Dane Cervine: California Poets Part 8, Five Poems
January 8th, 2025
California Poets: Part VIII
Dane Cervine
Five Poems
Sounds and Colors of The Great Matter
Let us awaken – awaken . . .
—Traditional Zen recitation on The Great Matter of life & death
I thought my fire was out, and I stirred the ashes. I burnt my fingers.
—Antonio Machado
After a quiet weekend, grandson Wyatt and his friend Hudson
visit again, eat silently at the kitchen counter
like poets about to compose a poem,
then sneak under chairs in the front room,
find brightly colored balls—red, blue, green—
forgotten from the previous week, sort by color,
place in the large cobalt-blue basket
that houses them. Inspired now,
they strip off their shirts,
roar and run through the house as though
the great matter was just beginning. All day,
they cavort. While I sit
with the old dogs in the open door
between study and garden. Like Bandit,
sniff the air for any sign of what lies
beyond; or Stella, who, like her namesake
tries to ignore the chaos, listens
to her own canine radio waves
without thought of any other
desire than this.
Bandit and the Bird
Just now, I see a flash of feathers in the window,
hear a thump against the side of the house, then Bandit the dog
chasing like the ungainly predator lurking in his DNA
the flurry of bird across the ground and round the corner
in the backyard. Following,
I find Bandit hunching over the now-still bird,
one paw raised like a hunting dog, but his eyes uncertain
what to do now that the bird lies motionless in the dirt.
The tiny eye dark black, a polished marble, unseeing.
I usher Bandit away, who withdraws only because of my foot,
then touch the still soft bird-body to feel
if any life remains. Only softness. Only stillness.
Knowing dogs and their bones, I dig a hole and bury the bird
in a clean, tender rag deep beneath the wet
Thanksgiving ground. Place a garden stone from a river
atop the mound. After, Bandit scours the yard for clues
where the bird has disappeared to—this mystery now a puzzle,
even for a dog.
The Impossible Red
Metaphor is an interior form of nature…
—Mark Nepo
I ask my grown daughter Kelsey
as she wanders the garden with little Wyatt
who pokes in the overgrown strawberry bed
for one ripe red mystery to eat, about the lost
leather key chain I found upstairs. The inked
engraving Mama Tried.
Kelsey laughs, says it’s the old Meryl Haggard song
and suddenly the metaphor of earth and mother and wry lyric
arcs between us, knowing how hard we both tried,
children the anthem inside a mother’s desiring
body, hers now, and my wife’s, and my own
still. This
old Earth trying so damn hard too
to bear the song of us and
here we are in an untamed garden of gorgeous berry
and weed, each wayward thing desiring life—
where a strawberry is more than a word
in my grandson’s tiny hand, and a metaphor
is none other than the impossible
red itself.
Mantra
The cab-driver’s long fingernails are curved like tiny knives
as he drives us through Bangkok’s rain
from Wat Pho’s immense Reclining Buddha.
He says
the city swells regularly to ten million
coming, as he did, from the countryside
because there is no work in the green hills.
He chatters on his cell in this taxi he spends
twelve hours a day in—weathered skin,
black handlebar mustache, raspy voice
a mantra of different timbre than a monk’s
silence. I’d stood at the reclining statue’s end
next to Buddha’s immense tattooed soles,
stared the length of his golden body
one hundred fifty-one feet from big toe to crown,
listened into the bustle of pilgrim and tourist
for the ancient mantra. The
golden silence. I do hear it, inside
the cabbie’s cackle, the engine’s
tortured gear shifts, the rain
singing like ten million souls
on the battered roof.
Books
Dharamshala & California
In the Dalai Lama’s temple,
I run my fingers along the old golden wood
framing immense glass cabinets from floor to ceiling
filled with wood-print parchments and scrolls.
One hundred volumes of the Kagyur—
sutras of the Buddha himself, translated from Sanskrit.
Then, the Tangyur—two hundred volumes of Buddhist philosophy,
astrology, poetry & art, medicine & science.
