Bobby Byrd

Saying Goodbye, Saying Hello

2011-12-30T13:55:00.000-07:00

Raymond Depardon, New York City. Manhattan. Central Park. 1982.

Thanks to my friend the photographer Bruce Berman

for introducing me to Depardon's photographs.[1]

Santa trudging through Central Park. My gosh, the photograph speaks eloquently about this time of year.You got to be careful wherever you live. You'll look up and see Santa trudging through the goo of your life.

I wish to send my best wishes to all of you--peace, good health and well-being in your mind, body and heart. Peace and understanding too for the U.S./Mexico Border and for the world. It's a precarious time now for our communities and for the generations to come. I'm one of those old fogies that believe that peace begins in our own hearts. Blessings to all.

Here's something I scribbled down the day after Christmas. It's sort of a minimalized diary of my own Post-Christmas day.

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Monday, December 26, 2011

This is the way the year ends and begins—

Extra little Merry Christmas turds.

Snowmelt seeps out of the mountain.

You can end this poem anyway you want.

[1] Shit. I don’t like to use so obviously copyrighted material. But sometimes the impulse of the time overrides my concern. I’m guilty here, and I’ll be happy to remove this post if somebody asks me. In the meantime, please visit Depardon’s site and Wikipedia Page. He’s a remarkable photographer.

The Whalen Poem

2011-12-23T13:14:00.001-07:00

Some of my poet friends don’t understand my allegiance to Ron Silliman’s Blog, and they certainly don’t understand why I lament the loss of Ron’s unrelenting blogging (along with the babbling of poets in the comments section) that came to an (almost) screeching halt a year or so back. To those folks I have two new words—William Corbett. Aka Bill. For some reason I’ve never paid much attention to Corbett’s work. I’m out here in El Paso, he’s over there in Boston. He’s plugged in, I’m not plugged in. No, that’s not true. I’m sort of plugged in. I think my wires got frayed. I think it was 1973. Lee and I, like Hansel and Gretel, went off following the trail G.I. Gurdjieff for three or four years. That’s a long other story. Ni modo.

Anyway, Silliman from time to time breaks his silence[1] and his overwhelming catalog of poetry events and dead poets and videos of poets reading (some dead, some alive) with a personal blognote. On June 3 of this year he wrote about Corbett’s little book from Hanging Loose Press The Whalen Poem. Shit. Even the title made me want to buy the book. I’m a Philip Whalen addict. Corbett says this about his book of poem—

I spent the summer of 2007 reading the galleys of Philip Whalen’s Collected Poems. I was in Vermont and had the leisure to read slowly, ten or so pages a day. About halfway through the master’s poems I began to write The Whalen Poem. I kept at it until just after Halloween. No book I have written, poetry or prose, has given me the deep pleasure I felt in writing The Whalen Poem.

I understand exactly. I’ve done the same thing. My only dilemma with Corbett’s book is that I didn’t write it. Of course, I would have written it my way. Differently.

Here’s a little piece that gives a good taste of the book. The poem has the off-the cuff dreaminess and improvisational energy that Whalen had, but of course it's purely Corbett being who he is. Besides, I chose it because I’ve felt this same confused emotion so many times in my life. Growing up and having all these different poetry heroes and then finding out they aren’t (weren't) who I thought they were supposed to be in my imagination.

Pollock by Namuth

He was drunk

He was nasty

Many knew

We young ones didn’t

He looked great

Brooding in denim

Cigarette between long fingers

On the running-board

Of his beat-up Model-A Ford

On the Evergreen Review cover

Names of heroes

CAMUS

BECKETT

SOUTHGATE

O’HARA

He’s not the same now

You grow up and adjust

You want the old feeling

It’s still there but not

To be trusted…well,

It’s not for him anyway

But for that world when

You didn’t have to know

What you know now

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I even had this feeling about Philip Whalen. I first discovered his book Memoirs of an Inter-Glacial Age in the U of Arizona Library in 1964 and from that time on I read everything he wrote. His poetry and its underlying poetics gave enormous energy to my own work as I wandered through the landscape. I only heard him read once in my life. He came to the New Mexico State University. I had looked forward to the reading for months but when I heard him I was disappointed. He didn’t read the poems like I felt he should be reading the poems.[2] The old standards, poems I knew by heart. Poems I had shouted aloud in my scruffy apartments in Tucson and Seattle in the 1960s. Shit. Later that evening at the party at the Somozas’ house, Whalen had so many Zen-wannabes imported from Santa Fe hanging around that I couldn’t get close to him. Besides, I didn’t feel any connection to them. They lived in Santa Fe, I lived in El Paso—enough said. I couldn’t read Whalen’s poetry several years. His reading had sucked that energy away. But I finally realized that was silly. His poetry was viscerally connected to my work. I finally forgave Whalen for being Philip Whalen. Weird. Or maybe I forgave myself for being who I am. Or something. Maybe I just learned to sit on a zafu and stare at a wall. Even that Whalen had contributed to.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, this is supposed to be a celebration of Bill Corbett’s book The Whalen Poem. Here’s a couple of short delicate pieces for a cold snowy day during the time of Winter Solstice—

•

There is room here

For 720,000 ladybugs

Devouring 4.6 billion aphids

•

EXTREME OCTOBER

Drought in Georgia

San Diego fires

I always go commando

Deserving everyone’s love

[1] I’m always worried I’ll find pictures of friends there along with the news of their catching the rickety little raft to the other side. And of course I'm not ready to be up there with all the other dead guys.

[2] I mentioned this once to Jim Koller and he agreed with me. He too didn’t like the way Whalen read his poems aloud, and Jim was a close friend of his.

Gene Keller on Robert Burlingame

2011-12-18T15:39:00.002-07:00

Gene Keller by Richard Baron

As I mentioned in my blognote about Bob Burlingame, our friendship was always punctuated by long interruptions. My friend Gene Keller (singer, songwriter, poet) had a much longer and enduring friendship with Bob, so I asked him to write something. I am posting it below. Gene is one of those necessary pieces of cloth that holds the quilt of El Paso's rich cultural underground together. He's a touchstone. I definitely recommend Richard Baron's unique interview with Gene from Newspapertree.com. Like Robert Creeley, Gene lost an eye an early age, and he tells that story there. The photograph of him is Richard's too. Visit Richard's website. His photographs are remarkable and should be much more widely known. Richard now lives in Santa Fe.

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So to Gene's remarks:

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to write about Bob Burlingame (1922-2011). As you wrote, we had an "enduring friendship." In 1968 I took a class in Modern Poetry with Burlingame. We studied Eliot, Frost, Cummings, Stevens, and W. C. Williams. This was in the days of mimeographs, so he would occasionally bring sheets of poems in purple ink by contemporary poets such as Bly and Kinnell, translations of Neruda and Machado. He became my thesis advisor in graduate school, allowing me to present a creative thesis rather than a scholarly essay.

I learned recently that it is said of Barney Oldfield, an early American auto racer, he couldn't think unless he was going a hundred miles an hour. Bob Burlingame's wisdom says, "Slow down. See the world at two or three miles an hour." I love his eye for a clarity of detail as he walked in the deserts and mountains of his life. In his readings of his own poems, he also demonstrated the virtue of slowing down by mouthing each word slowly, giving the consonants and vowels a moment to rest in the ear.

He was a plain man of the Kansas plains who wandered into the Southwest. He came to Texas Western College in 1954. Over the decades he influenced many young poets now entering their own elderhood - Howard McCord, Pat Mora, and Ben Sáenz, among many others.

He offered another lesson, that the craft of poetry was about writing and not so much about publishing. Individual poems appeared in journals, including Kayak, Quarterly West, and Texas Observer. But a book of his New and Selected Poems came from Houston's Mutabilis Press in 2009 - Some Recognition of the Joshua Lizard. The litany at the end of my poem that follows, Plain, is taken from the titles of his poems in that book. At the time of his death in late September, it was noted that a book of desert poems was forthcoming. I look forward to it like water after a hike.

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PLAIN

in memory, Bob Burlingame

If he had been

a creature on

an endangered list,

he might have been

a blackfooted ferret

nestled

beneath a gnarled

hackberry stump creekside

off the plains of Kansas,

or the plainest of plover

only found rarely

in a high canyon

deep in the Guadalupes

under the white peak

of El Capitán -

ancient reef

overlooking the salt flats

of West Texas.

He becomes a joshua lizard,

dry weeds, yellowood,

rooster, fish, beaver, finch,

blue milkwort, wild cherry,

sandhill crane, turkey vulture,

sunflower, shark, dandelion,

portuguese man-of-war,

sycamore, mountain laurel -

all that sing in solitude.

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AFTER MY MENTOR

Stepping through the door

opened me like sugar,

triggered a beam.

The clarity of light

through the door

soaked to the marrow.

At home in words,

I'm caught in the continuo

of their music.

A page of poetry opened -

an aural architecture

in a sonnet by Donne.

Like this, only simpler,

a way of seeking

that includes seeing.

Sweet words of light

behind every door,

after my mentor.

(from Chrysalis, 2011)

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Here's a nice video of Gene singing a song at a party in the Sunset Heights neighborhood of El Paso, 2009. Puro Gene. Happy and at ease and wise.

Some Recognition of Salt Flat, Texas: Robert Burlingame

2011-11-18T17:13:00.001-07:00

This is how Bob Burlingame (aka Robert Burlingame) made poems. In the mornings, he’d take a cup of coffee or tea into his study and sit in front of his manual typewriter. He’d witness the coming light of the morning, he’d listen to the birds, and he’d sit there waiting for a poem to come along like a visitor. Knock, knock. It would be the poem—a collage of memories and thoughts and images. And he’d write it down. He’d play with it some. Many days a poem didn’t come. So he drank his coffee and went about his life. The next day the same thing. A morning ritual of gathering poems. An ancient sort of hunting ritual. This is what he told me when he still lived in El Paso. Then when he retired from teaching at UTEP he and his wife Linda moved near the Guadalupe Mountains.

His post office box was in Salt Flat, a weird little semi-ghost town on the west edge of the salt flats in the photo above. The peak is El Capitán, the highest mountain in Texas, and US Highway 62 climbs to a pass to the south of the peak. I believe their rented house was in there in the llano up above the salt flat and east of the peak.

My friend Joe Somoza corresponded with Bob. They’d go back and forth with some letters and stick in a poem as gifts to each other. An old fashioned friendship of two poets. Bob’s poems and letters were still hammered out on that manual. Joe had to write him now and then and tell him to change his ribbon. Joe and Jill visited Bob and Linda up there. The house was still on the grid but barely. West Texas is magnificently huge out there. Skies forever, the earth fluid and ceaseless like the sea. Bob loved it up. He liked the touch and smell and taste and vision of real stuff. Joshua lizards. Nickel Creek. The little sparrows and the turkey buzzards. Busy ants. Snakes.

Bob was a great admirer of Judson Crews and his poems. (Besides the Wikipedia piece, read Mark Weber here.) He liked all that sexual energy going wacko in the gardens of Judson’s poetics. Bob and I would giggle together about those garden poems. Dionysius dancing in the mud among the squash blossoms and cucumbers and peas and lettuce. Judson, such a handsome man, was a happy satyr. I won’t name names. But Bob’s poems were more reticent and meditative. Quiet and very attentive to detail. The sexual urge was there but it floated beneath the surface of the poem’s flowing. Once before Bob retired my son Johnny (still in high school) and I picked him up and we drove up to the Guadalupe Mountains National Park which surrounds El Capitán. I had never taken the middle trail up into the mountains—the Dog Canyon Trail or the Texas Trail. I can’t remember which. Bob led us up the mountain. He was a skinny guy and hiked with steady joy and passion. He had all that curly kinky reddish hair and he wore khakis and a flimsy pair of low top tennis shoes. It was a wonderful hike. We talked about poetry and about Johnny growing up and looked at things. We walked through a grove of Texas madrone trees. Like walking through a Judson Crews poem. It was so beautiful. A great and wonderful hike. And on the way back we stopped at that old gas station and convenience store that used to be perched up top where U.S. highway 62 climbs up out of the Salt Flats. We ate sandwiches and drank water and soda and talked and laughed. It was a wonderful day. I was so glad Johnny had a chance to come along with us.

A Texas madrone grove somewhere in West Texas

Another time we sat in a sandstone canyon. Big round stone. Scrawny trees and grasses rooted in dirt fissured into the rock. Bob, my friend Tom Baker and me. This was in at the tail end of the Organ Mountains between Las Cruces and El Paso. We ate sandwiches and watched a canyon wren dart among the rocks. You don’t get to watch canyon wrens often. They are timid birds but they have wonderful trilling echoing song. We didn’t talk. We didn’t want the bird to go away. I had forgotten this story until right now.

The odd thing is that I had a few exquisite experiences like these with Bob but then he and I would become lost to each other in our different worlds. We didn’t reach out to each other like he and Joe did. I regret that. And now I miss him.

Bob, like so many of my older friends, is pretty much un-googlable. That speaks well of him and makes me sad and proud at the same time. But here are some poems from his last book Some Recognition of the Joshua Lizard: New and Selected Poems from Mutabilis Press in Houston:

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DEAD FINCH IN THE GUADALUPES
With nothing to do
wakeup coffee warming his guts
he remembers the finch
     red at the throat
          he’d found in the yard dead
beneath the immense gaze of El Capitán

empty eye
piece of fluff rotted
to a perfect skull
     its frayed beauty struck
          tears down his face
as he saw but did not want to see
its panache spoiled in final reckoning

he wanted as little to go
though he knew he would
as if he’d gone already
     to the poppy’s yellow
          bloom bravely
separate on a rocky shelf
crisp injunction to tearful woe.

