Taking place towards the end of March, the VWS featured one of Redlands’ own, which puts into question the fairness of “visiting” in VWS. The reason this event was so interesting was because I took Poetry Workshop II with Ralph this semester, so I got to listen to my professor speak at a professional, community open event.

A lot of what he talked about he had brought up in our first class of the semester. He holds an inspiring reverence for art in all its forms. One of his “famous” quotes is that he has 10,000 gods that he worships. Each one is an artist or inspiring person of some sort. He has painters, writers, film makers, etc. in his collection of gods, among others. Interestingly some of the poems that he writes are homages to those artists.

The other thing that he likes to talk about is how powerful language is. One of the things he would tell us in class constantly is that we should let the language do all the work in our poems, rather than us trying to do the work, because language is so much more powerful than we can hope to be. Language has been around long before us, he says, and it will be around a lot longer than us, he also says. In other words, it will outlive him, in his own words.

Just by listening to him speak, you get a strong sense of how seriously he takes his work. His art.

Until Next Time,

Joe