I can almost touch the ink, the hands of endless monks,
Indians who first carted this precious cargo
to China and Tibet, the endless copying,
the meticulous transcriptions; again, fleeing
through Himalayan snows, evading
military outposts, imprisonment, death,
to resurrect this library where, a millennium later,
I stand with mouth agape. This,
what any book lover might feel—
it is an ongoing affair. I see
this shared obsession in the eyes of Ajeer,
our weathered guide who confesses his library holds 5,000 books,
none which he can orphan,
despite his wife and daughter’s pleas
to simplify his life before it’s too late.
We laugh as conspirators burdened
with the same impossible love.
~
Landing again in California,
my cousin Cynthia—a lover of rare books—
listens as I tell her of Ajeer, the Tibetan archives,
show her my own modest shelves filled with poets,
philosophers, scientists. Dante’s Divine Comedy,
even a book from the 1700’s rescued from
Logos Used Books on its last day:
The Works of John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave,
Marquis of Normandy, & Duke of Buckingham.
Someone has to love such old conceits.
She smiles, tells her own tale
of scouring the internet to buy
five of the Merchant of Venice’s 300 copies
printed in the 1800’s on vellum with gilt lettering
for her theater group—in honor
of the ancient play’s 300th performance.
Says she once visited Hay-on-Wye in Wales,
a small village with 40 rare book shops,
and a castle full of books.
Some loves take you on a journey—
over the Silk Road, through Tibet,
old Europe. A book
may be polyamorous, we muse—
loves to be loved by many, yet is content
to be held tenderly
in the hands of only one.
Interview
February 9th, 2025
California Poets Interview Series:
Dane Cervine, Poet, Essayist, Memoirist, Therapist
interviewed by David Garyan
DG: Let’s begin with your work as a therapist. What are things you cherish in this respect and how have the activities in this field influenced your writing?
DC: I became a therapist before I became a poet, unless you count the soppy teen poems I wrote entitled Seasons of Rain for my sophomore English class in high school. My first moment of fleeting notoriety in a small farming town adjacent an Air Force base. Becoming a therapist gave me, in part, a language to understand the maze of intrapsychic, familial and socio-cultural experience; but interestingly enough, when my children were born, it failed to capture the utter miracle of life. So I found myself writing poetry, an avocation I suspected might be brief, but turned into a parallel exploration, with psychology, of the mysteries of being alive. Over the years, I found my therapy practice, and clinical experience in a broad array of youth, adult, and senior programs, appearing in my poetry. Not only as subject matter, or specific book titles like How Therapists Dance, but as a mode of apprehension bent on plumbing the depths of the psyche. As but one example, two poems of mine were published in the Jung Journal – Culture & Psyche [Fall 2020] that capture something of this integration:
Therapy
A television repairman says that most times a set is reported broken,
it is simply unplugged. I laugh, convinced my own brokenness
has darker origins, merits serious repair.
My therapist knows, pushing my buttons remotely, watching me come alive, replay every wound.
The blank screen is in love with electricity,
the empty heart with its sad story.
The Art of Therapy
On the opposite wall in my office,
I contemplate three wooden panels
with muted mountain scenes from Japan.
Towering forested cliffs, a small house at the bottom,
two men in robes dwarfed by immensity, lost in conversation amid cherry blossoms.
It is how I think of therapy,
traveling through immensities
lost in conversation, the dangers
of sudden cliffs, of becoming more lost,
of falling. Of failing
to run one hand then another
through the fallen cherry blossoms
littering the ground with beauty.
DG: For many years, you’ve been a practitioner of meditation. When did that begin and would you say that most of your inspiration comes as a result of practicing the art?
DC: That’s a very interesting question. I began a formal meditation practice in college while studying Buddhism and religion at the University of California, Santa Cruz, though I’d become deeply “spiritual” before that, in high school, when my evangelical Christian upbringing morphed into the high-spirited Jesus Movement that swept through our little town of Atwater in the Central Valley of California. Of course, college corrupted me wonderfully, and I pursued my graduate degree in psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, grounded in the cross-disciplinary philosophies of East/West studies. Which is a mouthful. While I wasn’t yet writing poetry during this time, I began to sense that my life path would eventually integrate three different spheres of the psyche, so to speak: psychology, meditation, creativity. Or therapy, spirituality, & poetics. They’ve become a synesthesia of expression and understanding. None, individually, alone, are sufficient for me. So yes, to answer your question, much of my inspiration for writing is grounded in this tri-partite dance of disparate disciplines. I love a good dance, despite its dangers. For instance, “spiritual” poetry can lack tension, complexity, opposition; poetry that is too “psychologized” can seem too self-helpy and sentimental; yet my particular poetic voice couldn’t exist without skirting these dangers. Though I may fall prey to them regularly, depending on the reader’s own aesthetic.