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CONNECTING

A friend writes me
a letter, can you believe
tells me he’ll look up my poem’s subject
on the Internet, that endlessly ramifying root
holding us all together as we sway above the earth.

I think fine, I think
of the undulating flights of sandhill cranes
finding their way through a breezy heaven,
the rank perfumes of lakes and rivers below
     their guiding compass.

I think sure, I think
of the busy ants outside my door as they signal
one another to carry in more food,
the soft sibilance of antly scraping telling
     us the wisdom of saving.

I think yes, yes, why not
go to the cold glass page impersonal as a glove
go to it, the book is there these days,
or a view of it, though somewhere
in a dim library you’ll find
     its original dusty and ignored
          its pages yellowing beneath
the smudged lipstick left there once by a girl
who read it in bed, her warm flesh pressing.

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AT NICKEL CREEK
(for Joseph Rice)

A while ago we walked
     up to where you’d stayed,
          old friend

we saw where you’d slept
     blue-blanketed narrow bed
          and the glassed wide doorway
you’d gazed through onto the mountain

the first night it rained
     thunder rolled and rumbled
          as you told us later,
your face a smile but serious

we had gathered my poems
     hundreds on white sheets, poems
          reaching back
half a century

but what you remembered most
     was the fierce wind
          out of the pass
and the stars over the mountain’s slopes
that, too, is a poem, you said.

The Luminous Beast & the Cairn for Janine

2011-11-11T11:12:00.000-07:00

Cairn for Janine Pommy-Vega

I’ve said this before but, since I’m getting old, it’s okay to repeat myself. Jerome Rothenberg (I think it was him) called poetry “a luminous beast.” Some sort of mythological animal that embodied the words and poems and ideas of all poets. The tail of this beast stretches back into pre-literate times when history was story and poetry was spoken language that had the power to shape the natural world. And it still survives in our language in these digitized bits of information on a computer screen. In poems we all provide sustenance to the beast as it squirms its way into the 21st Century. Like the Tao, it knows its way. I’ve come to trust the beast’s instincts explicitly.

The beast rumbled in my imagination when I saw this photograph of Bob Arnold’s cairn dedicated to the memory of Janine Pommy-Vega (more here and here). It's on his land in rural Vermont. The stone was harvested right there. It would be a nice place for Janine to rattle her gourd, to beat on a drum, the chant her poems. She would love to dance on a cairn.

Janine was a good friend and I came to know her poetry way back when through Longhouse Publishers and Booksellers. Longhouse is the collaborative project of Bob and Susan Arnold. The cairn for Janine is on their property. The poetry and the publishing and work of chainsaws and stone and cooking and eating food and the warmth of burning wood is all part of their one life.

I’ve never met Bob or Susan. Yet I’ve known of their work—Bob’s poems and prose, their Longhouse venture and their backwoods lifestyle in Vermont—and I’ve fitfully corresponded with them for most of my adult life. They’ve even been generous enough to publish my work in their magazine and in their delicious Longhouse libritos (little books). As I’ve said in a recent letter to Bob, they feel like intimate friends. That’s because we share a common bond with the Luminous Beast.

Please read the Kent Johnson interview of Bob that appeared in Jacket Magazine. It’s important stuff, and it documents a way to live one’s life fully engaged but doing the work of one’s essence. An ancient way to dance. Visit the Longhouse website and buy books there. Read Bob’s work and the poets that he and Susan especially support. Now, I see from the website, Bob has become the literary executor for Janine, Cid Corman and Lorrine Neidecker and he’s constructing websites to celebrate their work. I’m sure Susan is doing at least half the work. Wow.

Bob and Susan Arnold understand.

Bob and Susan Arnold at work in Bearsville, NY.

2005 photo by Janine Pommy Vega

On the Occasion of the marriage of Johnny and Ailbhe

2011-10-31T15:28:00.000-06:00

On October 1st Johnny Byrd, our oldest son, married Ailbhe Cormack. It was a wonderful occasion, and together they seem such a remarkable couple. All three of our kids were together, our five grandchildren. Plus brothers and sisters and friends from around the U.S. Bridget Cormack, Ailbhe’s mother, also had her three daughters together—plus sisters and relatives from Ireland and Australia. It was three days of celebration. Ailbhe and Johnny had gone whole hog and paid the postage too. On Friday night outside in the backyard Lee and I hosted a party for relatives, friends from out of town and the good friends of Ailbhe’s and Johnny’s who did much of the heavy lifting of helping. Big sister Susie emceed, brother Andy toasted them, as well as many others. The San Patricios (yerno Eddie Holland, Ailbhe, Johnny and the gang) played Irish music. The next day was a formal Catholic wedding (this is El Paso after all) at the historic Holy Family Church in Sunset Heights, then a six-hour blowout rock n’ roll party with food and wine and beer up McKelligan Canyon, and the whole thing was topped off by a brunch the next morning at Bridget Cormack’s (Ailbhe’s mom) plus relatives from afar hanging out at our house all day long afterwards.

I was very happy, Lee was very happy. The whole weekend was special. I am always being reminded how essential ritual is to being in a human community. Large or small rituals. A wedding or a funeral or a birth or simply breaking bread together with a close friend or a loved one. Saying a prayer together. Holding hands. Being awake to the life force running through us all. “It’s tribal stuff,” daughter Susie told me. I was asking her about how and when she and her friends (glorious men and women all close to 40 years old) would do this circle dance, the music blasting away, and one by one, the dancers would enter the center of the circle to dance. To strut their stuff. To explain through the music and their bodies who they are. She said, “Dad, you used to do that stuff too. You just don’t remember.”

Well, we didn’t exactly do the circle dance, but as a teenager on Friday nights at the Clear Pool in Memphis, the last song—maybe Larry Williams (“Boney Maronie,” “Dizzy Miss Lizzie,” “Short Fat Fannie”) making all the white girls go crazy—was always “When the Saints Go Marching In.” There’d be a long line of us snaking around the dance floor. It was some kind of joyous drunken tribal community. I have always believed that the rock n’ roll and the rhythm and blues music (mostly the music of Southern Black America) saved my life. But that’s a story that goes someplace else.

When Ailbhe’s and Johnny’s wedding weekend was over Lee and I were exhausted. Physically. Emotionally. We had witness and experienced our fill. It was like we had stepped aside like our parents had done before us. And these were our children, these were our grandchildren, these were our friends and brothers and sisters who we’ve grown old with, this was our community. Our children were at the center of all of this. It was our time in so many ways to be witnesses. I’ll be thinking about this for a long time.

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I'm not sure who took the photo above, but it's an iconic traditional photo it works for me. Our close friend artist Jill Somoza took the photos of Lee and me. We were so happy. Below the photographs are two short poems I read at the night-before party. I wrote “Memo #6” on a beautiful night 30 years ago. We had only been in our home on Louisville Street for four or so years. Now he’s a few years short of 40. The age I was when I wrote the poem. The other poem is from my recent book—White Panties, Dead Friends & Other Bits and Pieces of Love. It’s a reworking of a poem I wrote in the 80s. I was proud when Ailbhe chose the last part of the poem for the wedding invitations.

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Memo #6

When me and my son pee outside in the darkness
He looks at the ground and I look at the stars.

He is eight years old and I am almost 40.
That is the difference.

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A Story about Marriage

Once upon a time
a long while ago
there was a man

who received all
blessings under the sun.
Yet, he missed

something essential:
there was no place
to practice his gifts.

So he asked God
for the blessing of death.
God gave to him a woman.

But other peoples
tell the same story
differently.

Once upon a time
a long while ago
there was a woman

who received all
blessings from the earth.
Yet, she also missed

something essential:
there was no place
to practice her gifts.

So she too asked God
for the blessing of death.
God gave to her a man.

Because of these stories
babies are now baptized
in their mother's blood.

And from these two stories
did wise Solomon first
create his eternal seal.

So many stories, my love,
quilted together,
are true and real, like

you and me, me
and you, we practice
our marriage

in this little bit of
time and space—apart,
together.

Amen.

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Raising three kids has been for Lee and me the most interesting and exciting thing we’ve done in our lives. A truly remarkable journey. I wish many blessings on them and their families and their communities.

The Great Outback

2011-09-19T08:56:00.004-06:00

My friend Luis Villegas—“the fine arts handyman”—came out of his semi-retirement and built a deck for our backyard. We’re getting ready for Johnny Byrd’s wedding to Ailbhe Cormack and at the family party the night before we need a stage from which to declare our love. Lee’s been wanting some sort of boardwalk contraption for a long time, but the wedding pushed the ball downhill. Of course our deck had to be different. It had to be shaped like a piece of pie sitting into the corner of our backyard. A square deck is not what we wanted. Luis was hesitant. He’d had a heart attack and he couldn’t do any heavy lifting. Not to worry, I told him. I’d help, I’d hire our friend Gabriel Espinoza. So Luis thought about it some, drew up the design and did the job, along with Gabriel and me, and it’s miraculous. He even curved two 2”x6”x16’ boards to fit the pie around the outside of its edges. A true mystery. Luis kept mumbling about the Steinway curve. I will tell you sometime how he did it.

I’m so happy with our deck that in the early mornings I drag all my cushions outside do my meditation. The sun is rising, the neighborhood is waking up, the air is cool, and I can see the mountains when I look to the west. And, because the deck levitates above the earth on concrete blocks, the ants don’t come climbing up my legs. Life is good. So a few mornings ago I crossed my legs and sat down on my zafu. The full moon was falling in the dawn sky behind the mountains. I bowed, straightened my back, head pushing the sky aloft, and sat there in my goofy half-lotus. My breath settled into my diaphragm. Time passed like it always does. Ernie our big black cat nudged me. I keep a wide spot on my zabuton reserved for Ernie. I patted him some and he curled up beside me. This is his morning pleasure. I returned to my sitting. A little breeze.

Then I heard some scuffling off to the side. I didn’t pay attention for a few minutes but after a while I had no choice. Clovis, the young grey tabby cat from next door, had caught himself a bird. A yellow-rumped warbler. Poor thing. Clovis is quick and he likes to perch in the trees when he hunts. We think he carries some Siamese blood in him. Clovis had broken one of the bird’s wings and had the bird in its jaws and was shaking it furiously. Then he plopped it down in the grass and watched it for a while. The bird lay there panting in desperation. Then he flapped wildly his wings and try to drag himself away from his tormenter. His exertions made Clovis wonderfully happy. He pounced on the bird and shook him and pranced around. It was his show for Ernie and me. Ernie simply watched, not moving, with that unattached curiosity and grace that cats possess. I tried to do the same. But of course my mind quickly contorted into a mild ethical turmoil. What should I do? The bird was suffering terribly. It would soon die. I thought maybe I should grab rescue the bird from Clovis’ teeth and kill it quickly. I’ve done this before with wounded birds on the road. Slammed it against the pavement or crushed its head with my foot. Not fun. But quick and to the point. But I didn’t do that. I was just sitting there--correct posture, hands lightly clasped in the cosmic mudra, my breath going in and out--in Clovis’ and Ernie’s territory. This is what they do day and night--hunt and kill birds and eat them. No lesson I could teach Clovis, no bird's life I could save. I was their witness and in a way that was a privilege. I didn’t make any decision. Instead, I went back to my sitting. The intermittent scuffling sound grew faint and disappeared. Fifteen minutes later the alarm bell rang. I looked up. Clovis was no longer there. Only a few feathers remained. Clovis had devoured the bird completely.

TIM HARDAWAY & DON'T RECALL MY DAUGHTER

2011-09-16T13:02:00.000-06:00

So why am sitting on the ground videoing a Tim Hardaway press conference?

Well, I don’t do too much El Paso political stuff on my blog, and Tim doesn’t like to go into that melee either. In fact, his clumsy entrance into a hot national political issue (in 2007 he announced himself to be homophobic) is the reason he was the subject of my amateur video. Tim, like he says in the video, likes to be remembered for “the UTEP 2-step” and “the killer cross-over.” Oh well.

Lee and I do get involved in local El Paso politics from time to time—sometimes the result of our daughter Susie Byrd (our oldest) representing District #2 on City Council. That’s our district, the district she and her two brothers Johnny and Andy grew up in. In fact, Susie, her husband Eddie Holland and our three Hollandbyrd grandchildren live next door. That’s cool by us. Very cool.

Anyway, Pastor Tom Brown—a right-wing religious (Christian) reactionary—is leading an effort to recall Susie. The basic story line is a bit contorted. The City Council voted to extend health benefits to the partners (unmarried, gay, lesbian) of city employees. Most cities already have these rules. Even Southern cities. It’s the right thing to do and it’s good business. Especially for cities competing with other cities to attract new business. Tom Brown and his cronies blasted the Council. And they drafted “a family values” petition and ordinance to do away with the Council’s vote. The ordinance they drafted was vague and confusing, and they refused to edit their proposed ordinance for clarity. But they highlighted “family values.” They gathered enough signatures, the city held a one-issue election (a very small percentage of registered voters participated) and the ordinance passed. The Council then voted to rescind their new ordinance by a slim margin—4 for, 4 against, with the Mayor breaking the tie with a FOR. So Tom Brown and others are now gathering signatures to recall the Mayor, Steve Brown and Susie. (The terms of Rachel Quintana and Beto O’Rourke expired and they are no longer on Council.)

