“Can do” permeates the Ivy Room at Rossmoor in Walnut Creek where poets--average age 70--gather the first Monday of every month to practice their art. Marc Hofstadter, a relatively recent resident of the retirement community, is their guide. Each brings a poem they have recently written or revised, or a poem by a beloved author, and then they ‘go to,’ parrying words with zest, if not zeal, humor, insight, and good-natured support.
    The group of between 15-18 poets represents over a millennium’s worth of worldly experiences that can be wrangled into 14-line sonnets or 3-line haikus. Some of them wrote in high school or college but then life intervened; others have only begun to explore poetry writing. At 90, Jean L. Autrey (photo, right), is one of the oldest in the group and is obviously held in high regard. Her poem reflected a vision that she had experienced while walking across Rossmoor’s expansive park. (Watch out Arthur Rimbaud and James Weldon Johnson!)

I rode out in May at just past 1
and it was horns
Long, white horns singing
in the sky
Long, white trumpets
made of cloud
Calling, singing, sounding
Against the blue, blue of the sky
The hills were drying
The rain had gone
But the trumpets were calling
Of things yet to come
They pointed left
But was that message next
Or already done?
I rode out in May
At just past 1.
(untitled poem by Jean L. Autrey)

Aside from offering emotional release, opportunities to experiment with the sounds and meanings of words, or a format for the reflection on loss and change, poetry has given the group a 'community within a community' where intellectual exploration and creative imagination are honored. The poets listen intently as each reads and then provide feedback. Autrey’s poem was about “paying attention,” suggested Dian Gillmar.
       Jean Georgakopoulous (shown below, right, with John Whalen), a retired English and drama teacher came to the group with a fair amount of literary background and experience in workshops. After visiting a writing group in St. Louis  years ago, she realized “I can do this” and has since written a number of poems and a novel. Another poet/novelist, Gail Marshall O’Brien attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and studied with Welsh poet and translator Joseph P. Clancy.
    Martin (“Mike”) Portnoff saw an ad for the poetry group in the Rossmoor News and, at age 65, thought he would “give it a go” although he had never written poetry in his previous six decades. A retired diagnostic radiologist and avid bicyclist, Portnoff hardly fits the stereotype of someone living in “an old folks‘ home.” Alan Winslow, another retiree who worked as a physicist at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, checked out the group in July. “I think of myself more as a reader than as a writer of poetry,” he said and then shared a poem by Thomas Hardy as well as his own effort at rhymed couplets.
     Hofstadter founded the group at Rossmoor in 2005 not long after moving from Oakland with David Zurlin, his partner of many years. Hofstadter is a member of the illustrious east-coast family of scholars and writers which includes historian Richard Hofstadter. Marc Hofstadter has written and published poetry since 1982. In the beginning, he showed his work to a well-known poet who told him his “poetry was pretty bad.” Hofstadter credits Oakland poet and poetry teacher Clive Matson for renewing his confidence. Now, he has several books to his credit, including his most recent title Luck, and is a popular reader in local venues. He started the Rossmoor poets not only to share his knowledge and love of poetry, but to establish a locus of writers in his new neighborhood. “I get a lot of satisfaction out of leading the group but I don’t actually teach them that much; they provide the substance. They’re a remarkable bunch.”
Phyllis Devich (at left), born in northern Minnesota of Serbian and Dalmatian immigrants, said she has attended school “all her life” and holds a doctorate in education from the University of California at Berkeley. She shared a  poem that had been worked over after a previous meeting of the group. “I was so inspired by the feedback, that I took the edits completely to heart,” she said with enthusiasm.
     When one poet mentions an article he had recently seen that wrote about writing groups and institutions with “a snobby attitude,” several others chimed in with differing points of view. Writing groups of today are not unlike the informal settings for the poets of old, one remarked: “I imagine writers sitting around in a pub; for example, and C.S. Lewis brings in a poem that a fellow writer suggests “is a bit too mystical . . .  I’d change this or that.” A workshop is a “community that affirms and encourages writing, and supports other writers,“ someone else suggests as another poem is passed around for critique. Not surprisingly, it is a poem dealing with loss and death.

She died . . .
my childhood friend
robust
not yet 70.

I talk with her
in my head.
We laugh.

In night dreams
anxious
I call
    Where are you?
and find her

walking away with the others.
(poem “She Died” by Jean Georgakopoulos)

The poem’s layout reminds someone of “a musical score where the line breaks and punctuation guide the reader, showing where to pause, what to emphasize, and how to read the poem itself.” Several poems broach the subject of connection and relationship. Dian Gillmar reads “One Small Boat” which ends on an unexpected role reversal between a mother and daughter:

As the mist lifts we see
the horizon, a silver line
drawn by the sun. She pulls the boat
along the dock, steadies it
as I climb out and reach for the rope
she tosses to me.
(from “One Small Boat” by Dian Gillmar)

Gillmar (below, sitting next to Hofstadter and Portnoff) confesses that her adult daughter was uncomfortable being placed in the leadership position but then laughs: “With my luck as the boat comes in, I’d miss the dock!” Gillmar doesn’t live at Rossmoor, but makes the monthly trip to Walnut Creeek because she has enjoyed the group so much.

Rossmoor is a relatively upscale retirement community in Walnut Creek, built around a golf course with lots of open landscape and several clubhouses, including the one where the poets meet. The stereotypes of its elder residents, however, are worth tweaking. When Portnoff moved in, he once rode through the entry check-point on an Italian racing bike dressed in sleek garb: “I was riding bad, looking good, when security caught up with me. They couldn’t believe I was a resident.” Portnoff brought an experimental poem entitled “Kaleidoscope,” where he arranged letters, words, and phrases in a “cut-up” style to create several shorter concrete poems, poems that explore the playful iconography of type and font on the page. Portnoff’s life has always been “about discipline,“ he says, and that aspect drew him to poetry. After finding ways to read the poem aloud, John Whalen said that he didn’t know what the poem was about but that “it sounded good, like reading the Paris phone book out loud.”
     Geraldine M. Stokes (at left) “Jeri” for short,” is a descendant of Mormon pioneers who walked with their hand-carts and covered wagons from Nauvoo, Illinois, to settle Salt Lake City along with Brigham Young. Her ancestor wrote many Mormon songs. In the 1960s, Geri studied sociology at Cal where she recalls how “bongs were passed around in class.” Recognizing that she couldn’t earn a living from her academic studies, she turned to real estate where she applied some of her anthropological training: “I learned a lot about people from their garbage.” As she read her poem, “Youth’s Mantra,” murmurs of recognition went through the room. The poem was the result of a writing exercise. “I didn’t think I could write a poem on demand, but my friend told me ‘oh, yes you can,’ and set up an exercise using a timer.”

What will I be when I grow up?”
When did it stop?

Did I catch the golden ring
Or
Was I ground down, crushed
By circumstance and routine?

Now,
Elderly and snow capped,
Looking Back,
Asking
Questions of the past.
(from poem “Youth’s Mantra” by Geraldine Lillie Stokes)
     

Within the brief two-hour session, they shared their work, schemed about how they could get their local newspaper to include poetry and news of poets, dissected the use and value of workshops, classes and writing exercises, and shared their love of words. It made me want to holler and throw up both my hands by the end of the session, so exhilarating to be with such a devoted and fun group. At age 56, I still have a way to go before full-scale retirement, but the Rossmoor poets made it look like a great way to spend life’s remaining chapters.

(Photo: Sid Kahn and Alan Winslow, above left.)