DG: In 2021, you decided to do a book of prose poems, The World Is God's Language. Though you’ve employed that form before, what inspired you to do a whole book? And were there any challenges you encountered shaping this particular collection you perhaps hadn’t dealt with before?
DC: For context, I might refer to the four Santa Cruz poets [with national reputations] that inspired my work early on: Ellen Bass, Gary Young, Robert Sward, and Joseph Stroud. Ellen inspired my first poems with her clear, lined narratives, while Robert and Joseph each—in very different manners—taught me the range of differing poetic forms, voices, styles a poet might use. It was Gary’s spare, Zen-like prose poems that seemed to reflect my own meditative sensibilities, and I experimented with this form occasionally in my earlier books. I finally decided to bring a range of older and newer prose poems together in one volume for the first time, just to experiment. The book, whose title is a phrase from the French activist and mystic Simone Weil—The World Is God’s Language—was chosen by Sixteen Rivers Press for publication in 2021. This encouraged me, while still working on other books with different forms, to write another manuscript of all prose poems entitled Children of Obscura – This Mysterious Human, which will be my second book with the Sixteen Rivers Press collaborative [due out in 2026].
There are many different kinds of prose poems (surreal, narrative, long, short), but the challenge in writing my own was to follow Gary Young’s quiet, inspiring example as a kind of template or “gate” [in the Zen sense], without unduly mimicking him. To find my own, sometimes irreverent, voice that might fail to meet his gorgeous standard of spare clarity. Yet to trust my own poetics. You can find an illuminating interview or two with Gary online where he describes the uniqueness of the prose poem. This gave me both permission, and a map, to find my own way in this landscape.
I wrote an essay about these four entitled “The Manifest Destiny of Language”, originally appearing in a TriQuarterly 2014 blog , which you can still read on my website:
An expanded version was reprinted in Christopher Buckley’s Miramar (Winter 20217). It provides a view of the literary landscape I confronted in finding my own voice as a poet.
Another marvelous prose poem writer I continue to admire is our Sixteen Rivers colleague Gerald Fleming, who uses a long prose form for his poems, and they are exquisite. His example, I think, seeded the ground for my longer haibun form explored in Deep Travel.
DG: In addition to being based in Santa Cruz, your work is strongly associated with Sixteen Rivers Press in San Francisco. As a California poet, can you talk about the importance of both, along with your favorite literary haunts in the area?
DC: The Santa Cruz poetry community has a long, vibrant history that pre-dates me, and will extend far past my own little contribution. The San Francisco Renaissance, according to the Poetry Foundation, “is not a single movement, but a constellation of writers and artists active in the San Francisco Bay Area at the end of World War II. Poets associated with the San Francisco Renaissance include Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, Jack Spicer, and Michael McClure.” In this era, Santa Cruz became the occasional home, and oft-visited destination, for many related poets. George Hitchcock founded the journal kayak here, the poet William Everson taught for a spell at the university (where I took his iconic “Birth of a Poet” seminar in the Kresge Town Hall), and later, while raising kids and serving as Chief of Children’s Mental Health for the county, I floated on the periphery of the Santa Cruz poetic landscape curated by the likes of Morton Marcus, Stephen Kessler, Robert Sward, Joe Stroud, Maude Meehan, Ellen Bass, of course Gary, and more. If not for this vibrant community—the richness of which is akin to a large city—I might never have found poetry, nor become a poet.