Susie Byrd, Tim Hardaway, Jody Casey-Feinberg and me @ Cinco Puntos

So enter Tim Hardaway. In El Paso Tim’s remembered for those great UTEP teams (1985 through 1989) where he dominated the Western Athletic Conference. I was a big fan. My friend Tom Baker and I used to go watch those games. Two years running they had Tim, Antonio Davis and Greg Foster—all future NBAers—on the same team. The legendary Don Haskins was the coach. We were big fans. I followed Tim’s career in the NBA enthusiastically. I’ve still pissed off at Chris Webber for pouting his way out of his contract with Golden State when they had Tim, Webber, and Chris Mullin. Shit.

But post-career—despite an extraordinary NBA career (perhaps even a Hall of Fame Career)—his reputation took a nosedive. That’s because he’s now too often remembered for saying, “Well, you know I hate gay people, so I let it be known. I don't like gay people and I don't like to be around gay people. I am homophobic. I don't like it. It shouldn't be in the world or in the United States.” He was making these statements during a radio interview and in response to the publication of John Amaechi’s book Man in the Middle where Amaechi announced he is gay.

So in the video he announces his change of heart and he gives his support to the NO RECALL Movement in El Paso. Daughter Susie, and NO RECALL leaders, especially Jody Casey-Feinberg, arranged the press conference. Concurrently they were announcing a NO RECALL Rally for the next Sunday.

Good for Tim. I enjoyed talking to him. He was in town for a charity golf tournament and he had agreed to do the press conference. Beforehand, he came by the Cinco Puntos office and we talked basketball and Susie told him the story I just told you. He talked about his family coming to him after he made his homophobic statement and how they listed friends and relatives who are gay or lesbian. He was taken aback, he said. These were people he cared for. And so he came slowly around the corner toward understanding. Besides, he seemed like a nice guy, one of those guys who spent a lot of time in a gym and whose world too much was defined by coaches and teammates. That’s another kind of closet or cloister or whatever. So when he foolishly made his statement and it was blasted over national sports news shows he had opened some doors that he didn’t know were there.

Good for Tim. I’m glad he did what he did.

RANDOM HEARSE: Independent publishing as pure wise joy!

2011-07-31T22:31:00.000-06:00

Thanks, Bill Deemer!

Thanks, Kenneth Patchen!

Do it yourself!

Ensōs go round and round: Ed Baker & JB Bryan

2011-07-15T11:30:00.002-06:00

West Texas Ensō

by JB Bryan

The Perfect Ensō

by Ed Baker

A few weeks ago I blogged the beautiful and witty ensō by Ashikaga Shizan (1859-1959)--“Eat this and drink a cup of tea.” which is in the collection of my friend Bruce Kennedy. Then, within the next several days, I received the following images from my poet and painter friends JB Bryan and Ed Baker. I’m a huge fan of both men—their work as poets and as painters. Each has found his own path through the cantankerous side of the American grain. They echo each other but they are totally different—different as Albuquerque is to Maryland. Spend some time with their work, buy their books and art, celebrate your own life.

Amor por Juárez: Marching for Peace, June 10 2011

2011-06-14T17:19:00.000-06:00

Friday evening, June 10th, 2011, citizens of El Paso marched across the International Bridge to Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, to join la Caravana por Paz y Justicia, led by Mexican poet Javier Sicilia and citizens of our sister city to protest the on-going violence in Mexico, especially in Juarez. For more information about the march, read Debbie Nathan's article here in Colorlines

When I have the opportunity, I will add more about this event and the pact that was signed by organizations on both sides of the river.

The End of the World

2011-06-01T11:38:00.000-06:00

Eat This and Have a Cup of Tea

Calligraphy (Enso, or circle, and words) by Ashikaga Shizan (1859-1959)

Many thanks to Bruce Kennedy

What Happened?
Sunday, May 22, 2011

New York City

The world was supposed to end yesterday
But Paul and Timothy got it all wrong
They talked to God to see where their math went askew
God said the End of the World needs more juice
Like that jazz sextet at the African Market on 116th
The other side of Malcolm X
Three black guys on the brass horns talking New Age Zulu
Piano Cuban talks back voodoo bebop
The middle-aged Jew translates the Word on his drums
Likewise that skinny Asian American woman thumping the standup bass
(Where’d she come from?)
The Muslims are praising Allah on their prayer rugs
An ancient Japanese guy is slurping at his noodles
Rumor is that he’s enlightened
Although you’d never guess it
He’s eyeing the young women of poetry
Lesbians or straight he has no preferences
They are wearing skirts, they’re wearing naked legs
Their swaying hips prophesy the Ying and the Yang
Today they are our gate into the meadow
Tomorrow perhaps a mockingbird
Summertime and the living is easy, sweetheart
Maybe the world has already ended
Maybe we’re the last to know

●

I usually don’t put my own poetry up on my blog but I’m back from three weeks in New York City. In New York I always get a great feeling of liberation. The rain. The gardens and parks. The people, always the people. Sometimes I think its simply from being among all those people climbing up out of the subways like the animals that we are. This time the subways and the streets were full of hawkers handing out the news that the world was going to end of Saturday, May 21. One yellow broadside I took home was using Paul's letters to Timothy for their calculations of doom. I tried to read it but got bored and watched the Mavericks beat the OKC Thunder. It's an old disease from my childhood. I went to bed as usual and nothing happened. I woke up to a beautiful day and I went to the African Market on 116th Street in Harlem looking for a new kofi, a round hatless hat to keep my head warm and protected from the sun. It's a good place. All sorts of stuff from Africa. A sextet was playing good New York City jazz. A young Asian-American woman was playing the standup bass surrounded by four black men (a trumpet, two sax, one piano) and some kind of white guy hammering away at his drum kit. Obviously, the world hadn’t ended. That was cool by me. I jotted down some notes and that evening I wrote this poem.

The wonderful Enso by Ashikaga Shizan is from the private collection of calligraphy of photographer Bruce Kennedy. I ran into Bruce at the Still Mind Zendo one Tuesday night that I went scavenging a place to sit zazen. I know Bruce from our respective lives in the publishing industry. But I didn’t know he was a fellow Zenster, nor did I know that he was a wonderful photographer and a collector of calligraphy. It was a delightful surprise. And the Ashikaga Shizan fits so perfectly with what I wanted out of this poem. In fact, it says it better.

I wish I had known Steve Carey

2011-04-21T10:00:00.002-06:00

POEM

Oh, Mom, it is so beautiful

--Steve Carey, 1945-1989

The Selected Poems of Steve Carey

The Corner of Clark and Kent:: A Little Something for Wayne

2011-04-18T18:40:00.000-06:00

Wayne Crawford (1946-2011)

I knew Wayne through poetry--his poetry, my poetry, poetry readings and the beast of poetry itself, what Martin Espada calls the Republic of Poetry, a particular kind of glue. Besides his own writing, he was an activist for poetry and the arts, especially in Las Cruces, NM. I want to tell something of his story because he was a poet, a storyteller too, and his life since he arrived in Las Cruces seems to me pertinent to the our culture. Las Cruces is almost an hour away from our house, but I’d see Wayne at all (literally, “all”) the poetry readings I went to in Cruces, many here in El Paso, and at all of the Somozas legendary Thanksgiving dinners. He was always good to talk to, sometimes funny, sometimes serious, all the time full of wit and intellectual curiosity. Over the last few years he was not in good health, always in some sort of physical agony, but he carried that pain with a certain grace. And I had come to admire his poetry—always unexpected pieces of his imagination—and his readings in which he'd always be trying something new. All his life, it seemed, he had been a devotee to the mythology of Clark Kent and Superman. Shape-changer. Transformer. Mytho-americano hero. Maybe that helps explain what happened—after he retired from teaching at the Western Illinois University (students attest he had been a wonderful teacher) at the age of 55, around the year 2000, and moved with his family to Las Cruces, he decided to step out of the closet. He had been too long in there. It smelled of his sweat and his sorrow. He was a gay man, he said, and he wanted to live openly as a gay man. It broke his wife Barbara’s heart. Of course, she probably knew already. Bedrooms don’t hold many secrets. Not after 30 or so years anyway. Still, she must have hoped he would change his mind, changed his heart and body--she must have prayed to God and to hell with the Clark Kent and Lois Lane rigmarole. But Wayne had walked away. He had done his job as a married man and as a father and now he had to be himself. Wayne’s poetry flourished. He was writing daily—strange surreal poems, Superhero poems, serious political commentary poems, funny poems, frivolous poems, anything that popped into his head. He worked on a crime noir novel and a non-fiction book about a crime back in Illinois. He became a leader in the local poetry scene, organizing open mic readings, sending out a monthly newsletter about poetry events, serving as editor of Sin Fronteras (a poetry collective), publishing the poetry e-zine Lunarosity and hosting a monthly poetry workshop at his house that included poets Joe Somoza, Dick Thomas, Sheila Black and others. He fell in love with Randy Granger—flute player, composer, musician—, and he invited Randy into his home. They lived in a sprawling house on the West Mesa overlooking the Rio Grande Valley, the lights of Las Cruces, and the magnificent Organ Mountains. Their garden was wonderful place to be at twilight on the end of a perfect October day. The garden had a small pond with Koi and goldfish and lilies. The pond was fed by a bubbling fountain, really a contraption of found junk that Wayne pieced together. It was an ugly thing really, but that was okay. It had a peculiar and wise charm and, besides, Wayne made it and he thought it beautiful. I bow to people who do things with their hands to bring home-made beauty into their homes. But of course there’s always trouble. Without trouble there’s no story. No poetry. Even for Clark Kent who turned into—not Superman—but Wayne the gay poet. His son John moved in. John is a good young man, shy and introspective. All his life he’s suffered from cerebral palsy that runs down the left side of his body like a clogged up drain. John and Randy were friends at first but as time wore on they got in each other’s way. One the lover, the other the son. How could it not happen? They, like us, are human beings. John moved away. He too fell in love, Melissa, a wonderful young woman in El Paso, but he stayed close to his dad. He just stayed away from the house. Wayne was happy with that. He loved his son John, he loved Randy. The same tension grew with Wayne’s daughter but from afar. Children must watch. Their mother was very sad. She still harbored her hopes for Wayne’s return but had moved back to Illinois. Her sense of herself had been pulled out from under her. All the habits of everyday life are wiped away. It opens up all sorts of questions about who we really are. Life went along. It always does. Wayne had a heart attack and survived. He hurt his neck and back terribly and had to wear a brace for a long time. The doctors had a terrible time trying to control his blood pressure. But he continued to write and to live a full intellectual and creative life. Then he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He wouldn’t live. The doctors tried hard—radiation and all the rest. But Wayne was wasting away, he made his plans to die, sorting out his belongings for his children and for Randy, saying goodbye to friends, all the while the cancer eating at him. Friends—especially Dick and Sherry Thomas, Joe and Jill Somoza—helped Randy, who was always there along with hospice, to care for him. Son John and his girlfriend Melissa drove him to Houston for treatments. “Wonderful and special times for John and me,” Melissa said, “in the midst of that sorrow of his dying.” Sure enough, Wayne died on March 5, 2011. Ten days later his ex-wife Barbara had a massive heart attack and died. “Her heart was broken,” John said. Our lives are like this. We breathe in, we breathe out, and then we don't.

May they both rest in peace.

●

The Corner of Clark and Kent

Most of us boys were born
under the hood of a car, forearms
like Popeye's, pliers for fingers, grease
behind our ears.
By the time we were thirteen
we knew everything there was to know
about standard transmissions and short cuts
through country roads.
We were raised at the corner of Clark
and Kent where gods descend into men,
men into steel machines, bodies
built like Buicks,
faces framed by work.
We learned to eat with our mouths' full,
talk when we needed to piss, grunt
and groan through meals.
My daddy said I had what it took.
I just didn't have the desire
to spend my life with my dick
on a fender,
my head beneath a hood. I pulled out,
like I told Jenni I would, pulled out
before I was married and mortgaged, fighting
whoever came near.
One day I was thinking about Jesus, remembering
"wipe the dust from your cuff." I hit
interstate 80 at 75,
picked up
Jimmy, drove west 'til we ran out of talk.
He said he missed Cindy more than he'd thought.
I didn't miss Jenni enough
to go back
to a Sinclair future or a body shop job
in a town with gravel driveways, no
traffic lights, lots of old family vans,
balance
and align myself with steel-belted men
who stick oil-stained fingers in their ears, walk
like they're full of shit, sit like they're
straddling a gear,
and all I kept thinking was, Jesus,
I'm going to end up in a neighborhood bar
where you know a man by his truck and his tab,
spitting image
of his daddy, same bruises, same worts, same scars.
I pulled out, like I told Jimmy I would,
pulled onto the highway and never went back.
Sometimes
I wonder if I'd been better off
chained to a white picket fence
than wondering how to make sense
of dreams
that don't connect and can't be recharged
at the corner of Clark and Kent.

