The Lawrence Hart Seminars, going back to the late 1930s, are by far the longest-running literary workshop in the San Francisco area. After the covid shock, they switched to a Zoom format and are now available online anywhere. In person or onscreen, poets continue to explore the literary territory that Lawrence Hart and the early Activists opened in the middle of the Twentieth Century.
There is a modest tuition. Visitors are welcome. Poetic “sophistication” is not required–may even be a drawback. The essential thing is the willingness to try out a new path toward the mastery of language.
Between 2013 and 2017, five books by seminar members, each with an introduction by John Hart, appeared with the San Francisco Bay Area’s Sugartown Publishing: Patricia Nelson’s Among the Shapes That Fold and Fly, Bonnie Thomas’s Sun on the Rind, Fred Ostrander’s It Lasts a Moment (a new and collected); Judith Yamamoto’s At My Table; and John Hart’s Storm Camp, a sequel of sorts to his Pitt Poetry Series volume The Climbers (1978),
Below are a few poems produced in the Lawrence Hart Seminars and showing the range of styles developed under the influence of Activist approaches.
JONATHAN MILLER
ON RECEIVING NOTICE OF MY DIVORCE IN THE MAIL
Though I promised never to race the sun,
I grieve its indifference to my gait,
Displaced among flaws and dark compulsion,
Breath and retraction repeat and negate.
Not all loss, adjured by star or reason,
Advances within long, vocal lament,
Mine, intrinsic as moon or dull ocean,
Lacks ready retort, my name redundant.
As, disregarded by your foursquare gaze,
I cannot foretell the future you make,
My heart, ancestral, simplified, conveys
Only the feral stroke and blind intake.
Joined once, we, in certainty of measure,
Now dispel like unintended weather.
About “Receiving Notice”
After many years of writing free verse, Miller is also trying his hand at form. The striking thing about this poem is the scarcity of perfect rhymes; most pairs are half-rhymes or match stressed and unstressed syllables. One such variant might seem a fault; a swarm of them creates a new, strong effect, avoiding the monotony of much rhymed work.
PATRICIA NELSON
NOAH WAITS
My palm still feels her softness,
the little dove that I tossed upward
with her thirst and her height.
The motion in her wings grows louder
like a memory or premonition
of something beyond a curve.
Some future that might know her
or a blooming island lifted strangely
in the circle of her sight.
In this horizon, truth is liquid. A wave
that somehow knows each beating thing
that goes through it or upon it.
Oh, whoever drops the turning stars
into the color of the night,
burning and filled with error,
I invoke you. Yes, they’re only floating rocks,
but they’re forgiven their blankness, even loved
for where they enter the story.
About “Noah Waits”
Nelson has developed several sequences of poems on mythical or historical characters: Arthurian ladies and knights, Dante’s variously destined souls, celebrated Romans, and (as in this case) Biblical figures. “In “Noah Waits,” Nelson continues a stylistic shift away from hard-edged metaphor and toward reliance on statement–seeming abstractions employed with emotional effect. After her initial volume with Sugartown, Nelson has published four additional collections with other presses; the latest, The Worlds They Stood Upon and Named, is due in fall 2025 from Fernwood Press.
(c) 2024 Patricia Nelson; appeared in Blue Unicorn Spring 2025
FRED OSTRANDER
THE STATION 3
The past we chase. A train moving out. Great blasts of steam,
great wheels, gradual at first, out of the station--
glass, iron ceiling, and steam dispersing.
And a ridiculous figure who runs hopelessly, helplessly after an untraceable past.
Those whom he loved were so briefly present. They do not look back,
they being of the past. As he slows, without breath,
perhaps stumbles, catches himself, and turns back slowly, reluctantly,
disbelieving, in a confusion of loss, death, memory, tricks and falsifications of his time.
What is it they take with them?
Returning to a vacant, waiting present, the numberless clocks,
a station with all trains gone.
(c) 2003 Fred Ostrander; appeared in It Lasts a Moment
About “The Station”
Fred Ostrander, who died in 2016, had a thing about train stations, and a thing about memories that dwindle, leaving the remembering mind bereft. As often in Ostrander, the long lines are composed largely of lists. The first stanza invokes details of a railway depot (of another era), focusing finally on a running figure. In the second stanza, a list of this man’s actions–slowing, stumbling, turning back–merges into a list of psychological realities: “loss, death, memory, tricks and falsifications of his time.” A brief coda shows us the station empty, the attempt to reconnect to the past abandoned. The piece is not in any direct way autobiographical. Published in 2003 in Blue Unicorn, it is found also in the second of Ostrander’s three books, Petroglyphs (Blue Light PRess, 2009).
ESTELLE SOLOMON
WORDS
We come bent and stalking, secrets
adrift and the eyes' arrow directed.
As in dreams.
We move without argument,
in rooms, in shadows, our voices
catching spark, struck for fire or light.
Words, resinous, mute the willing throat,
linger on the tongue, almost waste,
words, in their thrust to rise, like a bird
Beating its crucial wings,
to rise, rise against gravity's thunder,
the shimmering, strutting gleam of them!
(c) 2019 Estelle Solomon; appeared in Blue Unicorn Fall 2019
About “Words”
Estelle Solomon has recently turned seriously to poetry. “Words” captures both the difficulties and the joys of wrestling with language in the Activist manner. She makes more use than some of her colleagues of the Surrealist “automatic writing” technique, editing poems down from longer strings of rapidly generated lines.
BONNIE THOMAS
SEPTEMBER’S PAUSE
Again, the body’s child comes, Look! Look!
holding bare the mistakes — fireflies in a jar.
And we, in our varying postures,
resist a perfect solemnity
as the asymmetrical leaps of living
dampen the sound of all fallen behind us.
The curse, descending darkness, changes its skin
like the low-slung, slinking animal,
variable as the loosely staked fences
between our bright and careful gardens.
We continue ourselves through the young,
salve old worry with the new measure of sun,
the music lifting up through the leaves,
as children run through grasses, fall, run again.
We look toward all not having arrived to ground,
gather the gentian — the blue flowers
that balm our errant, human bodies,
blue petals holding light that is not ours.
(c) 2024 Bonnie Thomas; appeared in Blue Unicorn Fall 2024
About “September’s Pause”
Whatever else is going on in the world, poets are ever drawn to the universal human experiences of time passing, of seasons changing, of gain and loss, acceptance and regret. Here Thomas takes up the challenge of turning these basics into fresh poetic experience: lines that make the reader recognize, as if for the first time, things already known.
JUDITH YAMAMOTO
STARI MOST
After dark, the dogs bark east of the equator
and in the absence of lilacs and of rivers encircling the earth
the orphans do not sleep well.
The grandmothers listen
beside the stone bridge.
What can they say to the mumbling of doves?
After the last months of shelling--
not to mention the ancient earthquakes and the old, old wars--
the mortar of eggs and goat hair
collapsed in the arms of these women.
I look for answers in newspapers, in old books,
where I find sulfur,
neither a metal nor the name of one of my children.
See dreams,
see fires that burn forever under our shoes.
(c) 2003 Judith Yamamoto
About “Stari Most”
Judith Yamamoto often writes–poignantly, not very hopefully–of war and atrocity; this poem hinges on the 1993 destruction of Stari Most, the Old Bridge, in Mostar, Bosnia. In her many years working with Lawrence Hart, Yamamoto perfected a voice that seems matter-of-fact but never fails to take the reader by surprise. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Partisan Review, Blue Unicorn, elsewhere.