Along the way, I became a part of the Emerald Street Writers, a critique group that formed in the aftermath of one of Joseph Stroud’s Cabrillo College poetry classes. Since I did not enter poetry through a literature degree nor an MFA program, the quarter century of this group’s existence has shaped my poetics and given me a community of fellow writers. I can’t say enough about this group of poets and the community we foster. For some years, I also served on the Poetry Santa Cruz board helping Dennis Morton and Len Anderson (with other key members over the years) host monthly readings at the iconic Bookshop Santa Cruz, sponsor related workshops, while Dennis hosted the longest running poetry radio show in the region. I’ve been more grateful-participant than leader through all this, but I was so pleased—in my role as Chief of Children’s Mental Health—to collect youth and family poems curated by Dennis Morton, and include them in my reports to the Board of Supervisors each year.
This brings me to Sixteen Rivers Press and my association since 2020 with this well-known poetry collaborative, which has been in existence for over a quarter century. Each year, two new books and poets are chosen, for publication and membership, with some staying for many years (like founding member Terry Ehret) and others cycling through their three-year commitment. The press, while based in San Francisco, includes poets and supporters in the broader Northern California region, but also maintains a national presence through conferences, anthologies, translation projects, readings and more. I feel very much the legacy of the poet Gary Snyder, whose sense of bio-regionalism finds its expression in the press’s name: the Sixteen Rivers of the Greater Bay Area watershed.
Favorite literary haunts? Bookshop Santa Cruz, of course, the long-running independent bookstore that has survived the literal earthquake in 1989, but also the challenging “earthquakes” in the modern publishing and distribution world. I still lament the demise of the equally iconic Logos Used Books & Records in downtown Santa Cruz, but love its “reincarnation” as BAD ANIMAL Used Books, where you can sit on couches while perusing rare books, at the natural wine bar, or make a reservation for the Thai restaurant it houses. And these are just two of the Santa Cruz haunts I love.
In San Francisco, there are of course so many, but I’ll mention Bird & Beckett for both books and jazz; while in Berkeley recently, I of course visited Moe’s Books on Telegraph Avenue. It’s enough to make you think America is still literate, and likes to read.
DG: Travel has been an important part of your life and has allowed you to explore a wide range of themes. Can you talk about the most memorable experiences you’ve had and, more generally, how changes in perspective have affected the development of your work?
DC: The first appearance, I think, of travel to other countries appearing in my poetry was a trip to Bali when our kids were still young. We met up with another family and spent several weeks (twice) on this lone Hindu/Buddhist island amid the 17,508 islands of Muslim Indonesia. I was so in awe that I couldn’t write a word, till the last week when I began a modest prose poem sequence that later appeared as the Bali section of my book The World Is God’s Language. Among other trips, a subsequent month-long tour of Buddhist sites in northern India with a group from Santa Cruz, led by the marvelous Shantum Seth (whose mother was the first female Supreme Court judge in India), coalesced in a series of poems that will appear in my forthcoming Nine Volt Nirvana (from Word Poetry Press). I think these early poetic thrusts while-traveling laid the [unconscious] groundwork for my latest experiment in Deep Travel – At Home in the [Burning] World published in late 2024 by Saddle Road Press. It’s a contemplative travelogue using a contemporary form of the ancient Japanese haibun/haiku, which I stumbled into after travels with my wife through Europe, Morocco, our own great Midwest, and New England through different seasons. I’ve practiced for over ten years an [almost] daily Japanese inspired zuihitsu journaling process, even when traveling. Returning home from these travels, I’d been reading about experimental forms of American haibun/haiku and took a stab at fashioning a book of my own from my travel journals. Saddle Road Press (who’d published my earlier book of Zen koan-poems entitled The Gateless Gate – Polishing the Moon Sword) took a chance on this unusual book, and I am grateful for it.
Travel lifts me out of the personal into wider connection with this strange, alluring, fraught world. Yet in traveling, I encounter time and again individuals, cultures, and histories that always bring me back to the person-ness in others. And to the preciousness of each moment. Which is the power of poetry.
DG: The hallmark of your work is clarity and directness of treatment. Do you feel that the haiku is a complement or a challenge to the other pieces you write—given that brevity and sensible association are required to master the Japanese form?