Watch Presumed Guilty online until March 31

2011-03-22T12:38:00.001-06:00

If you live along the border, especially here in El Paso a few minutes from Juarez, you are always hearing terrible stories about the Juarez police and Mexican army abuse of civilians, seemingly with a free reign to do what they want. This impunity extends into the Mexican judicial system where the Mexican judges at all levels act so many times without any regard to the facts. It's more about money and power and fear, the old mordida system--a system that's lost its core integrity. The movie Presumed Guilty by Roberto Hernandez and Geoffrey Smith document one such case. But what makes the movie so much important to me is that I've met and talked with Kevin Huckabee, the father of Shoun Huckabee, who has been incarcerated in the infamous Cereso Prison in Juarez now for over a year. He never got a fair trial and there's good reason to believe that the evidence that put him in jail was planted by the Mexican army. Shoun and his friend Carlos Quijas had witnesses to support their claim, but one witness was killed, the father of another was killed, and all other witnesses have disappeared. Who is to blame them? So Shoun and Carlos languish in prison, learning the hard truths of life in a prison where everything is bought and paid for. Kevin, who is in poor health, goes over as much as he can, he helps pay for bribes to keep his son safe, he negotiates with the Mexican prison system, he enlists the aide of Amnesty International and lawyers and activists--anybody who can help. Infuriating in all this madness is the U.S. government's total lack of help. Our U.S. Representative, Silvestre Reyes, totally ignores Kevin's pleas for help, saying he trusts the Mexican legal system, saying his hands are tied, saying it is not his problem. Meanwhile, the U.S. government will send Bill Richardson around the globe to extricate American citizens from similar situations, it refuses to pressure the Mexican government for release of its citizens five minutes from its border.

Below is the introduction and a link to the Wall Street Journal article by Nicholas Casey that documents the terrible dilemma that Shoun Huckabee and Carlos Quijas find themselves in. The El Paso Times has totally ignored the issue. And below that is a description of the movie Presumed Guilty. The movie is essential to anybody wanting to more fully understand the distress of the citizens of Mexico. It's available free for streaming on PBS POV. Please send the link along, especially to those able to raise a voice in support of a true justice system in Mexico.

July 17, 2010 from the Wall Street Journal by Nicolas Casey.
CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico—Two Americans were driving back to El Paso, Texas, last December after an afternoon across the border in Ciudad Juárez. A few blocks from the border, they were surrounded by Mexican army trucks and pulled from their Dodge Ram.

Violence escalates in the drug wars in Mexico as a car bomb set off by a cell phone kills at least three people. Deborah Lutterbeck reports. Video Courtesy of Reuters.

Mexico's military says it found two suitcases full of marijuana in the cab of the pickup truck. Two soldiers later testified that they drove the two Americans to a military compound on the outskirts of town, questioned them briefly, then turned them over to civilian authorities. The Americans were charged with possession of marijuana with intent to sell.

Those two men—Shohn Huckabee, 23 years old, and Carlos Quijas, 36—are being held in a Ciudad Juárez jail. They tell a different story about what happened that night. They say Mexican soldiers planted the marijuana in their truck. When they arrived at the military base, they say, they were blindfolded, tied up, hit with rifle butts, shocked with electricity and threatened with death.

Presumed Guilty
Directed by Roberto Hernandez & Geoffrey Smith

In December 2005 Toño Zuniga was picked up off the street in Mexico City, Mexico, and sentenced to 20 years for murder based on the testimony of a single, shaky eyewitness. PRESUMED GUILTY tells the heart-wrenching story of a man who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

A friend of Toño’s contacted two young lawyers, Roberto Hernández and Layda Negrete, who gained prominence in Mexico when they helped bring about the release of another innocent man from prison. As Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) legal researchers, they tracked an alarming history of corruption in the Mexican justice system (93% of inmates never see an arrest warrant, and 93% of defendants never see a judge).

Looking into Toño’s case, Roberto and Layda managed to get a retrial–on camera—and enlisted the help of filmmaker Geoffrey Smith (THE ENGLISH SURGEON) to chronicle the saga. Shot over three years with unprecedented access to the Mexican courts and prisons, this dramatic story is a searing indictment of a justice system that presumes guilt.

Japan (2)

2011-03-20T15:45:00.000-06:00

ACT GREAT

What is the key
To untie the knot of your mind’s suffering?

What
Is the esoteric secret
To slay the crazed one whom each of us
Did wed

And who can ruin
Our heart’s and eye’s exquisite tender
Landscape?

Hafiz has found
Two emerald words that
Restored
Me

That I now cling to as I would sacred
Tresses of my Beloved’s
Hair:

Act great.
My dear, always act great.

What is the key
To untie the knot of the mind’s suffering?

Benevolent thought, sound
And movement.

~ Hafiz ~

(The Gift – versions of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky)

For those brave souls who Act Great

that others may live....

●

I stole this from a great website--PANHALA--I only found this week through a newsletter I receive. I've been astonished, reading about the news in Japan, the men who are walking into the inferno of those reactors, doing their incredibly dangerous job, acting great, as Hafiz has said. Hafiz was the great Iranian (Persian) poet and mystic. The Panhala website marries poems with images and the results are many times very beautiful and meaningful.

I wish the people of Japan peace and good health.

Japan

2011-03-15T16:42:00.000-06:00

The following five poems from Japan were translated by Kenneth Rexroth (see his beautiful book 100 Poems from the Japanese). I receive the Village Zendo Newsletter. A person who I assume is Nina K posted them this morning, having received them from another list operated by Larry Robinson of California, "who sends out poems almost daily." The poems found a place in my heart today, so I thought to share them. I wish you are all well. Peace and hope for the people of Japan. For us all.

●

I can no longer tell dream from reality.
Into what world shall I awake
from this bewildering dream?

                       — Akazome Emon

●

The fireflies' light
How easily it goes on
How easily it goes out again.

                       — Chine-Jo

●

The crying plovers
On darkening Narumi
Beach, grow closer, wing
To wing, as the moon declines
Behind the rising tide.

                       — Fujiwara No Sueyoshi

●

I loathe the seas of being
And not being
And long for the mountain
Of bliss untouched by
The changing tides.

                       — Anonymous

●

If only the world
Would remain this way,
Some fishermen
Drawing a little rowboat
Up the riverbank.

                       — Minamoto No Sanetomo

Mas: Puro John Ross, RIP

2011-01-22T18:15:00.000-07:00

"Then there was John. Even in his seventies, a tall imposing figure with a narrow face, a scruffy goatee and mustache, a Che T-shirt covered by a Mexican vest, a Palestinian battle scarf thrown around his neck, bags of misery and compassion under his eyes, offset by his wonderful toothless smile and the cackling laugh that punctuated his comical riffs on the miserable state of the universe."
--Frank Bardacke, in the Nation

"Life, like reporting, is a kind of death sentence. Pardon me for having lived it so fully."

--John Ross, in refusing to accept recognition from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, 2009. They wanted to celebrate him for telling "stories nobody else could or would tell." John defiantly created his own story that they would not want to tell. Here's the poem he read to them to conclude his bit of very public guerrilla theater.

RONCO Y DULCE

Coming out of the underground
On the BART escalator,
The Mission sky
Is washed by autumn,
The old men and their garbage bags
Are clustered in the battered plaza
We once named for Cesar Augusto Sandino.
Behind me down below
In the throat of the earth
A rough bracero sings
Of his comings and goings
In a voice as ronco y dulce
As the mountains of Michoacan and Jalisco
For the white zombies
Careening downtown
To the dot coms.
They are trying to kick us
Out of here
Again
They are trying to drain
This neighborhood of color
Of color
Again.
This time we are not moving on.
We are going to stick to this barrio
Like the posters so fiercely pasted
To the walls of La Mision
With iron glue
That they will have to take them down
Brick by brick
To make us go away
And even then our ghosts
Will come home
And turn those bricks
Into weapons
And take back our streets
Brick by brick
And song by song
Ronco y dulce
As Jalisco and Michaocan
Managua, Manila, Ramallah
Pine Ridge, Vietnam, and Africa.
As my compa QR say
We here now motherfuckers
Tell the Klan and the Nazis
And the Real Estate vampires
To catch the next BART out of here
For Hell.

Three recent tributes to John Ross really catch his flair and his life, so I thought I would link to them: The Frank Bardacke piece in Counterpunch linked to above; "Rebel Journalist John Ross, the Master of Speaking Truth to Power, Is Dead" by blogger John Nichols in the Nation; and "John Ross, 1938-2011, Beat Poet, Revolutionary Journalist" by Tom Robbins in the Village Voice. Each writer seems to have known John well and loved and respected him. It's nice to see John get all this attention. The Nation piece has John's complete rant of the speech to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. He was a Wobbly in the original sense. He spoke his truth to power, he put himself in danger, he was brilliant, he was raw, he was witty, and he loved the Lakers (why, I don't know) and probably the Knicks too if they would ever get their act together.

JOHN ROSS, 1938-2011

2011-01-17T11:17:00.001-07:00

Photograph by Elizabeth Bell

JOHN ROSS: 1938-2011

Listen to him here on Progressive Radio

Rebel Journalist, Poet, Novelist, Human Shield

He was a good friend. May he rest in peace.

THE REVOLUTION IS NOT LIKE A FAUCET

The Revolution does not begin
over coffee at the Epicurean,
does not begin over gravy and grits,
in the first joint, the last hit,
the Morning Chron, your morning shit.
The Revolution does not begin
pulling greenchain on the graveyard shift,
or making the welfare line by nine.
The Revolution doesn't begin
in your mind, your heart, your liver,
your prick, doesn't begin
when you clench your fist,
The Revolution doesn't being in 1776,
1917, the depression, the dawn,
doesn't begin with gurus, Cinques,
the news from L.A. Havana, manana.
The Revolution doesn't begin
with both barrels, at the bottom of bottles,
on the pages of bibles, with the blues.
The Revolution does not begin,
The Revolution has no beginning.
The Revolution is unending.
The Revolution is not like a faucet –
you can't turn it on and off.
The Revolution leaks all the time –
you can’t call a plumber to fix it.

Janine Pommy Vega: 1942 - December 23 2010

2010-12-24T16:45:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Janine Pommy Vega took the journey to the other side. We found out last night, just before heading off to bed. I was doing one of my habitual tours of the internet. One stop is Ron Silliman's blog. When I saw that wild spiked hair appearing on the screen I knew she had died. Lee and I lay in bed talking about Janine, her visits to El Paso, her being so much alive. We'll miss her. Here's a video of her reading the poem "Habeas Corpus" which reflects deeply her work with prisoners, talking with them, learning about them, helping them to write. May she rest in peace. As my previous blog shows, she has been in our hearts for a week or so. We'll miss her. But her poetry is still here.

Janine Pommy Vega & the Black Sparrow

2010-12-16T14:00:00.001-07:00

Kitchen Dream

In my room over the kitchen
in Barranco, the shadow of incense
curls across the wooden floor
I lean over the kingdom
of my possessions, and just like that
one day
the smoke will stop

A pigeon lands outside my door
and coos coming in and
out of silence
like a life
lit up for a moment
like someone at the mouth of a river
rushing out to sea.

--Barranco, Lima, Peru, September 1993

●

This is another reason I love being a poet.

Last weekend I was cleaning my office at home--always a long process because I start picking up books, especially poetry books, and opening them up to random pages and reading. So I picked up Janine Pommy Vega’s book The Mad Dogs of Trieste and opened to that little poem above. I was enchanted with the poem. Sad. Wise. Joyful. All at the same time. I forgot my cleaning-up tasks and spent an hour or so with Janine's poems. She’s a good friend and a wonderful poet. I’ve known her work a long time through Bob and Susan Arnold’s Longhouse Books. She came to El Paso twice, both times performing her poetry at the Bridge Center for Contemporary Art and we became good friends. She’s a great storyteller, and she told us about leaving her New Jersey home at the age of 15 and moving to NYC to be a poet. Like so many of us she had read Kerouac's On the Road and was, well, persuaded. She took up with the Beats and began being a poet. All those legendary times with Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Ray Bremser…you can read about it in the many books about the Beats. But like all the other poets of those times, NYC was only a jumping off place for her journeys into the world. She loved following her nose for life and vision--intellectually, figuratively, spiritually—as the poems in Mad Dogs testify. And she’s a wonderful performer. A wild and excited voice, especially when collaborating with musicians. Janine is also a teacher of the writing of poetry, and she’s done much work in the prisons. I took the photograph above on April 14th, 2004, so, if I remember rightly, Lee, Janine and I were celebrating my birthday (I would be 62 the next day--Janine also was born in 1942 but a few months before me) in the backyard. A bottle of wine, good food, good talk. She and Lee became good friends, talking all the woman stuff that is a mystery to me. I was honored they let me listen.

It was then that Janine gave us our copy of Mad Dogs. It’s a Black Sparrow book (2000). Black Sparrow books--John Martin the editor, his wife Barbara the cover designer, the nice rough feeling cover, the colored end sheets, the generous typography inside. You could always pick out the Black Sparrow titles on the poetry shelves. A long time ago (the 70s, 80s?) I had sent John Martin a manuscript for consideration. He wrote me back a generous letter. He had thought seriously about publishing it, but in the end had to decide against it. I was honored. Janine’s Mad Dogs was probably one of the last before John and Barbara Martin sold the rights in 2002 to Harper Collins (Bukowski, Paul Bowles and John Fante) and the rest to David Godine. Oh well. All good things end. It’s the law of change. That’s okay. I still love those books. I have bunches here and there.

I’m so happy I picked up The Mad Dogs of Trieste. Such a good book of poems by a good friend. It’d be great to see her again. Saturday I start cleaning my office again.

