Introducing Sacramento's next Poet Laureate: Bob Stanley.

Last month The Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission (SMAC) voted to ratify Stanley as Sacramento’s fourth Poet Laureate. Yesterday, he was officially introduced to the SMAC as Poet Laureate.

In a charming introduction speech and reading, Stanley promised to see through his vision of increased awareness of poetry in our region. He also believes poetry can reach a broad audience. He said, “Poetry is something everybody can get into.”

Stanley added, “I like it when it’s just right there on the page. You read it and you know it’s poetry, but you don’t exactly know why. But you get something from it, and you feel like you’ve learned something about a person . . . A good poem tells a story, helps us connect to one another.”

Stanley has been writing poetry since age 14. He has been active in the Sacramento poetry scene since he moved to Sacramento in 1989. Stanley joined the Sacramento Poetry Center in 1998 and since has become more and more involved.

You can find Stanley at readings around town. He performs at Luna’s, Time Tested Books and Underground Books. Last month I attended a reading at Time Tested Books The Book Collector, and it was not only fun, but packed. There were more than 50 people crammed along aisles and out the door. Stanley’s work is engaging and accessible. I found myself lost in his world.

Since 2005, Stanley has been a teacher. He teaches English composition and creative writing at Sacramento, Sacramento City Community College and UC Davis Extension. Before that he worked in his family’s business - an auto parts distribution company.

In addition, Stanley loves music. He sings and plays guitar and banjo. Stanley has been a part of several vocal jazz ensembles at American River College and Sacramento State.

The Sacramento Poet Laureate program has been around since 2000. A history of the program, biographies and accomplishments of past Poet Laureates can be found on the SMAC website here.

This fall, Stanley will be introduced to the Sacramento City Council, and there will be an official introduction for the public.

Here are a couple of Bob Stanley's poems:

the poem is brought to you by

an image of a woman’s face

itself like cloud lit by sun

above a field: dry grass?
Before you know a breeze

transforms oak-stumbled landscape,

lifts long tresses.
The thousand dreams that change

weather, leaves shuddering,

cool rain begins to fall
the way the old man’s mirrored face

dissolved into

something he didn’t want to understand.

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Ode for the city and county

If you stroll this tree-filled town,

as you move through shade, you might dream of

a coolness that makes heat worthwhile,

you might dream children splashing their brief splash:

children of a great central valley,

old land of oak and open water,

then a land of planting: deep orchard and cotton,

(and still ribboned today with irrigated green)

but now planted full with humanity: we came, we saw,

we conquer and are conquered.
A hundred villages turned into towns, Perkins and Florin, Arden and Arcade, McKinley Park Oak Park Tahoe Park Curtis Park Land Park Fair Oaks River Park River Oaks Glen Oaks Arden Oaks Sierra Oaks. Oaks and Parks: there used to be more, so now we have words for placeholders. Mumbo Gumbo River Cats Rio Linda Rubicon Isleton Java City Tower Bridge Tower Records Loaves and Fishes K Street Elk Grove Folsom Prison Folsom Lake Downtown Midtown Uptown East Sac North Sac get back - all these names, people, places here today because Marshall saw gold flash in the millrace.

Fourteen hundred thousand people call this

levee-bound rice-paddy hundred-year flood plain home.

Once Maidu land, now freeway-crossed, recession-tossed, farmland lost,

across the causeway we roll down fifty, eighty, ninety-nine, five. We drive,

we roll into Capital City River City Camellia City City of Trees: it’s Sacramento,

call it what you will: Sactown, Sutterville, New Helvetia, Sacratomato, Sacto,

just plain Sac.

Land of heat and water, art and music,

county of developers and mortgages succeeding and failing,

city of legislators that come and go,

this country of Kings so close to capturing a crown

for this place that seeks itself the way places do

(people are inhabited by places)

we still grieve as if sport were life.
This place we live, this flat-bottom

skiff that sails through nights and days, clings to its winding

rivers like a levee road. Cottonwoods and oaks

wait for rain, jays cavort, turkeys strut, an occasional quail skitters into

roadside brush. Skunks slip into pipes,

and you and I take a night-walk because it’s cool,

you and I who loved and met and came to this place

just twenty years past. Those twenty years became a life, so that when one asks

on some day we hope remains far off, “Where did you live?”

We’ll say Sacramento – a city, a county, a country threaded

with rivers – American, Cosumnes, and wide Sacramento.

We lived in a land named for a river that was named for a land, a holy

connection of water and earth. And sky. And all things in between.

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Ernest Hemingway teaches Freshman English

The hour is early, and I see you have been up late. Fog covers the hills behind campus; you show signs of it in your eyes. You may be thinking “the beer was cold and wonderful to drink.” I think this as well. But then I am the teacher.

Writing is like learning to shoot. You raise the gun, but it is heavy, and you fire repeatedly without success. Keep firing. Walk to the target. Inspect the pattern of your shots. This is a serious pastime. Without noting your ability or inability to hit the mark, your marksmanship will not progress. I learned this in Spain, with regard to both writing and women.