Life on the Westside: Laundry, Art, and Repetition

A glorious Santa Fe day, and even though it is the end of the semester with lots of grading due I decided to take Saturday and enjoy my urban/suburban life here on the Westside.
Even laundry and dry cleaning give satisfaction, but the best was a visit to the nursery. A Moorish garden by definition is walled, and has big blue pots, and roses, as well as an evergreen. I had everything but the last. Now have a dwarf spruce in one of those pots.
Popped in to Lannan Foundation to see the show AGAIN: Repetition, Obsession and Meditation. Agnes Martin grids, and more of the like. Never ceases to intrigue me–visual artists seem to not be afraid of repeating themselves, while writers are. Both have obsessions, but as a poet I tend to try and prune out redundancies–but why?
Here is a piece I love by Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson–lighthouses in Iceland, I believe. I wonder if I’ll get to go back–I’m scheming too. Something I long to repeat.

Jose Angel Araguz answers the question “When did you start writing?”

In regards to the question “When did you start writing?” I give several answers depending on context.

If it’s a professional context, I say seventeen, that being the year that I first typed up, printed, and sent off poems to a real lit mag. I call it the year I began to take my writing seriously, the act of sending my poems out into the world for consideration an act of considering them worth, uhm, considering. (Two got published on that first try – bless those forgiving editors!)

If it’s more of the “When did you know you were a writer?” kind of question, then I go a little farther back. I talk about how as a kid I used to rewrite lyrics to songs I heard on the radio, how I filled up notebooks with various takes on other people’s melodies.

I look back and realize that putting my words into other people’s songs probably taught me something about form, about structure and rhyme. What exactly I learned, I don’t know. (I’m a terrible rhymer in poems!)

The core of the experience, though, cultivated an obsession with words – sounds, meaning, phrasing – of saying something and saying it concisely, aptly. Inevitably.

I threw away those notebooks sometime in middle school – a friend found me scribbling in one of them and asked what I wrote. I said homework, tucked it away, and later that night tossed them all into the garbage. Not a scrap remains.

What has stayed with me through the years is a distinct respect and fascination with song lyrics.

In this spirit, let me share some of the lyrics of French singer Manu Chao!

I have been listening to his first album “Clandestino” non-stop this week. Manu Chao, after being in a few other bands, took to traveling and picking up different influences from the various street music he encountered to create a hybrid sound that is as much diverse as it is simple. His songs remind me of Garcia Lorca being influenced by the folk culture of Andalusia. His traveling manifests itself in his writing songs in French, Spanish,Italian Galician, Arabic, and Portuguese.

Here’s a line that I keep turning over my head:

El hambre viene, el hombre se va -

(Hunger comes, man leaves)

This is a fine line – more than that, you see in the words themselves how one letter changing (hambre = hombre) evokes so much of the meaning of the line. Now, take the line within its context in the song “El Viento (The Wind)”:

El viento viene
El viento se va
Por la frontera

El viento viene
El viento se va

El hambre viene
El hombre se va
Sin mas razon…

(The wind comes
The wind goes
Across the frontier

The wind comes
The wind goes

Hunger comes
Man leaves
Without a reason…)
***

Suddenly the words take on a whole other meaning. That change from ‘a’ to ‘o’ in the words (hambre/hombre) seem almost a trick of the wind itself, the same wind that is being sung about.

Part of my general fascination with song lyrics is how you can do certain things in a song that you can’t do in a poem. I say this not to discredit one side or the other but to show them both as the formidable modes of expression that they are.

In his lyrics, the wordplay of hambre/hombre play out concisely the theme of vagabond that Manu Chao explores throughout his whole first album. Taken solely as words, the line is simply a proverb. But put to music, put within the larger context of musing on wind and then the even larger context of an album about transiency and the line becomes downright mythic.

***
For the complete essay and more on this writer, click here.

Stella Reed on her Mother’s Death–actually a meeting with a remarkable poet

My mother self-published her first poetry chapbook about twenty years ago, before it was a popular thing to do. She’d been raised on Dickenson and Frost and it was her foundational belief that poetry needed to rhyme. She was not a “remarkable poet” but she loved poetry and she paid attention, particularly to what she found beautiful. Writing for her was a hobby, never seen as a possible vocation. When she was in her sixties she joined a local poetry society. Occasionally she would share with me by mail the poems that she had written for the society’s get-togethers and sometimes the poems that others brought to the table. She taught me that poetry creates community. That creativity connects you to something larger than yourself.
For the past few years she has been speech aphasic with a touch of dementia. She always knew my sisters or I when we arrived at the home to visit, but she couldn’t express what she was thinking and feeling. This frustrated all involved, but especially her. Most days she would be lucky to speak one fully formed, sensible sentence. That’s why I found it significant when I came across this untitled poem while looking through her papers. By the handwriting I’m guessing she wrote it about ten years ago.

