Dave Seter: California Poets Part 8, Three Poems
January 8th, 2025
California Poets: Part VIII
Dave Seter
Three Poems
The Man Whose Bones Are Gone
Plenty of salt in the desert we made but never enough water.
Instead, Sunday’s thimbles of sacramental wine
helped him to incrementally drift away from this earth,
leaving behind jealousy, dogs and their bones.
He’d watched strays worry those found femurs
and circle their own tails like currents of water
flowing through city parks, the bounds of their earth
as they mourned their losses, whining.
The man grew a thirst for ordinary wine.
He grieved over the San Andreas Fault’s broken bones
and the last resting places of sailors in offshore waters,
who never felt at home in their bodies on earth.
He watched people, shot at, hugging the dirt,
suddenly in love with their bones.
What of the miracle of turning water into wine?
And the human body a miracle, almost all water?
He’s gone from his bones and his body mostly water,
freed from wine-soaked earth, from all that troubling blood.
Letter to Paul
Now I find myself somewhere West of the Mississippi,
but I’ll never forget the fire and ice,
those shots of schnapps
you bought me and my bride to be
at that Plainsboro bar where she and I skied
that rare New Jersey winter of moonlight and snow.
I’m sorry I didn’t find you again
until ten years later in an obituary.
I was broken up by the breakup of the marriage,
had removed myself three thousand miles.
But somewhere I still have your wedding present—
that sterling silver shot glass—
I just need to rummage into the past to find it.
When you left this world—I hope, for another—
did you drive the spirit of your cherry red Celica coupe,
the one you spun out—in the NJDEP parking lot—
in front of General Whipple our leader
who frowned upon Hawaiian Shirt Fridays?
Was your death like your father’s?
Remember—you confided in me once—
about his early fall from a ladder leaving you lost?
The only time you spoke of your father.
And I’m confiding in you now, a little late,
confessing, I forgot, for a while, our brotherhood.
Did an angel reply to your finger pain
when you plucked at the strings of that guitar,
a Winston on your lips, vodka on ice,
chiming lamplight at your right elbow?
Tell me what the angels have to say to us all—
one day—will we become elemental?
Growing Green Diesel
Work the field, tend tendrils of hope clinging to vertical rows of string,
play the field if you’re a free agent divested of your wedding ring
and all accoutrements. I will join you, harvesting Nelson hops,
brewing them into green diesel to drive the tractor of my imagination.
Because loneliness tends its own strands, seeing blonde hair
when there’s nothing there or finding them between the seats of that old Mazda,
though I traded away that memory years ago with its original clutch—
I was so gentle with it on the hills, climbing San Francisco.
Let’s run our tractors on green diesel and run circles around each other,
our childhood ponies painted without remorse. And while you’re at it,
please send me the secret code—how to live on a warming planet—
can we talk it over? Over a glass of green diesel? The tightly wound strands
of my worrisome mind have caught in the tractor’s gears, bewildered.
Interview
February 7th, 2025
California Poets Interview Series:
Dave Seter, Civil Engineer, Sonoma County Poet Laureate
interviewed by David Garyan
DG: I’d like to start a bit in medias res here—for years some poets have championed the idea that translation is the key to fully unlocking one’s own poetry creativity, mainly because there’s a new language for thoughts, to loosely paraphrase Pound. In 2022, under the guidance of Forrest Gander, you became a student of translation at Napa Valley College. Can you talk about this experience along with whether the aformentioned dictum did hold true for you personally?
DS: When I attended the translation workshop with Forrest Gander, it was with some trepidation. I had only been translating Lithuanian poetry for six months. I was by no means fluent in the language, and fluency still seems a distant goal. But I was motivated by an interest to engage with my Lithuanian heritage. It seemed the best way to do that, as a poet, would be through poetry. I found a contemporary Lithuanian poet who had published several poems in an online Lithuanian language journal. In one of the poems I saw the phrase ”atominė bomba” (atomic bomb) and knew these were the poems I wanted to translate. Armed with a Lithuanian grammar book, and three separate print dictionaries, I undertook the task. The translations I brought to the workshop with Forrest Gander were incomplete because there were cultural references it would seem only a native Lithuanian could explain. Forrest said: you have to contact her. At first I thought, who am I, a novice translator to contact a published Lithuanian poet? But this is where having an enthusiastic mentor helps. I did contact the poet, whose name is Alma Riebždaitė, and she was kind and helpful. Even though she isn’t fluent in English, we managed to communicate. As for Pound’s dictum, I can’t claim any significant influence from the process of translation on my own poetry, other than an appreciation for the common themes that occur across cultures. Perhaps as I further develop my translation process I will have a different answer.
DG: What are challenges you’ve encountered during the process of translation?
