You are the poem of my life

A celebration of Sebastopol poet Fran Claggett-Holland

Who would have expected 100 people to gather for a poetry book launch on the coldest day of the month right after Valentine’s Day? Indeed, this was no ordinary book launch but an all-out celebration for Fran Claggett-Holland, a Sebastopol poet, teacher and dog lover, held at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts. Wearing a long, graceful dress, she sat center stage between two guitarists, with a colorful piece of art as her backdrop.

Sebastopol poet Fran Claggett-Holland. (Photo by Nancy C. Dougherty)

At 96, Fran has published her sixth book of poetry, At Dusk. Fran began her talk by speaking about how poetry “gives shape, form and strength to language, gives image to ideas. Day by day, I write my world.” Many in the audience were poets influenced by Fran, and 20 poets would read poems in tribute to Fran. It was as though she was speaking of poetry itself and each of them when she said: “That’s all there are, particulars – And you are the poem of my life.”

The first poem Fran read was “Breakfast in Venice,” transporting us to a small café with her and the words of Marcus Aurelius as read by Brunetti, a policeman, spinning layers of intrigue. Her next poem, “The Canopy,” captures the effect a painting by Warren Bellows has upon her, taking a turn to something much more.

The poems of At Dusk range from myth and beliefs (“Wolf Speaks in Myth”) to language (“Origin of Vowels”) and the challenges of life (“Fragility”). Some of her poems become conversations with another poet or friend, inviting the reader into the exchange (“The Crooked Tree, Revisited”). Not unexpectedly, Wallace Stevens’s blackbird lands here and there.

Poems from At Dusk:

THE CANOPY

for Warren Bellows

here there is only today
edging into tomorrow
flaring into great slabs of sky

the canvas awash with wonder
blue green umber violet sienna
green so dark it becomes black

white swatches tumble past
the trees rooted in redolence
spreading out to create a canopy

intertwined
against the sun rising
and falling

white water stretches everywhere
creating great clumps of life
waiting to burst forth

ever more serious
ever more playful 
never in repose

ON THE ORIGIN OF RITUAL

The Hughes Aircraft Laboratory in California has developed a “tilt meter”
so sensitive that it has been able to record lunar tides in a cup of tea.
—Lyall Watson in Supernature

The moon turns. I pause, cup in hand.
The level drops and landlocked tide runs red.
As seaweed etches patterns in the sand,
the teacup tips to contemplate the dead.
I read the drying leaves the leaving left:
The ocean drained denies the moon its pull.
Fortune follows lines. The palm's bereft,
the tables turn and Tarot turns the Fool.
Years spin into hours, collapse in time.
The wafered moon, loosed from its earthly trance,
spirals, flashing holograms of rhyme
as poets match the dark side of the dance.
The ocean steeps in kettles brewing tea.
A drop of water comprehends the sea. 

The Community of Poets

Earlier in the year, Fran had been discussing her plans for the launch of At Dusk with Gale Kissen and several friends. They asked her how many people she expected to attend. When she replied, saying about 40 people, Gale thought the number was too low. Soon she had put together a “Let’s Do Launch” committee. They tended to every detail of the party and the program with music by guitarists Gale Kissen and Johnny Mason. A book of poems, Wings, curated by Les Bernstein, was created especially for the book launch, and designed and published by Amrita Skye Blaine of Berkana Publications.

Excerpts from Wings

“She believes in love, treats the world in kind.” ~ Rod Morgan

“Because at this moment
This is the only way” ~ Rebecca Evert

“We held the music
like a palm and fingers on a gate,
as if we were folding a distance.” ~ Pat Nelson

“The great ones are Mothers so founded
that when we look up from their arms,
we see only Mountain” ~ Freeman Ng

“late light spilling
through birch on the hill” ~ Amrita Skye Blaine

“you come to me on an uncured day
like a gust of birds” ~ Margaret Rooney

“(we hold you
with the small warm strings
of our poems)” ~ briahn kelly-brennan

“... Immeasurable then this Gift of her poems
this dromenon of the “Composition in which we Live”
that we find here ... in the deep Measures of
this ongoing book.” ~ Michael Franco

“you rethread the geometry
of our yearnings” ~ Susana Ackerman

“my muse is stranded on a Greek island with no Wi-Fi” ~ Warren Bellows

A Champion of Poets

Since teaching in high school and universities, Fran moved to Sonoma County where she has led classes on poetry and memoir for Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Sonoma State. She is a member of Redwood Writers Club and past editor (with Les Bernstein) of the annual Redwood Poetry Anthology. Madge Holland, her spouse (and partner) of 55 years, was also an English and Humanities teacher; she passed away in 2014.

Fran exemplifies how writing and engaging with community remain important at any age. She has been a champion for many a poet’s poems and a teacher sharing her curiosity about the craft of poetry and its possibilities. Fran teaches through dialogue and discussions where Fran opens our minds to thinking about words and language, and what she calls “a shifting field of black and white, of silence and sound.”

In her “Address to the 50th Asilomar English Teacher’s Conference in September 2000,” which appears in At Dusk, she said:

“When I say I don’t record my life, I abstract it, I mean that I transform the narrative of my life into metaphor. I frequently carry a line around a long time, without writing it down, until one day it just appears on paper with a kind of crystallized intent. The line I carried for years after my mother died was, “Who will tell her stories now?” And one day, at Asilomar, forced into language in my own poetry workshop, it found its voice as this small poem:

Moving Into Language

        We walk
	on the bones of our mother,
	shape earthsilence
	into elegy
	mourn the lost words that
	lie with her,
	searching
	for our own lost song.

The silence has given rise to the sound.”

Here’s one more poem from At Dusk:

AFTER WORDS

a cluster of birds
at the end
of the storm
fell into the breath
of the breeze
then flew into
the blossoming
fragrance
of after

Photo collage by Barbara Armstrong

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Fran’s book At Dusk is available on Amazon and the Sebastopol Center for the Arts, where its proceeds will benefit the art center.

Wings, published by Amrita Skye Blaine (Berkana Publications) is available on Amazon and the Sebastopol Center for the Arts.

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