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Cloud View Poets: An Anthology--Master Classes with David St. John

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Selected, compiled and edited by the team of Morley Clark, Jane Downs, C.B. Follett, and Susan Terris, Cloud View Poets: An Anthology - Master Classes With David St. John is an impressively diverse collection of 82 poets who each had in common that they studied poetry with David St. John (Professor and Chairman, the Creative Writing Department, University of Southern California) in one of eight weekend seminars he gives each year. Each poem in this anthology was written contemporaneously with the poet's enrollment in one of those seminars. The range, styles, subject matter, span the spectrum, but taken altogether provide an impressive (albeit collective) representation for the quality of those instructive seminars, the professor who taught them, and the students who enrolled in them. Why We're in Bakersfield: We're waiting for your voice to drop, for your 'nads to reach their apt angle.//True, the city is scruffy in spots,/but there are parks and trails and sushi bars/to complement the taquerias.//We're waiting for you to become interesting,/for your brain to blaze neon.//Meanwhile we bear the heat,/squeegee the dust from our windshield and/watch people wheel their babies through the mall.//Mornings we find ourselves downwind/of the ample valley--scent of barns and cow dung,//first light rising over the Tchachapis/from the Mojave beyond, sixteen-/wheelers headed our way.//We long for that light, and wait for you. -- Joel T. Katz