In the News:
from Marin Poetry Center
an interview by Kirsten Jones Neff
Wilkes and Randall: The Poetry of Generosity
- Kirsten Jones NeffToni Wilkes and Greg Randall are married poets from Santa Rosa. They have earned a reputation as generous hosts of the Londonberry Salon reading series and as volunteers for Sonoma Libraries and literary projects. Between them they have published (or will soon publish) four new chapbooks.
KJN : How did you each find poetry?
GR : My paternal grandmother introduced me to Yeats, Frost and Sandburg in her 1929 anthology, Chief Modern Poets of England and America– which she used to teach out of, in a one-room school house in a small farm town in Kansas. She first read “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” to me when I was in early elementary school in Southern California and then I studied the anthology myself in junior high. The book is now on my nightstand. Writing poetry arrived soon after. My first poem (though I’m not sure I want to admit it) was a 4th-grader’s version of Robert Frost , which means “sincere but trite”- it was about swans in a neighbor’s pond, except my neighbor didn’t have a pond and I’d never actually seen any swans, except in books. It was published in the Magnolia Elementary school literary magazine. Whoop! Whoop! My grandma kept this magazine and other stories I wrote in grade school. My father found them in the drawers of her secretaire after she died. I did study the classics in college, having majored in English and Latin. But my education stopped after the High Moderns (Stevens, Eliot, Frost) and my senior thesis was on Chaucer. I was mostly a medievalist. Which means, I’ve been trying ever since to catch up with American Poetry since about 1950.
TW : My mother had a big volume of poetry on the shelf [when I was] growing up. Of course, it wasn’t the kind of poetry I would read today. Mostly, I found poetry in the lyrics of songs published in the 1920s and 1930s which my mother played and sang on the family spinet.
GR : Yes, you could say a phrase in conversation that happened to be the line in some obscure 1920s song and Toni can launch into the whole song, which she probably hasn’t heard since childhood.
TW : Later, I discovered poetry books at the library as a kid and would riffle through the card catalogue for books by poets I had heard about, or any poetry. The librarian wanted to know what I was doing. I told them I was looking for songs. Then, she’d try to escort me to the children’s section. No, I’d say, I want grownup songs. I’d sit on the floor in the adult poetry section reading the words I understood.
KJN : How did you two meet?
GR : Toni and I came together over poetry. She was teaching a creative writing workshop with an emphasis on poetry at Chapman University. Although it was some years later before we came together as a couple, language, music and literature are in the fabric of who we are together. It’s been there from the beginning for us. I will add that, for me, a new urgency and seriousness took over in the poetry after her daughter’s stroke in 2003. A conscious/ unconscious realization that everything could dissolve tomorrow, so [you should] stop playing around and speak urgently about what it is you feel compelled to say. Just last year, the experience of tending to her daughter formed itself in the forthcoming chapbook Uncommon Refrains (The Lives You Touch Publications, 2010).
KJN : I’ve noticed that you collect all sorts of art. Did you ever think about another form of expression, or did you always know you were writers?
GR: Toni says I’m a musician/composer more than a poet. And maybe I would’ve been, except I can’t carry a tune and my 5th grade band teacher told me to give up the cornet I was hopeless. So instead of musical notations, I have words. In fact, the sonata form or the music of Chopin or Brahms’ chamber works probably influences my poetry more than the writing of other poets. I’m drawn to the intricacy in the patterns of notes and voicings in their music and how ideas and themes develop, dissolve, drift apart and then reform to create a changed but unified whole.
TW : The art on our walls you mentioned are reminders of beautiful things. Nudes, still lives, landscapes they’re reminders of how necessary it is to be present to particular moments in our life.
KJN : I know you have a very busy financial practice. Is it ever difficult to transition from working with numbers to working with words?
GR : I don’t imagine it’s any more difficult for us to carve out space for reading and writing [than it is] for anyone else who’s working… like all business owners’, our minds never completely leave the needs of the business and perhaps that crowds out space for poetry. I don’t know. I’ve never seen poetry and financial planning as anything but complementary… With our clients, we’re always striking a balance between living more fully this particular moment… and planning for an abundant future. For me, poetry is similar. I see poetry as helping to improve decision-making relative to how we live a life more attuned to its particular moments. Poetry often synthesizes what seem like disparate elements into a cohesive whole. And the concerns of clients those human fears, ambitions and desires sound to me a lot like the concerns of most poetry. For me, the act of writing poetry is an act of paying close attention to the vitality of language. In corporate-speak and even in much of our media, words get hollowed out or dulled to the point losing of any meaning. The poetry reinvigorates the words so that the words remain alert and alive and meaningful in communicating with clients.
KJN : Tell me about the origins of the Londonberry Salon, what you envisioned and what you have created?
GR : Every time we clear the furniture out of the house and prepare for the Londonberry Salon we ask ourselves why we do this. And then, thirty-some people show up elated and eager to listen to a poet read and answer questions in our living room for an evening and we know exactly why. The Salon grew out of a craft talk Robert Hass gave at Squaw several years ago when he said it would become incumbent upon poets to create their own, local communities for poetry in order to give space for those voices to be heard.
TW : We wanted to bring poetry back into the home in a private and intimate setting and out of the distractions of bookstores and coffee shops. This spring we decided to expand to a public venue and launched the Londonberry Salon East. We host it at the Rincon Valley Library in Santa Rosa. We have websites for both Salons Londonberry, and Londonberry East.
KJN : This past year you both had significant personal successes.
GR : Toni’s book was picked up the first time she submitted it (albeit, they waited seven months to accept it). My books have taken much longer to find homes. Toni kept telling me, “you just haven’t found the right person to read it.” And then suddenly it happened… (editor’s note: Randall’s A Room in the Country was published by Puddinghouse, Uncommon Refrain by The Lives You Touch Publications, and Double Happiness was the winner of the Camber Press Chapbook award). Toni’s first chapbook, Stepping Through Moons , came out from Finishing Line so I threw a big party in December to celebrate the launch.
TW : What was so enjoyable about the evening was how many attendees were friends and clients who had never attended a poetry reading in their life it’s very much what we try to accomplish with the Londonberry Salon: to bring poetry to new people.