Once you imagine a word is a cloud unseen
that somehow connects you to where you have been
a few wingbeats ago,
or to a noplace where you must go because it is a place you don’t yet know,

You scribble more clouds of music
misty with dew
a quiet river becoming a pool
of deepest blue

And though the clouds intend
elsewise you will swim
to the stars reflected there
when you reach days end.

Word clouds. My mother always had her head in the clouds, even while she loved the earth beneath her feet. When I read this I thought that this place, with its misty music, its rivers and pools, was very much where she had been living, internally, for the past few years.
I received a call last week that Mom was in the process of dying. I flew to upstate NY to join my sister and be with our mother if possible, hoping she would hang on until we arrived. When I got to my sister’s house we discovered that a solitary white swan had made a temporary home on the pond on her property. Three times I attempted to photograph it. But it was elusive. On the last try I was rewarded with a photo of it as it lifted away from me, massive wings stretched above the water, graceful neck thrust forward.
I spent six days at my sister’s house. Each morning when I woke I would use binoculars to scan the pond for the swan. Every morning it was there…until the day I was to return home. When, on the last day, I couldn’t catch sight of it I felt anxious. Its presence had become part of the routine that had made the vigil at my mother’s bedside bearable. Mom died that afternoon just hours before my scheduled flight. I held her hand and watched as the wingbeats, the waiting stars, the noplace she had to get to, all came together in her final breaths. Her death, like her life, was a poem. Simply remarkable.

Ursula Moeller’s Photographs and Haiku from Nicaragua

I feel I should sing
“De Colores” as I stroll
Nicaragua’s streets

smiling faces greet
around Granada’s corners
horses faces too

cathedral hush
votive candles flicker bright
cool stones underfoot

geckos behind glass
tropical decoration
better look quickly

Poet Michael G. Smith Up In A Tree

Santa Fe based writer Michael G. Smith was recently in residence in Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon.
It is a wonderful program, housing writers at a research station in old growth forest, and is affiliated with Oregon State University’s Spring Creek Project.

Photograph by Andy Gottlieb

Ancient Fir, Climbing

Michael G. Smith

Carabinered to a braided rope and dangling
ten feet off the ground, things change,

like suddenly there are too many questions
about the physics of friction versus gravity,

but the shy, awkward boy zips up into the open,
waves from above the first fan branch eighty

feet higher than ground. You have game
you say, the only matter is repose into harness,

lift the ascenders, push against the stirrups
againagainagain. You pray to the physics

of friction, you pray to the molecular bonds
of rope. Face sweaty, twenty minutes gone by,

you touch fan branch’s built soil, rub lichen,
lobelia and fern, then find yourself shaking

laughing man’s soft hand on a fine day
in April, wind and rain starting to come in.

Photograph by Michael G. Smith

Meetings With Remarkable Poets #7: Miriam Sagan on May Swenson

As I get older, I think back on some amazing poets I had the honor to meet. For example, when I was twenty five and spending an autumn at MacDowell, I was there with May Swenson.
There was also a small group of young very avant-garde composers in residence. We had almost nightly soirees in the library–a writer would read, a visual artist would show slides, and a composer would play. The music was often minimalist, electronic, and a la John Cage.
May Swenson was then in middle age. Raised a Mormon, she was also one of the first lesbian poets in the United States who didn’t hide her identity. She reminded me of a nuthatch–tanned, small, she had a sturdy birdlike quality. And it turned out, a sense of humor. Because she was busy recording her own avant-garde composition. It was basically of May Swenson eating lunch. She’d intro the theme–chewing on celery–and then record it. She played the whole piece for me and the composers and we found it hysterically funny.
I liked her poetry then and I like it now. It can be surprisingly emotionally violent, but it has integrity. However, what I really liked best was her. She was unpretentious despite her stellar career. She had focus and was obviously dedicated to writing in her cabin in the woods. (I was somewhat more dedicated to roaming around southern New Hampshire eating BLTs in diners with the composers.)
But she liked the young, and wasn’t above teasing them. She was kind to me about my work in such a low key way that it is only in retrospect that I understand her support.

Meetings With Remarkable Poets #6: Miriam Bobkoff on Lew Welch

In 1967 or so, my friend Jim Tressler was taking Lew Welch’s
University of California Extension Poetry Workshop. We went to hear Welch read at a coffee house in North Beach. He sat with us at a little coffee house table (before? after?) and I couldn’t get AT ALL why Jim worshipped him. He was this weird wired jazzy dude with ’50s hair and straight clothes. I closed my mind against him on the spot. It was one of the three great missed opportunities of my life.

Nevertheless that night Welch read a poem that sank right into my head. I looked for it, vaguely, for years.

