In honor of Santa Cruz poet and longtime Festival friend Joan Zimmerman, her friend and fellow poet, Ken Weisner, is creating a living collection of verse inspired by our season’s sounds.
You can read some of Joan’s poems on page 57 of our program book and her bio on the next page.
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?
—Gary Young, former Poet in Residence, first published in That’s What I Thought (2018)
The Cabrillo Festival has maintained a poet in residence program since the 1990’s, usually featuring local poets in the role including Joan, Farnaz Fatemi, Gary Young, and others. Whether you attend an open rehearsal or a concert, write a haiku or a poem in any form in response, in homage, in awe, or just in the spirit of the festival as you experience it, and email your words to Ken at poet@cabrillomusic.org.
7.28.2026
“I was struck by the clarinet soloist, Carlos Ferreira. Just appreciated the sounds that emerged from his instrument. I remembered doing this with the flute I played in Jr. High School. His playing also reminded me of our local Phil Yost’s playing when he was alive. His “Blackbird Tangos” is very special. Lots of squeaks and interesting rolls.”—Alison Woolpert
no scale note to start
the clarinet just whispers
—summer festival
7.28.2026
This elegy is for Joan Zimmerman, friend and predecessor poet with the festival.—Ken Weisner
FOR JOAN Z.
How grateful am I
for Joan, ordinary Joan
how I will miss her
*
Things that happened while you were dying
Dandelion seed
lands nearby, flies up again,
a woolly aphid
Walk through cloud of gnats
Milichiidae, Canyon Flies
form is everything
Most amusing, these gnats
I shake my head
like a dog
*
When the ego is gone,
how time
becomes music
*
Reading your haiku
after you died.
Your voice!
7.28.26
Patti Sirens grew up in and outside New York City, where she discovered her love of poetry, studied at St. Marks Poetry Project, played bass and toured in several punk bands, worked for a publishing company and fell in love with the ocean at the Jersey shore. She moved to Santa Cruz in 1989, where she continues to write and perform spoken word, and in the 1990s was a founding member of Tribe Through Time, a women’s poetry performance group. Her first book of poetry, “Antarctica”, was published by Burning Bush Publications in 2000. “At The Cabrillo Music Festival” was first published in her second book, “Unrequited”, published by Uttered Chaos in 2019.
At The Cabrillo Music Festival
You shed your fuzzy green sweater
like an outer skin. I imagine
You unclothing a lovely unveiling
our limbs and torsos twining
Up the blue spine of an evening
what I mean to say is I’m hiding
desire wanting once again
what is just beyond my reach
to breach the humid air
between us
walking the invisible
high tension wire I can feel
the hairs on your arms
a breath away I want to
touch you. but don’t
dare disturb the pleasant
being-with we share
there’s an orchestra vibrating
the space we inhabit I close my eyes
and let the music and your nearness
flow through me my wanting
is a melody of horns and strings
an ocean pulsing
in and out of time I want
to float on that sea with you
discover our songs and rhythms
when the beat of the drums
draws me out of reverie
I realize it’s my own heart
playing its tympani
I long to be bold and impolite
take your hand
that’s coiled around
the arm rest reach up
touch your face
which is tilted
like a cat listening
to what is pleasing in the distance
break the silence of what’s not said
in the shimmer of that music
and kiss you on the mouth
7.25.26
A poem to get us started, by Stephen Kessler, who wrote this poem one night a few years ago at a Cabrillo concert. It is published in his most recent book, Last Call (2021).
New Music
Arrived early,
orchestra tuning in deep cacophony,
audience filing in finding their seats,
ushers handing out programs, reporters pulling out notebooks
to record what is unreportable
but portable,
you can carry a tune in your pocket with enough practice,
echoing and reflecting on what you hear and see,
a Botticelli in the front row,
her long rippling red locks a giveaway,
and the sounds of bows stroking long strings as the cellists
find their keys,
the official photographer, himself a celebrity,
angling in for the best shot,
old friends schmoozing in the wide aisles,
the rows far enough apart to allow illusions
of elbow room while we are cheek to cheek
and ear to ear in lines of folding seats,
except for mine, nobody to my right, a row of one’s own
in which to listen and write, all night if so inspired,
“no recording of any kind allowed” but I am nothing
if not outside the law politely defying
official guidelines and ground rules
while the music speaks for itself and is taken down
by a scribe incredulous at early rumblings of drums
less eloquent than the thunder they’re trying to emulate,
then the clouds
break for a bit of birdsong and a breeze
smelling of blood, hunters stalking dangerous
endangered species that might turn at any time
and devour them,
that’s how fast the tables
can turn and the diner is suddenly dinner
wondering how he was consumed by what he was pursuing,
it was a sting all along,
the conductor’s baton and the bows and drumsticks
conspiring to attack, to tickle, to provoke ironic rhythms
as infectious as they are fatal in the end.
Then the Steinway is rolled out and opened up,
microphone angled into its maw by a stagehand,
concertmaster fingering one note for orchestral orientation,
musicians lining up their tones for the composer,
the pianist and the Romanian maestro set to rip up
the virtuoso concerto
with aplomb, a young man’s first blast at a big band masterpiece,
or maybe just a flying chance, a nice try, close but no laurels
to smoke backstage afterward, and nothing to tap the ashes in
or get stoned on,
a long series of sighs
and wild bangs on the black-and-whites,
it’s all in his head, or was, and the writer has forced it
into the array of instruments and made them sound like his mind,
and it goes on like that, tracking his thoughts
and impressions, self-abstracted expressions
made concrete by execution,
and the sounds are killing me,
slamming and stabbing and pounding
my desire for pleasure to a pulp
with cosmic dissonance
to scramble whatever eggs I had left after all those frittati,
those tortillas, those omelets with too much of everything,
including drippings of the kitchen sink
where the buckets aren’t big enough
to catch it nor can ink begin to imitate its influence.
What I meant to say is what can’t be said
except maybe in what I swear was Esperanto
this morning on the car radio,
little traffic on Mission Street so early
and newspapers awaiting me at Safeway,
more information than I can use and it’s only Saturday,
tomorrow is when it will weigh a ton and I’ll have to tote it home
in a black bag like a dead body,
all the suffering in the world
spelled out in print and in pictures that blister credibility,
but you turn the page and there’s a jewelry ad,
or a picture of a watch where time has stopped
as long as you’re looking,
but it’s more than you can afford,
like the cost of this concerto with all its bells and whistles
way over your budget but you can’t afford to get over it either,
it is all over you
until it’s all over.