Walt Whitman y the Huevos Racheros at the H&H

2010-11-12T12:41:00.000-07:00

This is what you shall do:
Love the earth and sun and the animals,
Despise riches,
Give alms to every one that asks,
Stand up for the stupid and crazy,
Devote your income and labor to others,
Hate tyrants,
Argue not concerning God,
Have patience and indulgence toward the people,
Take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men,
Go freely with powerful uneducated persons
And with the young and with the mothers of families,
Read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life,
Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book,
Dismiss whatever insults your own soul,
And your very flesh shall be a great poem
And have the richest fluency not only in its words
But in the silent lines of its lips and face
And between the lashes of your eyes
And in every motion and joint of your body.

--Walt Whitman, from the Preface to the Leaves of Grass

How to Eat Tacos on Piedras Street, El Paso, Texas

2010-10-27T17:59:00.000-06:00

Eileen Myles' THE INFERNO

2010-10-11T10:15:00.002-06:00

"I am glad I am not an artist. A poet kind of is, but really it’s like you’re like a professionalized person. Poetry. Nobody knows what the fuck it is. And what makes it entirely odd is that there’s no money in it.

So in the awards it’s worse than art. No poetry-driven economy. No critical machinery. There’s just no thing at all. Which could be Zen but instead it’s entirely the opposite. It’s so symbolic. And humorless. Awards are the only currency American writing has to describe a writer’s work. It’s almost French. But in France at least the ribbons mean something. You get dinner, a bottle of wine. People know you. Here it’s nothing. And like everything else horrible eventually it leeches into t the soil. Even Allen Ginsberg wanted an award. The week before he died he emailed Bill Clinton to say I’m Allen Ginsberg, the poet. I’ve never received any kind of award from my country. It would be great if I could get something before I die.

But it would make difficulties for you with Gingrich and the right, I understand. Clinton didn’t write back. Nothing for the man who wrote “America”? Allen knew it wasn’t remotely possible to get honored by the superpower that can’t tolerate criticism of itself. But he was dying and he had to ask. Robert Lowell got honored but he wasn’t a queer or a Jew. He was Robert Lowell."

—Eileen Myles, Inferno, pp 165-66.

Here's a weird thought. I worry about reading too much Eileen Myles. Her writing is so seductive. It’s saying stuff the way I want to say stuff. She even enjoys being not quite accurate. Like some pants with lots of legroom. Space for the mind to feel comfortable and at home. The words could mean this thing or it could mean that thing. And that’s alright. Like those three sentences that start this passage, the last one having two similes, two likes. “I am glad I am not an artist. A poet kind of is, but really it’s like you’re like a professionalized person.” Like she’s really not sure what she wants to say, not sure she wants to tighten it up so there’s no legroom. Like she wants the reader to figure it out herself if the reader cares. And she hopes the reader does care enough to think about what the meaning of being a poet and writing poetry is all about. It’s a crucial question for Eileen. It was a crucial question for Allen Ginsberg. And it’s a crucial question for me. And, like Eileen, I want to wear my own poetry with lots of legroom. Like those pants I wear in the zendo, the ones with the drawstring. I’m always wondering if they are going to fall off. There I am bowing to the Buddha and my pants slip down to my ankles. My legs are so white. My daughter Susie says I need to get more sun.

See there. You can see why Eileen’s writing is so seductive. Maybe infectious is the better word. Like Creeley was for guys like me growing up poet in the Far West 1960s, not many people to talk to. Those little delicate Creeley lines with the heavy breath stop at the end of the line. Such little poems. Creeley said it was okay to write short poems. Poems the length of your sheet of typing paper. That was okay. Then computers came along and we can go on forever. Sometimes I want to go on forever. Sometimes I’m happy writing little short poems. Shorter than haiku poems. Like I said: You can see why Eileen’s writing is so seductive.
POSTSCRIPT: Eileen underlines words in this novel INFERNO which is so much like a memoir it could be a memoir. But she said it's a novel so that's okay with me. Maybe she'd rather be a novelist than a memoirist. Who wouldn't? Especially if you're a poet. But back to the underlining of words. Like she’s writing on a typewriter and not a computer. She doesn’t italicize words. She underlines them. In some places she strikes through words. She didn’t like this or that sentence but she doesn’t delete it she strikes through it. Again like she’s using a typewriter. It has an old-fashioned look. But Eileen is not old-fashioned. She wants the reader to see what she took out and wants the reader to think about what she took out and why she took it out. Style or meaning? Whatever. It’s important to her. Sort of flip and fun. And important. At least in my head. Yeah, infectious is a good word. Like laughter. That kind of infectious. And seductive is a good word too. One or the other. Take your pick. But read the book. Especially if you are a poet. You can choose between one cover or the other cover. That’s odd, huh? Independent presses are always doing interesting things to make you think. So O/R has these two covers. And Eileen underlines words and strikes out sentences. Interesting publishing kind of stuff. I chose the white cover. Sometimes I wonder if many poets are out there buying books anymore. No wonder there’s no poetry-driven economy.

If you want to read a regular review of INFERNO, Liz Brown did a good one at Bookforum. Also, here's a video of Eileen reading from the novel. She reads the part about why she calls it a novel. "Writing a novel is like being buried alive." Etcetera. She's a very good and fun reader.

Charles Olson live @ the Kitchen Table

2010-09-22T12:02:00.000-06:00

Below are some great videos of Mr. Maximus Charles Olson reading two of his wonderful poems. Watching these kitchen-made movies really lets you understand how Olson cast such a big light over the workings of the New American Poetry when I was getting into that world. Shy. Unsure. I must have read Olson's "Projective Verse" essay 15 times trying to figure out exactly what his complicated prose was talking about. (It's actually quite simple, I discovered, but I wouldn't trade that journey for an Idiot's Guide.) Barney Childs said one day in class, "Well, Byrd has a good ear. He knows how to do it. He just has to find something to say." Ha. I remember another home movie that I saw in Tucson must have been 1964. It was after a Creeley reading and there was a party up in the hills. The moon and the stars. Lots of booze and talk about poetry. Dreamy. I walked into one room and Creeley was showing a movie of him and Olson in Gloucester. They were walking down a road, hands in their pockets, talking, Creeley looking up to see this big man, his friend. Man, I thought, this is where I want to be. Thanks to Ron Silliman's blog for posting the videos, and to the Worcester Polytechnic Institute archives which is where I copped the photograph, one of my favorites.

In Memory of Luis Jimenez

2010-09-06T12:25:00.000-06:00

Note: In a few weeks I'm going back to Memphis for the 50th Reunion of my graduating class. I graduated from Memphis University School, a prep school. It's a long story how I got there, but my mother who was widowed when I was two was desperately trying to find a male role model for me. I was a hell-raiser, not a happy young man. Public school wasn't working, she felt. I tried CBHS, a Catholic boys school. I got deeper in trouble. So finally for my last two years she bit the bullet (indeed, our whole family bit the bullet) and off I went to MUS. I don't think I've seen any of these guys (except Kingsley hooker) since 1960, so I'm nervous. One classmate I'm very much interested in seeing again is Todd Slaughter, who has become a very fine artist, with an emphasis on public art. I asked him if he knew my friend Luis Jimenez, and he said yes, so I thought I would post this piece on my blog. It originally appeared in El Paso's Newspaper Tree, which is in limbo now, and the Texas Observer.

Eating Mexican Food on Texas Avenue
In Memory of Luis Jimenez

Artist and sculptor Luis Jimenez is dead. The angels killed him. They had been pestering him for years. When he was a kid, walking in the alleys, he was shot in the eye with a bee-bee gun. In 1965 the angels cracked up his car and sent him to the hospital with a broken back. In the 1990s in pure malice they plucked out his left eye, the one injured by the bee-bee. They clawed enough at his right arm and hand that he needed operations. They packed him off to the hospital twice with heart attacks. But he kept working. His art kept him going. He was a blue collar workingman. He loved his tools. He wore a big, complicated utility knife on his belt. He had a nice big pickup.

Houston sculptor Sharon Kopriva says Luis was the hardest working artist she has ever known. He wouldn’t leave it alone. And he was happy when he was lost in his work, his art, using his hands--the stupid angels had left him the one eye in his head, and he saw things only a fronterizo could see. Inside that peculiar geography strange things happened--sex and death danced with the drunks and vatos, cowboys and Indians rejoiced in their legends and defied the onslaught of Manifest Destiny, automobiles made love to America, the myths of Mexico wandered the streets on the sides of low-riders and mingled with the pedestrians of Albuquerque. So he kept on working in the midst of a horrendous divorce and the battles with lawyers. The city of Denver was after him about the Blue Mustang that was to be installed at the airport years ago. The Blue Mustang was cursed.

And of course the angels chose the Blue Mustang with the beautiful eyes of fire as their murder weapon. Thirty-two feet of steel-supported fiberglass and years of labor--he was atop a ladder, hoisting a piece into place, and the angels pushed the Blue Mustang down on top of him.

"When I was young, I felt my skill was inherent in being Chicano, inherent in being Mexican, and that every Mexican not only had ability but appreciated art. It was a kind of fantasy, but certainly within the context a positive thing."

The art of Luis Jimenez was rooted in the gritty aesthetics of El Paso--that rasquache aesthetics that grows up out of the bones and dirt of the desert, an aesthetics that speaks poor Mexican and broken English so that it can somehow endure the relentless expectations of America. He worked in his father’s Electric Neon shop and helped design some of the bizarre neon signs that still are sprinkled around the city. He traveled through Mexico and saw the work--sketches, paintings, and murals of Diego Rivera, Siquieros and Orozco. They were sometimes funny, political, violent and populist. The murals especially--heroic and monumental. And in the late 1960s he strode manly Chicano into the belly of the beast, New York City, which was awash with Andy Warhol Marilyn Monroe pop culture and intellectual minimalism. The New York City art world disdained American regionalism and didn’t know what “Chicano” meant. Still Luis paid very close attention, he learned what he wanted to learn, he began to make waves but he never forgot where he came from.

Sometime in the 1980s I was in downtown El Paso and was wandering through City Hall in search of some bureaucratic permit to fix my house. I turned a corner and, there on the 1st floor bigger than life, stood Luis’ huge “Border Crossing,” a Mexican man with bandana was wading the Rio Grande with a woman in a shawl on his shoulders. The woman was carrying a child in her arms. The family, pura indigena, was immigrating illegally into the United States. They obviously had their own laws to attend to--life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The piece was 12-feet tall, made of the polished fiberglass that made the form seep with deep fluid color. In the guise of art Luis had infiltrated City Hall with contraband ideology.

The piece was on loan and so it disappeared after a few months. I know because I went looking for it. It had become part of my imagination. Then years later I saw “Border Crossing” standing in the December snow near the plaza in Santa Fe. The hoity-toity walked by and nobody paid attention. I daydreamed about stealing the sculpture some drunken night and bringing it home to El Paso. I would install it on the El Paso Street Bridge. It belonged in the ferocious Chihuahua sun.

I had wanted to make a piece that was dealing with the issue of the illegal alien. People talked about the aliens as if they had landed from outer space, as if they weren’t really people. I wanted to put a face on them; I wanted to humanize them. I also wanted to deal with the whole idea of family…I went back to my experience in El Paso where this is a common sight…It was dedicated to my dad, at which point my dad said, “You know, I was never an illegal alien. I just never had my papers straight.”

When his mother was alive, Luis would come to El Paso often and he’d stop by and visit. We’d walk down to the Mexican Cottage on Texas Avenue. Luis usually got the caldo de res, and I got the chile relleno plate with the beans and rice, although I know it’s impossible to be a good vegetarian on Texas Avenue. There used to be a waitress there, a woman in her 30s, who would flirt with us. She’d call us los Guapos and los Reyes de la Avenida--both of us grey-haired 60-somethings, Luis with the one eye and me with the baldhead and the goofy hat. We’d laugh with her and do some flirting of our own. Luis especially got a kick out playing with the coy side of Spanish and explaining to me, his gavacho friend, what he was saying. The waitress would bring us special gifts from the kitchen.

The last time Luis visited, his mother only had a few days remaining in her life and Luis told me about sitting with her as she labored with her breathing. She knew she was dying. He’d try talking to her, but she’d slip away into sleep. He pulled out his sketchbook and he sketched his mother as she lay dying. His sister walked in while he was sketching. She got mad at him. Here their mother was dying, and all he could think about was making art. Luis was hurt by his sister’s anger, but he understood. All his life, he said, his art got in between him and the people he loved. “But,” he said in an almost plaintive voice, “that’s what I do. I make art. That’s how I understand.”

The making of the art cut through the crap. The confusion slipped away and all that remained was the man working.

The waitress at the Mexican Cottage has disappeared. I never even knew her name. The new waitress is nice, but she’s slow and almost as old as me. And Luis is dead. That goddamned blue Mustang. He bled to death on his studio floor.

We’ll miss him, huh?