I think perhaps it wasn’t published until Donald Allen brought out _Ring of Bone_. But I always hoped to find it, the poem in which Lew Welch said that everything about the earth had always seemed right, and he had never seen it any other way than whole; and to hear again about that long moment when you jump into the middle of the earth and bounce gently back and forth through the very center. A decade or so later, there it was in _Ring of Bone_. “He Begins to Recount His Adventures”. Starting there, I read forward and back, forward and back, through _Ring of Bone_ and all of _How I Work as a Poet_; and for some long time most of Lew Welch’s words were in my head. I xeroxed them, I recited them, I wrote them in the sand on beaches. His poems came to mind constantly, and I worshipped him. Though I
hadn’t recognized him when we met.

Meetings With Remarkable Poets #4: Sari Krosinsky on Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I just read the first few posts of “Meetings with Remarkable Poets” and remembered this:

When I met my childhood hero, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 10 years ago, he didn’t like my poem. He thought it devoid of emotion.

The event was an odd situation brought on by working around a prior contract (the one supplying the funding to get Ferlinghetti to New Mexico, I think). Other readings in the area by Ferlinghetti himself were prohibited, so several University of New Mexico students (including me) were selected to read a poem to him and receive a critique.

We met in a comfortably old room at Zimmerman Library with a packed audience, though publicity had necessarily been minimal. Each student sat or stood beside Ferlinghetti as we read our poems and listened to the discussions that followed. It felt unreal to be that close.

Most of the audience seemed to get the admittedly subtle emotion of the poem I read, “Roller Coasters Always Get the Nice Girls.” Some (mostly women) were offended that Ferlinghetti didn’t. But I don’t think his reaction had anything to do with my being (apparently) the only woman (actually transgender) among the critiqued poets. I suspect he just had other things on his mind.

Ferlinghetti had then long been my favorite poet, and is still one of my favorites. I can’t say his apparent inattention wasn’t disappointing, but I don’t think I can blame him for not finding me as interesting as I find him—even if he should.

Sari Krosinsky

Meetings with Remarkable Poets #3: Carol Moldaw on Adrienne Rich

Carol Moldaw wrote this right after Adrienne Rich died. Throughout April, Poetry Month, Miriam’s Well will be publishing reminiscences of various poets. Please write and send one if you like!

***

When I heard yesterday that Adrienne Rich had died, I knew that the era of my coming of age–in reality long over–had now irrevocably ended. Her many subsequent accomplishments as poet, essayist and activist notwithstanding, I will forever associate Rich with my college years, the years of Diving into the Wreck, Of Woman Born, Twenty-One Love Poems and Dream of a Common Language. That was the time of the separatist movement, of back-to-the-land-no-men allowed, of amphitheaters filled with bandana’d women carrying her books and quoting her words and worrying over her limp and her cane. She was our first iconic feminist poet, someone who enthralled those of us enamored with word and image as much as she enthralled those of us enamored with other women or just with being women ourselves. Her moral fiber was already apparent; her poetic gifts indisputable. The long line I stood in at the Grolier Book Shop, waiting to have her sign my copy of Poems: Selected and New, 1950-1974, was the first of such lines I’ve withstood: I was that young. It was also probably the longest. I still remember the kindness and patience of her face as I struggled to talk to her, to tell her how much her poetry meant to me, as if she hadn’t heard that thousands of times before, and the line still long behind me. I also remember, with more than a bit of embarrassment, asking if I could send her my poems, if she would read them, and how I saw my request change her face, how it fell even as she firmly denied me, explaining in plain language, as if to a slow child, that she needed to protect what little writing time she had. Who was more disappointed I wonder: me, rejected, or Rich, having a compliment turn into yet another demand?

Meetings with Remarkable Poets #2: Did Anne Sexton Hate Me? by Miriam Sagan

As an undergraduate, I went to many poetry readings. I learned how to listen, with a rapt (sincere or insincere) expression on my face. I learned to avoid drunken poets and would-be poets at receptions, and to not snicker when Beat street poets rose from the audience to spontaneously declaim about “the silver butterfly of life.”
I heard many famous poets read, but the big rock and roll event was Anne Sexton, at Harvard’s Saunders Theater, shortly before her death. She was dressed in a slinky black and white Mod outfit, sipping a highball. She looked–and felt–like one of those wicked queens in a Disney cartoon. The work was amazing, but somewhat lost on me, until years later. I was mesmerized by the feeling that she might crack. Right there. On stage.
Which she did not do. But instead received a standing ovation, like the prima donna she was. But I wasn’t standing up, nor was the friend I’d come with. Instead, two scruffy students, we sat, clapping, but seated.
Anne Sexton glared at us, and glared. Finally, intimidated, we stood up.
About a year later, she killed herself. One of her daughters was in my women’s history class and I was struck dumb by her look of pure suffering. I wish I’d been more of an adult then and known to have said something, anything, like “I’m sorry.” Instead, I sneaked a glance, and then looked away.