Poet, Santa Cruzan, and longtime Cabrillo Festival friend, Joan Zimmerman will be sharing poetry inspired by the sounds of the season.
She will create new poems and curate work from fellow poets, responding to the music of the Festival, enriching and deepening the experience of our music. This blog was updated throughout the 2025 season, so that people could follow along as the season unfolded and the music rippled out, creating waves of new muses.
(Most recent poems first.)
Ken Weisner, author of Songs for the Great Horned Owl, is an emeritus college teacher, the editor and advisor on the international journal Red Wheelbarrow, and a creative writer of poetry. His new haiku celebrates the full orchestra:
Ah, summer ocean!
the orchestra rehearsal,
everyone noodling, warming up.
The second piece is in appreciation of Daniela Candillari, guest conductor for the first week of the 2025 Cabrillo Festival:
Daniela is precise
formal black-clad
wasting neither word
nor motion
she makes this orchestra
shine
their exuberant
accomplishment
she leads them on a great adventure
pushes the tempo
at the end of Corigliano
to show off what they can do
like any fine teacher
we see who she is most of all
in her students
in the ones she loves
– Ken Weisner
of strings and snare drums
8.6.24
Alison Woolpert, author of Greetings From, is a retired Santa Cruz teacher and a creative writer of poetry particularly haiku. This new haiku reflects the magnificent presence of the strings in Cabrillo’s first two 2025 concerts:
summer concert
the violin section’s
vesper flights
The second haiku, while written for the 2017 Cabrillo Festival, is particularly relevant to the social battlefield of voters’ rights portrayed in the 2025 commission and world premier of Stacy Garrop’s Frederick and Susan B:
summer concert
with the violins we cross
a battlefield
(First published in Modern Haiku, 2018)
– Alison Woolpert
8.2.25
Dyana Basist, author of Coyote Wind, is a Santa Cruz creative writer of poetry including haiku. She is a particular fan of the shakuhachi flute, which her best friend plays. Maybe one day CFCM might perform Dai Fujikura’s Shakuhachi Concerto?
summer grasses a piccolo shimmering at dawn
silt shifting along the riverbed shakuhachi
a baby grand
washes up on shore
summer concerto
– Dyana Basist
Gary Young is a brilliant poet with particular mastery of the short prose poem. He is also a past Poet-in-Residence with the CFCM. Additionally he has three roles at UCSC: Senior Continuing Lecturer in Literature; Director of Cowell Press, and holder of the Gary D. Licker Memorial Chair, Cowell College.
He wrote his untitled prose poem below (published in his 2018 book That’s What I Thought) while he was 2017 Poet-in-Residence with the Festival.
Music marks time—gathers, embraces, and endures it. Thunder in the tympani, nectar in the run of a flute; arpeggios of wonder, terror, and desire. When the orchestra plays, the world flies at us on a fierce wind. Abandoned to the music, you ask yourself—how long have my eyes been closed; how long since I’ve taken a breath?
(Published in That’s What I Thought)
7.29.25
Poet, visual artist, and creativity teacher Mimi Ahern (San Jose) is delighted to offer these haiku in honor of the initial 2025 CFCM Open Rehearsals, with Concert Master Justin Bruns, Guest Conductor Daniela Candillari, and Flute Principal Martha Long – and in honor of summer:
afternoon sunshine
Cabrillo’s concert master
leads the tune up
in silence
she raises her baton
shimmer of summertime
her flute notes
float into the cirrus . . .
summer twilight
(First published as a similar version in Geppo XLIX:3, 2024)
– Mimi Ahern
7.28.25
This series of tanka and haiku spotlights each of the six pieces on the program of the thrilling Donors Concert on the evening of Friday 7/26/25. The first piece was Ligeti’s Ballad and Dance of Romanian melodies performed on violin by CFCM’s Maestro Christi and his young daughter Maria. Second was CFCM’s Executive Director Riley Nicholson playing gloriously John Adams’ exquisite and challenging China Gates on piano; I appreciate Riley’s telling me that “it took a while to get the patterns in my hands.” Third was janela. ein fenster – fur zwei by Houben for cello and bass. Fourth was Michael Sheppard on piano with Sunday in the Park (the italicized haiku below samples and reorganizes phrases from lyrics by Stephen Sondheim). Fifth was Candillari’s duo for trombone (played by Carson King-Fournier) and piano (Candillari), Extremely Close, a 5-part programmatic piece inspired by Foer’s novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Finally Christi and Maria closed the program (aided by Sheppard on piano) with three of Shostakovich’s Five Pieces for Two Violins.
Generosity
lullaby and dance
the radiant violin duo
of maestro
and his barely teen daughter
in her concert debut
his agile fingers
unfolding the design of
the China Gates
the sincerity
at day’s end of the cello
and double bass
a deep-voiced fog horn
welcoming an unlit raft
flecks of light and dark
blue triangular water
and elliptical grass
bel canto
trombone and piano
to calm the panic
of high bridges in a storm
and falling falling falling
held in the waltz
of violins and piano
and soft evening light
– Joan Zimmerman
Thanks to the attendees (including Bill, Mary, Nick, Cherrill, Ellen, and Jim) that I talked to about the concert music.
7.26.25
Behind the Scenes
– With a line borrowed from Lou Harrison
A warm July afternoon,
in the Civic Auditorium lobby,
placing well-chosen photos,
drawings, books, manuscripts,
and musical scores,
inside two glass display cases:
an homage to Lou
arrayed for learning and pleasure.
Cherish, conserve, consider, create.
Stepping inside the hall,
late afternoon light radiating
from the transom windows,
the truss lifter poised to install
lighting and sound equipment
over the stage, the crew’s
soft steps and hushed conversation
burnishing the hardwood floor.
Cherish, conserve, consider, create.
Behind the scenes is where the work begins.
An exhibit installed, a stage readied.
In planting a garden the ground must be
prepared for what is to follow.
Cherish, conserve, consider, create.
– Jim Petersen
7.25.25
joyful jacaranda
all the Civic’s parking spaces
reserved for music
– Joan Zimmerman
7.25.25
To bring in an additional poet, her fellow haiku poet Beverly Acuff Momoi comes with her to one of the open rehearsals every year – in 2017 they hear the rehearsal of a piece by Gerald Barry. Beverly offers two published haiku to reprint.
midsummer misunderstanding the French horns go staccato
~ after composer Gerald Barry
published in Ekphrasis: British Haiku Society’s 2017 Members Anthology
–
summer blues
never enough
trumpets
~ after composer Gerald Barry
published in Root: British Haiku Society’s 2019 Members Anthology
The second was prompted by Barry’s actual quote during the rehearsal: “There can never be enough trumpets.”
– Beverly Acuff Momoi
7.25.25
To begin, we start with a poem from Cabrillo Festival 2013.
hopscotch
first violins
warming up
– Joan Zimmerman, originally published in Daily Haiku