DS: Interestingly enough, at the moment I’m trying to find a publisher for an essay I’ve written on that very topic. The working title of the essay is “There Were No Seagulls.” The Lithuanian poet whose work I most recently translated is named Alina Borzenkaitė. In one of her poems, “Laumės ratas” (Witches’ lifecycle), there is a beautiful stanza that seemed to read, in translation:
The Baltic Sea had frozen over
building houses for seagulls.
Among glasswort
their newborn greeted the day.
When I shared the draft translation with the poet, she replied “there were no seagulls.” It turns out Lithuanians referred to the Normans who invaded Baltic shores in the 11th Century as “seagulls.” This exchange showed me how important cultural fluency can be in translating a poem. The other lesson I learned, early on, is that computer translation applications or “apps” cannot be relied upon to accurately translate complex Lithuanian phrases. There is simply is not enough “data” available for the app to reliably make a guess. Lithuanian is rarely translated into English, unlike say, Spanish, or French. This is why I always use print dictionaries first, then use various internet resources to research specific phrases for which dictionaries prove insufficient, and also why I rely on direct communication with the poets I translate. This is one of the advantages of translating contemporary poets.
DG: Last year, you assumed the position of Sonoma County Poet Laureate. This is a place not short of natural beauty. Can you talk about how the environment has influenced your writing and what you plan to do during your two-year tenure?
DS: When I was growing up in the Midwest, the Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire. As a young boy, I was outraged. I knew from that early age that I wanted to do something to protect, and speak for, the environment and its voiceless inhabitants. I followed a career in environmental engineering to protect the environment, and a secondary career as a poet to speak on behalf of the environment. As a migrant to Sonoma County, but having lived there for over twenty years now, I still walk the hills and the shores in awe of the beauty that surrounds me.
Because I self-identify as a poet of the ecology, or eco-poet, in the second half of my two-year term as Poet Laureate, I intend to craft a series of nature writing workshops. Those workshops will be based on 17th Century Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō's concept of Zōka (the transformative power of nature). But for the first half, I have decided to challenge myself as well as other Sonoma County poets to write documentary poetry. Documentary poetry has no formal, fixed, definition, but generally calls attention to some injustice witnessed or heard of by the poet. One of the keys to writing a good documentary poem is to research facts about the injustice to add dimension to the poem.
DG: Historically, Sonoma County has been at the crossroads of various people and cultures, including Spain, Mexico, and Russia. If you had to be a tour-guide for first-time non-Americans visitors, where would you take them?
DS: The first place I’d take them would be to the Museum of Sonoma County, which sounds boring, but … They’ve just recently installed a permanent exhibition called Sonoma Stories, which includes updated, culturally aware, stories of all the aforementioned groups. There’s even a collection of audio files in which some of these oral histories are recorded. Then I would take them to places like Fort Ross, where the Russians had a fur trading outpost, to Sonoma Plaza, the site of the Bear Flag Revolt, and many others. How many weeks do the visitors have to spend?
DG: Let’s stay with nature and the environment, a topic your poetry addresses extensively. Which issues in particular are you most concerned and was it a specific event or a poem that led you to become interested in the state of our planet?
DS: As for my own initiation into the world of environmental activism, I’ve mentioned the Cuyahoga River Fire. As for poets who have come before, I’ve always considered 19th Century English poet John Clare one of the first poets of the ecology, or ecopoets. His poem “To A Fallen Elm” includes the following text:
Self interest saw thee stand in freedoms ways
So thy old shadow must a tyrant be
Thoust heard the knave abusing those in power
Bawl freedom loud and then oppress the free
Thoust sheltered hypocrites in many an hour
That when in power would never shelter thee
Thoust heard the knave supply his canting powers
With wrongs illusions when he wanted friends
That bawled for shelter when he lived in showers
And when clouds vanished made thy shade ammends
With axe at root he felled thee to the ground
And barked of freedom—O I hate that sound
Clare’s powerful words go so far as to bleed into the category of activist poetry.
DG: You’re an engineer by profession and have described yourself in this way: engineer, poet, essayist. On your website, the tagline under your name reads “building with words.” What parallels do you see between engineering and poetry? Would you go out on a limb and say, in fact, that the former requires more creativity while it’s really that latter that’s all about precision?
DS: Engineering and poetry both have a framework. True, engineering has more severe consequences if the framework fails. For example, if the truss (which is essentially a framework of steel beams) holding up a bridge fails, people may die. If the structure of a poem fails, the consequences consist simply of damage to the poet’s ego and/or boredom or confusion on the part of the reader. In the case of the latter, the poet and reader fail to connect in the same robust way that a bridge connects San Francisco with Marin County across the Golden Gate. I guess what I’m saying is both a work of engineering and a poem require attention to detail. But both also require creativity. Some of the more complicated environmental cleanups I participated in required creative thinking from crafting legal agreements to determining how to rebuild a creek that has been obliterated by mining practices while still making the creek attractive to the native trout who used to call that creek home.
