About Axe Handles
The reading and performance series name is taken from beat poet, Gary Snyder's poem, "Axe Handles." Snyder recalls an idea he'd heard before; "when making an axe handle the pattern is not far off." The art we produce, in literature, in music, is indeed patterned after those that have come before. Art begets art.
Poets, musicians, & thespians all participate in Axe Handles: Creative Performance Series , a West Trade Review event, hosted approximately once a month in the Wildcat Den of the Student Center at Johnson & Wales University where participants read poetry, sing songs and play instruments in a relaxed atmosphere of creativity.
Axe Handles
One afternoon the last week in April
Showing Kai how to throw a hatchet
One-half turn and it sticks in a stump.
He recalls the hatchet-head
Without a handle, in the shop
And go gets it, and wants it for his own
A broken off axe handle behind the door
Is long enough for a hatchet,
We cut it to length and take it
With the hatchet head
And working hatchet, to the wood block.
There I begin to shape the old handle
With the hatchet, and the phrase
First learned from Ezra Pound
Rings in my ears!
"When making an axe handle
the pattern is not far off."
And I say this to Kai
"Look: We'll shape the handle
By checking the handle
Of the axe we cut with--"
And he sees. And I hear it again:
It's in Lu Ji's Wên Fu, fourth century
A.D. "Essay on Literature" -- in the
Preface: "In making the handle
Of an axe