James Ellroy: Blood's a Rover audio

2010-08-25T12:44:00.001-06:00

Huge James Ellroy fan. Can’t help it. American Tabloid juiced me the disease. The public world as conspiracy. The JFK assassination. Mafioso. The Bay of Pigs Fiasco. Cuba dirty money and nothing else. L.A. Cops. FBI. No innocence. Hate and re-hate. We are all dumb rubes. Exotic prose. Un-prose. Re-prose. Kill the sentence dead. Zap the verbs. No adverbs. Shit out adjectives. Break and re-break all rules. Pureland of the Profane. Say what? Son Johnny Byrd sd if 10% is true, then we should walk out the front door and join a revolution. But in Blood’s a Rover, the cops change their spots. Waved little red flags. Morphed Tiger Cab. I didn’t read it but listened to a masterful unabridged recording. The master Craig Wasson and his many voices. 26 hours wandering around the streets of El Paso in my Subaru. The history of 60s & 70s 20th century America seen from the dark smelly and hairy end of the digestive tract—Herbert Hoover, Dick Nixon, Bebe Rebozo, Sonny Liston, Sal Mineo for god’s sake, Red Foxx, Howard Hughes as Prince Dracula. Wasson nails their voices. Never wavers. Emeralds and sex and voodoo. “That’s right, Baby Boy.” MLK assassins (feds and cops and peepers) go red. Guilt and shame. Cannot sleep. MLK fleshy truths dreams. Hoover wears the panties. The Red Goddess wants to have a baby. Beware Haitian voodoo black men with wings and automatic weapons. Hide and re-hide. Secrete and re-secrete. A meet and greet with Ellroy? No way. I think he’s busy scripting the narco-war in Mexico. His personal novel. Talks daily to Calderon and El Chapo on Skype. America doesn’t stand a chance. So, no, I don’t want to meet that man. But I’ll read his books. He’s the best.

TODOS SOMOS JUÁREZ: Peace for the Border

2010-08-10T13:25:00.006-06:00

Poster by Antonio Castro H. Antonio grew up in Juárez and now lives in El Paso. He certainly feels a deep sorrow for his city as witnessed by the poster. His father, the artist Antonio Castro L., still lives in the home in Juárez where he grew up, but his son wants him to move across to this side. Antonio H, besides being a professor of Graphic Design at UTEP and is the principle designer for his own graphics art firm, has designed many of our prize-winning Cinco Puntos Press titles, and on a number of occasions he’s collaborated with his father Antonio L who is one of our most important illustrators. They are good men, good artists, good friends and good role models for young artists growing up on either side of the border. They are at home on the border and they feel a terrible sadness for this on-going tragedy.

We all wish peace for the City of Juárez.

The Gates of Paradise, La Ciudad Juárez, Summer 2010

2010-08-04T10:30:00.006-06:00

An 8-yr-old boy was killed yesterday in Juárez in an attack apparently aimed at his father, in the Francisco Madero neighborhood in western Juarez. Both were outside of their house at about 7:30 pm, when a group of sicarios drove by and shot them. The bodies were left strewn in the dirt street and the attackers got away. The adult was not identified, but it was reported that he was known as “The Buddha.”

—from a post on the Frontera List, 6-13-2010

In Juárez, since January 1, 2008, when Presidente Felipe Calderón declared war against the drug cartels, 6,000 people have been murdered. The number for greater Mexico is over 28,000 but Juárez is certainly the epicenter of the bloody vortex. The government blames the vast majority of the violence on a turf war between cartels, particularly the Sinaloa Cartel and the Juárez Cartel. The normal human response to such violence is more violence. Calderón dispatched the Mexican army to Juárez but the army has become part of the problem, responsible for murder, disappearances, home invasions and other human rights abuses.

●

Yesterday afternoon, Gabriel, a man who lives in Juárez and who works for us here in El Paso, came by to talk with me. He needed to tell me something. Gabriel was whispering. It happened on the street that becomes the Zaragoza highway. That’s where they built the new American Embassy. In fact, he was walking down the street toward the American Embassy. Gabriel is an American citizen, but his older son was born in Juárez. Gabriel needs to get his son all the right papers to bring him across. It’s not a simple task. The red tape is a net to stop poor people like Gabriel, an American citizen or not. So Gabriel’s son is growing up in all that murderous violence. The streets are dangerous. He’s not going to school, he’s in his house all day, waiting for his father to come home.

So Gabriel keeps hacking away at the red tape.

Gabriel was wondering if he should catch a bus or should he walk? He’s always balancing time and money. He needs to get to work, he can’t spend too much money. The bus stop was crowded. Gabriel is whispering all this to me. A street vendor, he says, was rushing across the street. He was lugging along a large white ice chest strapped across his shoulder. The strap broke and paletas and sodas and ice scattered on the hot street. The vendor turned his head and stopped. Cars rushed by, swerving to miss the man. One car came almost to a stop close to the man. An SUV with dark windows. A window slid down and a man leaned out with a gun in his hand. A large automatic pistol. He shot the street vendor three times, once in his head, twice in his chest. Blood and pieces of flesh and bone exploding from the body. The SUV sped away, the man with gun waving and laughing at the startled bystanders waiting for the bus.

Gabriel looks at me and says, “That’s exactly what happened, Mr. B.”

He’s told me three or four stories like this. Usually, the stories are about stuff that he didn’t quite see, stuff that happened before he came by, pop pop pop, the gunfire so peculiarly a piece of the white noise on Avenida Juárez, a man staggering out of a restaurant and dying on the sidewalk, more gunshots in the night, a little tienda that sells burritos where gunmen barged in and told everybody to leave. They had business with the owner. The poor guy was late on his extortion payments. Gabriel whispers these stories to me. Like they are secrets.

It’s not unusual hearing these stories if you know somebody living in Juárez. Everybody has a story to tell. Another friend told me once that when people on the streets and in the bars and even in their living rooms talk about the murders they whisper. They don’t talk out loud. Like they’re worried other people are listening. And the conversations have the feel of men and women talking about family problems or spiritual and religious questions. They are deep exchanges of stories and feelings—not argument. It’s become a small comfort to share these stories and to work at understanding their sorrow.

“Did you see this body or that body on the corner of such-and-such street? That guy was walking off to work. He was Guillermo’s friend. He wasn’t dirty. They pulled up in a car and shot him. Twice in the head. Three times in the chest. He was a family guy going to work. I think it was the army. They made a mistake. I hope it was a mistake. I mean, I hope he was not dirty.”

Whispering.

Death and the terror are the facts that matter in these stories. What does a man or a woman do? How will you be when an SUV pulls up next to you, its windows black, the electric window glides down, a gun is pointing at you? Statistics are irrelevant, even if they were considered true. Who is doing the counting and what are they not counting? What about the dead buried in the desert or burned at the dump and shoveled under? Nobody trusts the authorities, the mayor is a liar, the president is a liar, the army is in cahoots with El Chapo, the people don’t trust the cops, they don’t trust the newspapers or their TVs. They certainly don’t trust the killers. Why should the killers speak the truth? And the soldiers and the police are just other gangs of killers. So the citizens pass along rumors and innuendos and fables because these fictions stink of the truth. Just a little bit of the truth is like food. What is truth anyway? The number of dead people on a Tuesday night? Those are black ink in a newspaper. A very clean abstraction. The people on the streets know what is happening, they can see the rivers of blood seeping from the mountains of corpses. They want stories from the people who have been there. People who have seen it with their own eyes.

Here’s another story from another friend, a man who grew up in Juárez. He said when he was a kid his granddad used to tell him that every town or city has its wise men and wise women hanging around in the shadows of cities and little towns. His grandfather was talking from his experience as a little boy during the Revolution. So many people had died then. But no matter how forlorn things became, there was somebody out there who understood. His grandfather had met some of these men and women. He would sit at their feet and listen to them. Mexico, his grandfather told him point blank, is rich with such wise men and women. They have stepped off the railroad track. The train rumbles by with all its chaos and confusion, but these men and women have found a little something that let them be at peace with themselves. And they have stories and wisdom and even techniques and pieces of herbs to help others along. But as my friend grew older he began to laugh at the memory of his grandfather telling him about the wise men and women who scatter themselves through the cities and countryside. His grandfather didn’t trust God, he said. “God doesn’t listen.” That’s what his grandfather told my friend when he was a little boy.

As the violence grew worse my friend began remembering his grandfather and what he said. He wished it were true, but even if it was, he figured that Juárez didn’t buy the right ticket. Juárez feels like the unluckiest city in the world in the summer of 2010. So much blood and death so it’s no surprise that all the wisdom sort of was leached out of the city.

Then six months ago his mother told him the story about an old man named Jacobo. A small wiry man. Half-Mexican, half-Lebanese or some Arab-thing. A hodgepodge of roots. Puro meztizo. He was very brown, almost black, the color of mud. His hair and his beard were speckled with white but it was difficult tell his age. A strange looking guy. He liked to hang out behind the cathedral downtown Juárez under the flag of Mexico. The tri-color. He wasn’t comfortable in front of the plaza. So many people there. Jacobo loved those people. They are the color of earth, he said, and sometimes in the hottest parts of the day, he’d sit with them on the benches and the walls in the precious shade of the trees. But there was too much bustling and commerce for Jacobo. Too much religion. The Catholics scurrying off to mass, the Pentecostals preaching in the plaza, and even the Aztec dancer with his crown of feathers and his leather breechcloth and the rattles and drums. Jacobo said he felt happier behind the cathedral. Not so much chaos. He could do his exercise movements—like a dance, his skinny legs and arms slowly swirling around his meager frame—and he could sit at peace, his eyes half-shut, the noisy world a fragile shell in which he rested. And besides a bookstore was across the street connected to the art school. The art school has a nice clean bathroom with toilet paper, and the bookstore clerks liked him because he read books. They let him use the bathroom when he wanted. He could take a book into the bathroom where he could read and do his business. It was a cool clean place to spend a little bit of the hot afternoon.

Anyway Jacobo would show up most afternoons around 3pm. When he was there, a few men and women would come talk to him. It was like a ritual, a way to pass the time away, get something in their hearts to carry home and to think about. They’d bring him a bottle of water or a diet coke. Maybe cold slices of mango or a banana. Jacobo liked fruit. They’d pester him with questions. They wanted to know why is it that Juárez had to endure so much suffering. What about God? Didn’t God care? Jacobo would look over at his interrogator and whisper little short answers. He didn’t want to talk about God. God is another question. And the wrong question at that. He asked them instead questions about themselves. About their families. He wondered how they spent their days with all these big questions. He told them stories. Little teaching stories from all over the world. Sometimes he’d give little talks. Short things. About living in the moment, the right now, the heat in the sky, the nice cold slice of mango. He never gave them any answers, he didn’t tell them how to live but still the men and the women seemed satisfied. They’d show up the next day with more questions although one or two would disappear. They’d get a job. Something needed done at home.

One day a tall man showed up. He had a big square head and a black moustache. He was dressed up to look like a rich cowboy. He was wearing a big white Stetson hat and hand-tooled cowboy boots, and tight blue jeans, an expensive black silk t-shirt, a black windbreaker. Black aviator sunglasses. Thick in the chest. A paunch starting to hang down over his silver belt buckle. He looked dangerously cool. And mean.

“Are you Jacobo?” the man grunted.

Jacobo looked up at the man. The guy was a giant compared to him. He asked, “Who are you?” Jacobo’s voice was so soft the man could barely hear him.

“None of your fucking business,” the man said.

“Well, so be it,” Jacobo said and turned to talk to a young woman. But the woman was gone. She was afraid.

“Look, old man, don’t fuck with me. I came here to ask you a question.”

Jacobo turned back around. “Yeah? About what?”

“I want to know about heaven and hell.”

“Heaven and hell? Why do you want to know about those places?”

“I’ve killed a man. I’ve killed 12 men. Maybe 15 men. What’s going to happen to me?”

“So I ask you again, who are you?”

The man looked at Jacobo. Then he said:

“I’m one of the Aztecas. That’s who I am.” He pulled out a pistol, an automatic that was tucked into his belt under his windbreaker. The other watchers, like birds on a wire, drifted away. One lady murmured a prayer. She was almost running. A clumsy awkward gait, pulling along a shopping bag.

“The Aztecas,” Jacobo said, “they were a handsome race. They had handsome noses, they had long shining hair. You don’t look like an Azteca. You look like a thug. A stupid ugly thug. A thug with a big gun in his hand. A fucking common gangster.” The profanity sounded coming from Jacobo’s mouth.

“Shut the fuck up,” the man said. He put the gun to the side of Jacobo’s head.

Jacobo looked at the gun. He took a deep breath. He didn’t want to die.

“So you have a big gun. And that makes you a man? It makes you an Azteca?”

The man was breathing hard. At least a minute passed, Jacobo and the thug staring at each other. Then the man clicked off the gun’s safety, he was locked and loaded. He was leaning over Jacobo, close enough so that the two could smell each other’s sweat. And Jacobo could smell the clean oily smell of the automatic. The man took good care of his gun. The city rattled in their ears. They could pick out little pieces of the white noise. A kid’s whimpering in her mother’s arms. Sssh. Sssh. A bus coughed and roared down the street. A man and a woman were laughing somewhere across one of the streets.

Jacobo, almost whispering, said, “So here open the gates of Hell.”

“What?”

“You are walking through the gates of Hell. Right now. This place. The gun in your hand opens the gates of hell.”

And again there was silence. A long silence like before. The men looking at each other. Jacobo was such a little man. He didn’t seem afraid. Like he was at peace. How could he be at peace if he was about to die? The man took a deep breath and clicked the safety back on. The gun dropped to his side.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He took a few deep breaths. He could feel his heart beating. Like a time clock. He was still bent over, leaning down close to the old man’s face. He said, “And thank you, old man.” And then strangely, he reached his big hand and touched Jacobo on his cheek.

“Here open the gates of Paradise,” Jacobo said. “Right now. This place. Your hand.” The man let out a deep sigh, his hand trembled. He stood up straight, he slipped the gun back into his belt.

“Thank you again,” the man said. And he walked away.