DG: The intersection between the natural world and what we have called “civilization” is becoming increasingly felt. The paradox is that civilization entails the departure from what we’ve called “wilderness,” and yet humanity couldn’t survive without the resources this so-called wilderness provides. To build our cities we work hard to destroy the forest, only to escape to it when we need reprieve from the madness of modern life. Is there, perhaps, a case to be made for nature as civilization—a very gradual departure from modernity in the smallest increments possible? Or is the only sensible way forward? More modernity as salvation?
DS: If we look outside through our windows, our doors, most of what we see is a result of human intervention. Most of the trees have been planted as part of a landscaping plan on the part of a homeowner or city. Even most suburban trees that appear to grow “accidentally” grow from seed collected by one animal or another from a tree planted by people in one location and dropped in the new location. And yet there are times when nature takes back the landscape. Native plants we call weeds grow in sidewalk cracks and abandoned homes. Beaver return to the rivers after having been trapped to near extinction (their pelts once used to make men’s hat’s or women’s ankle length pelts now out of fashion). Looking at it another way, the human species is part of nature. Our housing developments are in some ways like wasps’ nests, only larger. Will we be the ultimate survivor, or will we die off only to be replaced by another species?
DG: Though the environment is a serious topic, some of your poems, like “Growing Green Diesel,” take on a more sarcastic tone. What was your state of mind when you wrote the poem? Did the sarcasm come out as a manifestation of greater pessimism about the world, or, in fact, perhaps the opposite—a guarded sense of hope?
DS: When a poet publishes a poem, they send it out into the world to make its own way. Different readers will read a poem differently. Based on the language of the poem, I can see how you found sarcasm in “Green Diesel.” And yet, how do you take this series of phrases?
(…) though I traded away that memory years ago with its original clutch—
I was so gentle with it on the hills, climbing San Francisco.
Let’s run our tractors on green diesel and run circles around each other,
our childhood ponies painted without remorse.
(…)
The gentleness that’s possible in a broken world, the desire to see the world through a child’s eyes, do they possibly mitigate in the reader’s mind the tone of the somewhat exhausted narrator? I don’t like to influence the reader by saying what the poem means, because it means what the language means, and the language may read differently to different people. Let’s just say that the poem is intended to explore the possibility that hope may exist in a broken world. It may also suggest that fellowship is possible in the gesture the narrator makes to an unseen audience of possibly one, possibly more than one, in the form of the question: can we talk it over?
DG: In an interview with Made Local Magazine, you’ve talked about your “strong sense of place.” Are poems, then, more likely start with powertful connections to particular regions or rather ideas you’ve ruminated upon?
DS: Most of the poems in my full length collection of poems Don’t Sing to Me of Electric Fences were inspired by a moment in time, whether a landscape, an overheard conversation, et cetera. Many of them derive from notes taken in a 5 x 8 spiral bound notebook I used to invariably carry with me, especially on nature hikes. I probably have a stack of thirty of these notebooks in my closet. Some of my poems still originate from this strong sense of place, but I’m also expanding my repertoire into abstraction and documentary poetry.
DG: What are you reading or working on at the moment?
DS: I’m working on a full length collection of poems with the working title Dear Science. In the poems, the scientist in me interrogates science, whether one calls science scientific principle or applied science of manufacturing or government. To give a few examples, here are the titles of a few of the poems: “Bird Strikes Began with Wilbur Wright”; Dear Science Will You Give the Drone Bee a Stinger”; and “A Polar Bear Fell on Me”.
I’m currently reading House of Grace House of Blood by Denise Low, which is a poetry collection documenting the Gnadenhutten Massacre in which, in 1782, a renegade Pennsylvania militia killed ninety-six pacificist Christian Delawares (Lenapes) in Ohio. I’m also reading Matilda Olkinaitė The Unlocked Diary which includes the historical account about, diary entries and poems of the Jewish-Lithuanian poet murdered at the age of 19 by Nazi collaborators in the year 1941. The local Catholic priest, who was friendly to his Jewish neighbors, hid the diary in his church but was later sent to Siberia when Russia took control of Lithuania post WWII. The diary and poems were only discovered in the 1990s and were only recently translated into English. I’m currently attempting to write reviews of both books.
Author Bio:
Dave Seter is an environmental engineer, poet, essayist, and the author of Don’t Sing to Me of Electric Fences (Cherry Grove Collections) and Night Duty (Main Street Rag). He earned his undergraduate degree in engineering from Princeton University and his graduate degree in humanities from Dominican University of California. He has been named Sonoma County Poet Laureate for 2024-26. More at: https://www.daveseter.com On Instagram: @daveseter_ecopoet
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