Poetry Festival's 2nd Artist Ready To Interact With Audience
By Sean Ely

James Lenfestey will be featured at the Poetry Festival Sunday, July 15. "This is an art I have been passionate about since I was in high school," he said of poetry. "I love to read poetry a lot; it's a great love."

When high school freshman James Lenfestey first heard Robert Frost's poem, "Out, Out," it had a profound effect on him. The first line, "The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard," made him think to himself, "How did he do that? He made the sound of what he was saying match the sense of what he was saying."

Mr. Lenfestey believes that particular moment was the trigger for him to pursue poetry and to begin playing with language, and he has written poetry ever since.

He will be reading selections at Little Stone Church Sunday, July 15, at 8 p.m. as the second of three sessions scheduled this month in the Mackinac Island Poetry Festival.

"I've always written poetry around the edges of my life, in which I've been busy," he said. "I got married right out of college and had kids right away, making quite a life for myself. I always wrote, almost every day, staying up until two or three in the morning, when the kids were asleep, or before they got up in the morning. I'd be up because I'd get a feeling, something that needed to be written down, then I would fuss with these sounds."

For Mr. Lenfestey, who lives on Mackinac Island's East Bluff and in Minneapolis, poetry is in some ways like sculpture, where the feeling is like a block of granite, articulated by its shape.

"I'm always sanding it off, or buffing it, and it may take five, 10, 15, or 20 years to get right," he said.

After college, he taught at the University of Wisconsin at River Falls, then moved to Massachusetts to run an alternative school. He entered private business, but continued to teach part-time at a city university in Minneapolis, lecturing on American Indian literature and comedy writing for more than 20 years.

For nine years before retiring in 1998, he was an editorial writer at the Minneapolis Star Tribune while running his own advertising agency.

One editorial of which he is proud, "Save Main Street," was about an effort to widen the main street in the small town of Sauk Center, Minnesota, the hometown of Sinclair Lewis. Mr. Lewis, a Noble Prize winner in literature, wrote one of his most famous novels there, "Main Street," and the essence of Mr. Lenfestey's editorial was, "Not all main streets can be saved, but we must save this Main Street," and the community ended up preserving it.

He still writes for magazines, and finds himself tinkering with screen plays, but is more focused now on poetry. He chairs the Literary Witnesses Poetry Series in Minneapolis and founded the Ojai Poetry Festival in Ojai, California.

"I have a friend who lives out there, and they noted that Ojai is a well-known festival town out there, with the first music festival in California, in a small town of 8,000 people, yet only an hourand a-half from the heart of downtown Los Angeles," Mr. Lenfestey said. "I realized there was no poetry foundation, so I talked to a few people and they liked the idea, so we started the Ojai Poetry Festival, which has been a big success."

Mr. Lenfestey feels that paying attention to the venue is necessary for poetry to be given justice. The atmosphere is incredibly important, he said.

"I believe that poetry is sacred speech, so it enhances it to have it read in sacred space. This Little Stone Church is scared space, and I think it's one of the finest poetry venues in the land. It's intimate, and yet it's a sacred space."

In Ojai, the festival is performed under huge live oak trees, with frogs singing from the creek nearby, at a huge beautiful amphitheater outside. That is one of the reasons that Mr. Lenfestey wanted to continue the tradition of performing in magical places, such as the Little Stone Church on Mackinac Island.

Mr. Lenfestey also conducts poetry classes at Grand Hotel on Wednesdays from 10:45 a.m. to 11:45 a.m., at the request of owners R. D. and Amelia Musser. For 20 years, the hotel had hosted classes on Shakespeare, delivered by the Shakespearean scholar John McCabe. When he died September 26, 2005,, Mr. Lenfestey was invited to step in.

"The Mussers asked me if I would do something, and I said, 'I'm sure not going to do Shakespeare, because he's been at the hands of a master for so long, but I'll tell you what, I'll do eight poets that I love,' and that's what we did last year, and we are repeating it again this year. We are actually going to do seven poets this year, because the last class will be dedicated to the poets that the guests want to hear."

Mr. Lenfestey's writing comes from emotion, feelings, or ideas. He is a lyric poet, and at the end of the day, he wants his poems to be about something specific. He was a prose writer for many years, as a journalist, and that helps being a poet, but the two, he notes, are actually quite different.

"What makes a poem different from prose," he said, "is that the language in poetry is much more concentrated and intense, and, arguably, more beautiful. It is more musical at least, than prose. You get a feeling, and you want it to become a poem."

He finds that most in solitude.

"The occasion that a poem begins to arise for me," he said, "is in a time of peace and quiet, which is very hard to find when you have four kids. This quietness comes, quite often, while I am driving down the highway. I don't listen to the radio in the car, because doing this allows the busyness of the day to disappear, to dissipate, and then the feelings and thoughts that are much deeper than the furor of the day begin to surface. I try to capture those."

He carries his thoughts in a notebook, and now that the children are gone, and his job is gone, he tries to write each day.

"I like writing first thing in the morning," he said, "when it's quiet. William Stafford, who wrote a poem every day, said to begin pushing a pencil in the morning, without thinking of something specific. The pencil will move, and if all goes well, you will go from the surface of something down into your chest and your heart. If you feel that happen, then you've got something."

Mr. Lenfestey's poems, like those of other poets, seem never to be finished, and they undergo periodic editing. Some do get published, but even those can get tweaked.

"Oh, if I could have just changed that one syllable," he might say when reviewing a published poem.

One book from which he will read Sunday is a collection of poems inspired by Mackinac Island, including a series of early morning conversations he had with the birds in the trees.

"There are times when I realize the birch tree out front is not just a tree, but my life," he said.

He looks forward to reading for others who enjoy poetry, and to share his thoughts. He enjoys trying to connect with the audience, he said, to let them hear, make them laugh, and invite them enjoy the music he sings.

Sunday, he notes, will be the first time most of his audience will see the poetic side of him.

The Reverend Vince Carroll, who organized the poetry festival at Little Stone Church, has already seen it.

"Jim is an exceptional poet," said Dr. Carroll. "The Midwestern connection we have helps me understand his writing. The gift that Jim brings is a sort of sensitiveness to the soul."

On July 15, Mr. Lenfestey will be reading from three works. The first, "Saying Grace," is a book rooted in Wisconsin. The second is "The Toothed and Clever World," with its collection of poems on Mackinac, in a more Zen and Buddhist style. It is a quiet walk into the woods, Mr. Lenfestey said. The final book, "Han-Shan Is the Cure for Warts," was an inspiration from Han-Shan, his mentor, after he fell in love with his book in 1971. He is a dead, hermit, Buddhist poet who lived in a cave 1,200 years ago.

In the near future, Mr. Lenfestey will publish two new books, which he has been working on for 30 years.

The free and public event begins at 8 p.m. at the Little Stone Church.

Rev. Carroll will conclude the festival Sunday, July 22, when he reads selections from his published book, "Poems from DaNang," accompanied by organist Rachelle Deresti.