot of the life of one day of a poet. As Ronald Johnson said “Anything may happen, but nothing happens twice.” This is the essence of a dharma position. (Q&A follows the reading of the poem.)

A note on Olson’s poetics which I recently came across again and is helpful now. Sherman Paul wrote:

Open poetry is itself a way of responding to an open universe. That the universe is open is one of the “new recognitions involved in it. In such a universe — in the “field,” in the process–the self, only a thing among things, is a center of relationships. Its circumference is merely the space that bends around it and constitutes its particular field. Of most importance is the fact that the self is in the field (involved in an occasion, or an event), that the situation is ongoing, not to be described but presented or enacted. For the poet who, as Olson says, now ventures into the field has indeed put himself in the open, had given whatever mediates experience to confront experience directly–nakedly, freshly, firstly…