●

That was the story my friend told me. “And it’s the truth,” he said. “It’s exactly like I heard it. Word for word. That woman who was there. She is a friend of my mother.”

It was one of those strange magical stories that you hear when people are talking about Juárez these days. I didn’t want it to end.

“Well, what happened next?”

“What do you mean, what happened next?”

“What happened to the killer?”

“You gringos,” my friend said, “you never want a story to end where it’s supposed to end.”

“Come on, tell me what happened next?”

“I’m not sure. The cops came. They found a pistol in the gutter. The big man had disappeared. Jacobo had disappeared. But the cops could have put the gun where they found it. And they could have killed the man. I don’t think so, but that’s possible. Nobody trusts the police. They’re assholes. They’re cold fucking killers.”

“And the old man, what happened to him?”

“I don’t know. My mother says he doesn’t hang out at the cathedral anymore. He got to be too famous. He’d have 15 or 20 people gathered around him. He didn’t like that. My mother said she heard rumors. People have seen him over in the Chamizal Park. He sits under a tree there sometimes. Reading a book. Others say he lives over under the mountain in the west. Near the Rio Bravo. He has a family. A beautiful wife.”

“You think this story is true?”

“It’s the story my mother told me. It makes sense to me.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

●

Peace for the City and the People of Juárez.

●

NOTE: Every morning I click through stories about Juárez collected by Molly Molloy at Frontera News Service. I find it very distressing, but important reading. Not only because my family and I live only a few miles from where this bloody vortex has descended, but I consider this on-going tragedy emblematic of our world’s future. Now our leaders can respond to violence with more violence. The violence, as we’ve learned over and over again, leads nowhere. So I wrote this piece—part fiction, part non-fiction—after hearing Gabriel’s story one afternoon. That morning I had read the little story “The Gates of Paradise” in the classic collection of teaching stories and koans Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. I’ve always wondered how to put those stories in a contemporary story.

If you're interested in following the Frontera List, you can go to the google list page or write Molly Molloy at mollymollow@gmail.com

THE GREAT PAT SMITH AMERICAN DREAMPOEM

2010-07-25T10:40:00.002-06:00

The Great Pat Smith American Dream Poem

I have been teaching poetry for too long
I know this
everyone else thinks so too
the trick’s to clear out before they say so

In a dream I am leaving
crossing Central Avenue
wider now than the Rio Grande
heading down and west
past Jack’s and the bloodbank
past Gizmo’s and Blazer finance
saying hello
to my sad downtown that was always waiting

I am taking a job
becoming the best cashier in Albuquerque
my register sings
I call out orders:
sunnyside up
once over lightly

I smell like french fries and Evening in Paris
my nails are polished
my smock is pink
my hands drip nickels

all the regulars call me Patti
spelled with an i
they eat me up
while the juke box plays
Lacy J Dalton
Willie and Waylon
I hum right along
I know all the words
I am cashing in

One day my customer is Busby Berkeley
He leans on my counter lights a cigar
looks me up and down
likes what he sees
and says in a wise voice
Girlie, can you swim?
I show him my medals from the 400 freestyle
the 1958 First Annual Pine Point Maine Open Water Classic
He says Esther Williams is making her comeback
They are calling the movie Born to Swim
if I meet him tonight at 8 at the Y
he’ll let me audition for the chorus

Suddenly it is all so simple
there are no limits
to all the color light can turn water
my stage name is Tammy Aphrodite

I am one of the girls
we swan dive from volcanoes and Grecian Columns
stroking tandem, we angle down
then bubble up like spangled lilies
slim fish chlorine virgins
who cares about tenure
I lose the need to breathe
I could stay down forever

In a world all light and water
I am the wet,
the wordless angel

●

Last Tuesday Lee and I (with our granddaughter Hannah) drove up to Albuquerque to the memorial for our friend Patricia Clark Smith. We've known her for a long time. Indeed, on the drive up I tried to remember when I first met her. I think it was in one of those great bars that Albuquerque and Santa Fe used to have back in the 70s. The Thunderbird in Placitas, Claude's in Santa Fe, Smokey Joe's on the corner of Central and University in Albuquerque, Raphael's Silver Cloud out on the highway north. It must have been summertime, 102 hot like it was last Tuesday, muggy, some nameless band playing, maybe a jukebox. I was drinking and standing looking at the dancers and this little woman appeared out of the crowd of rockers. She was dressed part-Indian, part country and western. She had a roundish smiling face and her eyes twinkled. Yes, her eyes really twinkled. Who would guess she was a PhD from Yale? Who would even care? I certainly didn't. She asked me to dance and she grabbed my hands and out we went into the crowd of dancers. And we danced.

●

Since the memorial Lee and I have been mulling over Pat and her death. For whatever reason we have been feeling sort of empty, like something is not there. She was my generation, and like so many of our peers--important workers in the fields of culture and literature--, Pat's not very well represented on the internet. The talks people gave were wonderful, but mostly the people talked about Pat as a wonderful friend and colleague in the university. It was good to see old friends, especially our publishing colleague John Crawford, Pat's lover (aka husband), the longtime independent publisher of Westend Press. But only poet and performer Joy Harjo represented the alternate universe of poem-writing outside the university, that place where I feel most at home. Well, that's not quite true. Poet David Johnson, who like Pat has roots in each world, was the last speaker. He was Pat's friend and colleague in the English Department at UNM, but he also shared with her the love of literatures that range far beyond the accepted canon (especially was back in the 70s when they started stirring the pot)--the poetries of Native America, women and men of color, of the various nations of Latin America. In concluding his talk David read from her book Changing Your Story "The Great Pat Smith American Dreampoem." Listening to the poem (a man's voice, a woman's poem) I thought then that I would put the poem on my blog.

I lose the need to breathe

I could stay down forever

In a world all light and water

I am the wet,

the wordless angel

Patricia Clark Smith (Valentine's Day 1943-July 11, 2010)

2010-07-19T10:53:00.001-06:00

Poet, writer and activist Patricia Clark Smith and her John Crawford (Westend Press publisher)

I lifted this obituary from the Albuquerque Journal. I'm sure John wrote it, with the help of many friends and Pat's two sons, Joshua and Caleb.

Patricia (Pat) Clark Smith died peacefully at Women's Hospital in Albuquerque Sunday evening, July 11, 2010. She had been admitted four days earlier and died of successive organ failure. She was surrounded at death by her husband John Crawford; her two sons, Joshua and Caleb; members of her extended family, and her friends; She is survived by her two brothers, Mike Clark, 64, and James Clark, 61; and her two sons, Joshua Smith, 43, and Caleb Smith, 40. A memorial service will be held at the University of New Mexico chapel at 5:00 Tuesday, July 20, 2010. The public is invited to attend. Patricia was born on Valentine's Day in Holyoke, Massachusetts in 1943 and lived with her mother, grandmothers, and aunts while her father was serving in the Army Air Corps. When her father returned from the service and the war ended, the family moved to Hampshire Heights, a project on the outskirts of Northampton, Massachusetts. While she was later renowned as an accomplished scholar, poet, and teacher, she always stayed close to her working-class Irish, French Canadian, and Micmac Indian roots. Her childhood friends from Hampshire Heights, whether or not they left New England, remained close to her to the end. Following the war her two brothers were born: Mike, later a sea captain, and Jim, later a musician. Patricia graduated from Deering High School in Portland, Maine in 1960. She attended Smith College as a scholarship student, graduating with a B.A. in 1964, and Yale University from 1964 to 1970, when she was awarded a Ph.D. in English. Meanwhile she married Warren Smith in 1963 and had two sons, Joshua in 1966 and Caleb in 1970. She and her husband taught at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa from 1969 to 1971. From the beginning she attracted the attention of helpful and kindly mentors. The distinguished English professor W.K. Wimsatt, his wife Margaret, and their family befriended her during the Yale years and thereafter. In 1971 her husband Warren was offered a position in the Classics Department at University of New Mexico and Pat followed, soon joining the regular English faculty. She taught English at UNM for thirty-two years, from 1971 to 2003. Early in her career at UNM she also taught at schools connected to several Navajo Indian reservations (Ramah and Sinosti) in New Mexico with a new mentor, pioneering New Mexico early childhood teacher Lenore Wolfe. In the late 1970s she and Warren Smith were divorced. She taught courses in Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman as well as American literature and creative writing. She began to expand her interests in Native American studies. One of her early Ph.D. students, Laguna Pueblo author Paula Gunn Allen, published a revised version of her doctoral dissertation as The Sacred Hoop, a groundbreaking approach to feminist studies in Native American literature, in 1986. Among Patricia's companions throughout this period were Native American writers Joy Harjo, Leslie Marmon Silko, Simon Ortiz and Luci Tapahonso. She published the first book of her own poems, Talking to the Land, in 1979. She married teacher and small press publisher John Crawford in 1987. She published her second book of poems, Changing Your Story, in 1991. She and her husband joined UNM Professors Paul Davis, David Johnson, and Gary Harrison in editing and publishing Western Literature in a World Context, a two-volume college anthology, in 1995. She also published As Long as the Rivers Flow: Stories of Nine Native Americans, with Paula Gunn Allen in 1996; On the Trail of Older Brother: Glous'gap Stories of the Micmac Indians, with Michael RunningWolf in 2000; and a younger reader's biography, Weetamoo: Heart of the Pocassets in 2003. Those who have known her deeply- and there are many-have praised Patricia's generosity, her ability to bring out the best in others, and her gift of encouragement. She has started many a young writer or scholar on his or her career. Her advocacy for women scholars, multicultural writers, and especially Native American students has moved the teaching profession powerfully in this region. She has also befriended many people she recognizes as her own kind-waitresses, nurses in hospitals, receptionists, clerks in stores. Arrangements are being made for gifts to be donated to Native American educational funds.

She was a good lady, a wise lady. May she rest in peace.

Dreaming Martino's, Dreaming Juárez

2010-07-07T10:02:00.000-06:00

Dennis Daily--musician, musicologist and library archivist (@NMSU at the time)--took these photographs at Martino's Restaurant on Sunday March 23, 2003. These waiters, busboys (see note) and chef had served me, my family and friends for years. I have their names in a file somewhere that I cannot find. The last time I was over in Juárez, Martino's was simply a bar that opened at 6pm. I don't go across that late to find out what's going on. The on-going counting of the murdered dead continues to overwhelm the city. This last Sunday was election day. 13 people were killed. Families are leaving, businesses are closing. But Martino's has always been an important place for me. A piece of the culture and ambiente of El Paso and Juárez. For those of you who don't know Martino's or Juárez, I'm pasting below an article I wrote around the year 2001 for a local magazine. It gives you some gist of what the restaurant and the city used to be. And below that is a sweetly humorous photograph, taken by good friend Michael Wyatt, of the famous parking sign that stood in front of the restaurant.

[NOTE:In a restaurant in Mexico, to get a waiter’s or mesero’s attention, you use the word “Joven” which translates literally as “young man.” I never was comfortable using the word in Mexico, especially at Martino’s. As you can see from Dennis' photographs, these guys were all grace and style and for many years they were my senior. Especially my all-time favorite, a man named Moises II, a Peter Lorre look-alike who retired sometime in the 1990s. So when I wanted another beer or martini, I said “Señor.” Even in speaking with the busboys. I felt more comfortable like that, even though sometimes it took a while for them to realize I was trying to get their attention.]

●☼●

Things You Can’t Do in Austin or Santa Fe, #3

(Written sometime around 2000-2001)

This is a message to those thirty-something and forty-something and fifty-something paseños who worry themselves silly because they’re not able to spend enough time and money in Santa Fe or Austin:

PLEASE DO AS I INSTRUCT YOU.

Walk south along El Paso Street past the Camino Real, the pawnshops, the shoe and clothing stores and the peculiar assortment of other thriving businesses. You will come to a bridge that crosses a river. On the other side of the river the bridge will miraculously unburden itself in another city that exists in another country. This is a foreign city and a foreign country. Indeed, you can go to London or to Paris and you won’t be in a country as foreign to you as the city and country on the other side of that bridge.

If your heart is open, you will be amazed at this journey. It’s like you have walked into a story that Gabriel Garcia Marquez is writing. You remember Gabriel Garcia Marquez, don’t you? You read his books in college. If you didn’t, you should have. Make a note to yourself to buy 100 Years of Solitude the first chance you get.

If you are a little bit waspish, or if you look perhaps like someone who will vote for George Bush, then the people in this foreign city will look at you like you are a foreigner. Trust them. They are right. Suddenly you are a foreigner. It’s like walking through a mirror. That’s okay though. They want you to enter their country because you probably have money in your pocket and credit cards in your wallet. In fact, you might think about giving some of the change you are rattling nervously in your pocket to the indigenous women and children who will greet you with their outstretched hands. These families--the tiny women in the colorful dresses, the men in the white pants and shirts, the children hungry and forlorn--are the Tarahumara. They have fled the Sierra because of the never-ending drought and their fear of the druglords and logging companies who are usurping their homelands.

You might be overcome with sadness, even remorse, seeing the poverty of the Tarahumara. Likewise seeing the poverty of some of the other citizens of this country. Maybe this is why you have forgotten about the Bridge from our country into their country. You didn’t want to look into the heart of such poverty. I can understand that. They can understand that. But give them a quarter. Or even a dollar. It won’t hurt you. It might even help you. Just please don’t sully their proud history by naming a polo club Tarahumara. This would be an arrogant and ugly act.

But this is not the reason you have crossed the Bridge.