DC: My first formal effort at writing haiku has been as part of the haibun form itself, in Deep Travel. So it came naturally as the breath-pause at the end of the prose vignette. In this book, the non-traditional haiku—meaning not-keeping to the 5-7-5 syllable count—was in each case written after I’d sculpted the zuihitsu journal excerpt into a smaller prose form. I then sat at my desk for a minute or two, feeling my breath, and let a line or two or three become a contemporary haiku. The Zen poet Issa was a guide here, where lines follow the breath more than a literary syllabic count. Which of course can be problematic in translation anyway. I discuss this more in the preface to my book.
But I do write poetry/prose in a variety of styles, rather than keeping to one specific form honed over years of time. Perhaps as a therapist, I am aware of the different “parts” of me, or voices that want their own expression on the page. So I relent, and experiment, rather than browbeating them into a singular voice and style. In this way, haiku is not so much a “challenge” to my other modes of writing, as much as a complement. Though to date, I’ve only written modified haiku as part of the haibun form itself. Which allows me a certain rhythmic counterpoint between the fullness of the prose section, and the brevity of the haiku that follows.
DG: Have your writing habits changed much over the years or do you stay fairly consistent?
DC: Yes, I’d say my writing habits have changed somewhat over the years. In the early days, when juggling career and family life, I would often nudge our old green recliner close to the front room’s windowed cupola, put pen to paper on the weekend while the kids played in the house. An amazing feat of concentration, I must say, and good will on my wife’s part to keep our children occupied while I grabbed a couple hours to read and write. Of course, I wrote much about family life in those days, so there was a natural collusion. As time passed and our children became teens with their own preoccupations, I found myself gravitating more to [what became my] backyard writing studio, and to composing on the blank pages of a laptop. It seemed to mirror the fluidity of my own mind more than a pencil or pen was capable of capturing. Though I always found writing inspiration in any of Santa Cruz’s many marvelous cafés. When we began traveling more, I’d land, somehow, in places like the café adjacent Shakespeare & Co. in Paris with my son, who is also a poet and lover of books. Or at a tiny desk in a room in Munduk, Bali; or on the porch of a beach bungalow at Wakatobi, Indonesia, when not snorkeling in the still-pristine waters; or in India, scratching moments in a tiny burgundy-colored travelers journal so as not to forget what I saw. Or, in Deep Travel, at Isabella’s apartment in Turin, Italy, a year after she’d passed away during the pandemic and her home—with its many books in Italian—was offered us for two weeks. Anyplace, I guess, with a chair or room with a view, is where I tend to gravitate. In general though, when not traveling, I keep most mornings for a contemplative reading/writing schedule because that’s when I’m most lucid, still under the effects, perhaps, of night and dreams.
DG: Revision is a key aspect of every poet’s work, but some tend to trust the first impulse more than others. Would you say your lines are a product of intensive revision or rather a well-measured orchestration of how you feel at the moment?
DC: I love that: “a well-measured orchestration” of the moment, which is a fine enough description of my process. Though many of my poems find their way through the critique process of fellow poets in Emerald Street Writers, and/or my Sixteen Rivers Press colleagues (when a book is in process). I find this review process invaluable and evocative. Still, I tend not to be the kind to rigorously revise again and again the same poem. I have too much I want to write, and perhaps tend toward the Zen of “first thought, best thought”; as well as being suspicious of what happened to Walt Whitman in his old age, where he devoted himself to revising-out of his earlier work the very eros that made him so intriguing.
DG: In an interview with Julie Murphy you’ve said that “literature is the best scripture for me because it’s not very dogmatic ... it’s tremendously evocative.” Along with this you’ve spoken about the role of doubt and constant questioning to get at the world’s essence. Can you talk more about how religion and art intersect for you and how we can use the best of both disciplines to enrich our connection to the world?
DC: The notion of literature as an alternative, or complement, to organized religion is several centuries old (more or less). And a topic of serious debate, if you take such debates seriously. As a therapist trained in existential psychology, and being a poet myself, I find poetry in particular to be a deep and varied kind of personal/universal “scripture”, if you’ll forgive the use of the word. Many poets and priests alike might balk at this use of the word, but I find it humorously and deeply salient. Carl Jung, certainly, experimented in his posthumously published Red Book with an intersection between lyric, psychology, and myth. He advocated, for instance, that everyone should make their own “Red Book” and fill it with dreamwork, art, existential queries, whatever the soul might want. I am by no means wedded to the conflation of literature and religiosity, but given my childhood evangelical Christianity, I’ve found it liberating to think of finding, and writing, the sacred still in more personal form. Zen, too, has a very specific tradition of curious, humble, outrageous “doubt” as the core of practice, eschewing the over-reliance on “beliefs” of even a Buddhist nature. This freedom seems also at the core of poetics—unless of course one becomes a “true believer” of the veracity of one school of poetry or literature over another. Which becomes its own kind of fundamentalism.
DG: What are you reading or working on these days?
DC: Oh my, I read poetry every morning, along with a bit of Zen, and then read quite eclectically throughout the week. As the old adage goes, a poet’s work is 90% reading, 10% writing. I read in a Walt Whitman sort of manner, perhaps: the whole body electric of human life. From sources as diverse as history, anthropology, biology, cosmology, Buddhism, philosophy, myth and current events, I often find unusual anecdotes and facts that work their way into my writing.
I just finished The Silk Roads – A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan, and am currently reading Leonard Shlain’s Art & Physics – Parallel Visions in Space, Time & Light. Re-reading, too, Peter D. Hershock’s Chan Buddhism (one of the best on this topic). In literature, I continue to make my way through Dorianne Laux’s new Finger Exercises for Poets, and finished Jim Harrison’s collection of essays The Search for the Genuine. Poetry includes my Sixteen Rivers Press colleague Terry Ehret’s third volume of translations of Ulalume Gonzalez de Leon entitled Plagios/Plagiarisms (with Nancy J. Morales); the poet Dean Rader’s new hardback book from Copper Canyon Press, Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly (with full page art-prints); new and old work from Ellery Akers; also, my son Gabe Kittle-Cervine’s latest little book entitled RITE LIFE, a series of generative prompts culled from a monthly meditation/writing gig he hosts in the iconic old Santa Cruz cemetery (included are his own poem-responses as examples). The list goes on. My study can’t quite contain its books.
For my part, as I mentioned I’m working to bring two new books out: Nine Volt Nirvana with Word Poetry Press in 2025, followed by Children of Obscura – This Mysterious Human with Sixteen Rivers Press in 2026. The former, an example of my “regular” lined poems that include many references to family, culture, and our journey to India; the latter, another prose poem collection, this time focused on an eccentric range of scientific and cultural facts from human life. I’m working on two additional manuscripts that may or may not find their way to publication eventually. The first is a follow-up travel haibun collection to Deep Travel entitled Deep Origins – At Home in the [Entangled] World, from travels in England, Scotland, Wales, and along the Pacific Coast. The second is a hybrid work of two smaller “books”: The Democratic Dreams of Animals & Gods – The End of the World [Is Always Disappointing]. The first is a romp through myth, cultural and scientific facts that illustrate the allure, and problems, of “democracy” at all levels of life; the second is a romp through history’s ill-fated obsessions with the End Times. Both are experiments with prose poems.
And thank you so much for these intriguing questions. They bring a depth to this art of poeting. I’ve enjoyed the exchange.
Author Bio:
Dane Cervine’s recent books of poetry include DEEP TRAVEL – At Home in the [Burning] World (Saddle Road Press), The World Is God’s Language (Sixteen Rivers Press), Earth Is a Fickle Dancer (Main Street Rag), and The Gateless Gate – Polishing the Moon Sword (Saddle Road Press). Dane’s poems have won awards from Adrienne Rich, Tony Hoagland, the Atlanta Review, Caesura, and been nominated for multiple Pushcarts. His work appears in The SUN, the Hudson Review, TriQuarterly, Poetry Flash, Catamaran, Miramar, Rattle, Sycamore Review, Pedestal Magazine, among others. Dane lives in Santa Cruz, California. Visit his website at: https://danecervine.typepad.com/
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