You have crossed the Bridge so that you can go eat at a restaurant that is a few blocks further down the street. Don’t bother telling this to the cab drivers who want to take you to the market or to the bullfight or to a girlie show which is only around the corner anyway. Just ignore those guys and walk straight to Martino’s.
Martino’s is waiting for you next to the historic Kentucky Club. You might even want to have a drink at the Kentucky Club before going next door to Martino’s. Fine. The place has a wonderful old-fashion mahogany bar and a long mirror where you can sit on a stool and contemplate the meaning of things. The bartenders serve ice-cold Mexican beer, and they fix a decent and inexpensive drink. The bathrooms sort of stink, but that’s okay as long as you sit toward the window. If you see friends of your sons and daughters--indeed, if you see your sons and daughters--ignore them like you ignored the cab drivers. You are in a foreign country, they are in a foreign country, and you are turning another page of the story written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

So it’s time you enter Martino’s.

Before entering, however, peer inside through the big plate glass window. You will notice two things--first, the very neat and semi-elegant motif is bronze with red and white table clothes and huge mirrors, and, second, there are not too many customers inside. In fact, if you look closely, you might notice that there are more waiters inside than there are customers. This always mystifies me. Martino’s is my favorite restaurant and it is never full. Why? Because people like you are not crossing the Bridge to eat there. This is why I have brought you here. I love Martino’s. I want to see the waiters and the busboys and the cooks and the owner making money. I don’t want Martino’s to disappear like Julio’s disappeared.

So don’t be worried about the emptiness. You will enjoy yourself.

Entering Martino’s is a pleasure like an oft-practiced ritual is a pleasure. You push open the glass door and a waiter neatly dressed in a white jacket will be waiting for you. He is glad to see you. He and his colleagues quietly organize your table, they insure that you are comfortable. You soon realize that--no matter how good the food will be--the real pleasure of Martino’s is how the waiters treat you with respect and gentleness. They are never in your face, but they appear miraculously when they are needed. Like they too have read 100 Years of Solitude and they have learned the genuine meaning of service. My favorite is Moises II who looks like Peter Lorre and who first waited on my wife Lee and I in the 70s. But two or three others rival him in the soulful practice of the art of being a waiter.

Now that you are seated at Martino’s, I want to give you some advice

If this is your virgin crossing, don’t worry about the water. It’s bottled water. The ice is from bottled water.
Once you’re beyond the question of water, I recommend you order a martini straight up (derecho) with either Tangueray or Beefeater’s as your gin of choice. Vodka, of course, should not be considered. Although other devotees of Martino’s praise the traditional Margaritas, or the icy exotic drinks of greens or blues, or even the exquisitely cold beers, I believe my recommendation leads you deeper into the mystery that I perceive at Martino’s. The waiter prepares the martini at your table. It is a ceremony worth watching, a sacrament to enjoy, and it’s certainly well worth the 4-bucks you pay for the pleasure. Especially since it’s a double.
Like many restaurants on the other side, the menu at Martino’s is huge, and I have never come close to eating everything. If you want something before dinner, the shrimp and octopus cocktails are good, the escargot (or so says my friend Willivaldo Delgadillo) is delicious. When you’re choosing an entrée, stick with the steaks and fishes. Under no circumstances choose a Mexican dish. They don’t know how to cook Mexican food at Martino’s. Also, stick with the simply prepared foods. Our experience with the paella, for instance, is that it was excellent one visit and lousy the next.

I usually get the chateaubriand cooked on the grill or pan-fried French-style in butter. I order my steak medium-rare, and the chef has never disappointed me. The meat is very tender and very delicious. It rivals any steak served in El Paso. Guaranteed. At $10.95 it’s truly one of the great deals anywhere near our city.
The fishes are a number of different fillets, or whole Black Basses, cooked in a variety of ways. They also have lobster and shrimp dishes. I don’t know anybody who has ever had the lobster. All entrees come with a soup, salad and potato. My favorite soup is the French onion. It’s delicious. Even my snotty New York friends say it’s delicious. But Martino’s has other soups, each with its fans--a hot potato soup and two cold soups, avocado and a gazpacho.

Sadly, the salads are commonplace--iceberg lettuce and tomatoes with the usual suspects for dressings. Oh, well. I eat them and am happy I did. I notice, however, that my friends sometimes don’t eat the salads. I don’t know if they’re worried about getting sick or simply don’t like iceberg lettuce. I never ask.

After dinner, the waiter will offer you a wide selection of deserts ranging from a raging flambé to the traditional flan. Lee and I usually get the flan with a bunch of spoons for everybody. It’s truly rich and delicious. I may even go whole hog and get a good shot of brandy in a snifter and a cup of coffee. Why not, huh?
I hope you enjoy Martino’s. I hope you sit close enough to the big front window so you can watch all the different kinds of people walking by. Doing so is an act of meditation, one that is amplified by the fact that you’re in a foreign country but close to home. The waiters somehow recognize the fact that you are meditating and they leave you alone.

If you’re a man, I hope you visit the bathroom so can enjoy the old-fashioned pleasure of melting the ice in the urinal.

When you’re done, pay with a credit card because you get a much better rate of exchange. BUT tip the waiter with cash. U.S. dollars. Twenty-percent at least. The staff will have earned that amount easily. Besides, you’ve had a truly wonderful dinner for somewhere around $20 a head. That’s very good for the excellent evening you’ve had.

The waiters will shake your hands as you leave. Go back outside into the noise and the traffic of the night. All sorts of kids will be on the street full with a wild energy that you lost long ago. They might frighten you, they might worry you. That’s okay. You can remember the confusion in your own heart at that age, no? Walk back to the Bridge, poking your head into the stores and into the discos.

I hope you’re full of wonder...

(Photo by Michael Wyatt)

Poet Bill Deemer

2010-06-08T17:22:00.000-06:00

This humble little book was waiting for me when I cam home from New York City. I was tired and confused with all the stuff I had to do. Stuff for work, stuff for writing, family stuff, etcetera. Lee gave me a 6x9 manila envelope from Oregon and said, "Here, Bobby, this came for you." There it was—a signed copy of Variations by Bill Deemer. “Compliments of the author” a hand-written note said. Oh, wow! Bill Deemer is one of my favorite poets. And a wise man. Full of wit and Basho-like understanding. A part of that breed that Ron Silliman calls the New West Poets or Zen Cowboy Poets. This is Silliman’s way of saying that Deemer doesn’t belong to any group. A republic of poetry governed by anarchy. Deemer has the usual virtues of the citizens of that anarchy. He lives in the West, he has roots to Philip Whalen and to Jim Koller's Coyote Journal and he doesn't belong to any identifiable group. He just lives his life—a very full life, a rural life, a contemplative life—in Oregon, his eyes wide open, and from there he writes his poems. Of course, being who he is, most folks haven’t heard about him, much less read his work. The little book (4½ by 5½) only has 31 poems, many of which are “Variations on a Theme” (the delicate and beautiful title poem). Variations on WCW’s red wheelbarrow, Zen rock-skipping, etcetera. Only a few are bigger than the one small page. I sat down and read it and have re-read it twice. The poems make me joyous. Here’s the last poem in the book.

●

TIME TO PEN MY MEMOIRS

I waited for a letter to arrive,
I waited for the phone to ring,
I waited for water to boil.

I saw the wood rose between gray fence posts,
I saw her asleep beside me in the morning,
I saw the moon glowing in a puddle.

I heard the blue jay’s reveille,
I heard Lew Welch read his poems,
I heard her whisper to me in the dark.

I remember it rained a lot.

●

What a great little poem, huh? And so much mystery suddenly to think about Lew Welch reading his poems. I wish I had been there. Oh well. Bill Deemer seems happy to be our Basho, our Issa. I looked for images of him on google and came up with nothing. I’ll let him be. But I want to thank him here for such a wonderful gift.

And likewise to Longhouse Book Publishers, publisher of Variations (1999). Longhouse--an essential independent press and on-line bookseller of poetry books that matter--is the remarkable business owned by Bob and Susan Arnold. Bob and Susan have indeed walked the walk all these many years on River Road in Guilford, Vermont. Bob Arnold is likewise fine poet and writer himself. His book On Stone: A Builder’s Notebook (Cid Corman’s Origin, 1988) still reverberates in my heart. Bob and Susan, although they live in Vermont, certainly would qualify as indigenous citizens in the anarchy of New West Writing.

Self-Portrait in a Bathtub, New York City

2010-05-22T21:14:00.000-06:00

Many thanks to Sylvia and John Gardner who kindly lent me their apartment so I could spend some extra time in New York City.
--Bobby

The Lessons of Mr. Wu

2010-05-20T08:30:00.003-06:00

I'm in NYC for a few days between the sales conference for Cinco Puntos (Consortium Book Sales and Distribution is our distributor) and the Book Expo next week. I'm trying to get some writing done, putting together a poetry manuscript, looking through old journals, writing whatever I want. And every day for a few hours I get to wander the streets. This is something from my journal.

Monday around 2pm I was deep in the hubbub of New York City, leaving Times Square on the “R” Train going south. I like the "R" Train. It's not so crowded, the cars are newer. A couple of young people were smooching a couple of seats down. In her excitement the girl dropped her can of Coca-Cola, the boy tried to grab it, but he was too late. A puddle of the dark sparkling sugary stuff spilled out onto the floor. The girl giggled. The boy apologized, he picked up the can before it was completely empty but what else could he do? She snuggled her head into a comfortable place on his shoulder and hugged him around the waist so he went back to the more important business of fondling her. A black woman, old like me, hurrumphed at their activity. The train started off and the puddle began to flow, becoming a long tiny river reaching inch by inch back toward where it came from. Like it had its own intelligence, like it had something to say to me--the Tao of Coca-Cola. I watched it slither toward the end of the train. It never came to a logical or physiological conclusion. The train screeched to a halt at 34th Street and the river reversed, understanding the laws of its existence, and snaked back the other way, its integrity intact. Once more a tiny crest of the Tao flowed past my feet. The woman looked at me and pursed her lips. She too was a student of the little rivulet. Weird, huh? 23rd Street. The Coca-Cola repeated its performance, but this time half-heartedly. I suppose this is entropy. I’m always trying to figure out what that word means. Although I can feel it in my bones.The girl and boy got off at 14th to play kissy-face in Union Square. That was my wish for them. The black woman watched them go, gave me a big smile and rose majestically for her exit at the 8th Street Station. A few others came and went, but nobody stepped on the river of Coca-Cola. It would have been a foolish and unlucky act. Bad mojo. I got off on Canal Street. I had business with a Mr. Wu.

When the weather is good he sets up his card table on the south side of Canal near Mott in the swirling humanity at the edge of Chinatown. His business he calls “Grass Arts.” He cuts small thin strips of bamboo and thick grasses, he dyes the strips various colors and then he braids them into exquisite little animals. Like palm crosses the church ladies make to celebrate the arrival of Jesus to Jerusalem, but these animals are lovely and very delicate. Real craftsmanship. I bought a mouse and two swallows, gifts for grandchildren and friends. $20 bucks I gave to Mr. Wu. Happy for my success I took the slow way home. I’m on vacation and I get to enjoy the bustle and chaos that is New York City. After walking around through Columbus Park, I took the #6 to Grand Central Terminal and walked to Bryant Park. I clutched my bag of Grass Arts. I didn’t want to lose it. I sat in the green grass under the library and read my book. And then after a while I hopped the #104 bus, still clutching my paper sack and my purse.

Oh, it was a beautiful springtime ride up Broadway toward my borrowed home on the West Side. People came and went. I got a place near the window and went back to my reading. The book is Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl Malantes. It's gotten great press, I was given a galley (one of the bennies of being a publisher) and so I brought it along. The book has swallowed me up. The first half of the book is about a platoon of soldiers (boys really, 18 and 19 years old, some as old as 23) struggling through the gunk of the jungle in the rain and mud, little or no support from their command. Their clothes are rotting off, pus is oozing from all their sores, their feet are swollen with jungle rot. They are fighting and suffering and dying, their commanders and the chain of command lost in their own mechanical psyches of ambition and fear and delusion. I was one of the young men who dodged that war. For good reasons too--I never wanted to go to Vietnam, I didn’t know anything about Vietnam, I didn’t believe anything that was told to me, and I was afraid. But I have friends who did go. Now all these years later I am sure that violence answers absolutely no question of politics, nationality, ethnicity or whatever reason the power brokers use to stir up their pot of madness,. But how do I know this really? It remains an abstract idea. So I study violence like a man who has misplaced something in his house. Something that I need to find and understand. Sure, this is crazy, but it’s who I am and it's what I do. I'm an old man now. At 107th I got off the bus. I was hungry and somehow sad. The sorrow inside the book was sinking into me. I went home and ate.

This morning I got ready to send one of Mr. Wu’s little birds to my granddaughter Birdie. The pink one. Birdie loves pink. But the sack of Grass Arts, I realized after searching frantically around the apartment, is still on the #104 bus. The bus went into Harlem, my sack of Mr. Wu’s gifts like a piece of flotsam in that puddle of Coca Cola, moving along to wherever it goes. I hope somebody found them and passed the beautiful little animals to their children or grandchildren. Or maybe an old man found the sack and he needed the money so he sold them to somebody on the street. I hope so anyway. I hope those little creatures of grass found a good home for a while.

Tomorrow I will go back to see Mr. Wu.

MURDER CITY

2010-05-14T15:19:00.000-06:00

Everyday I pray for the people of Juárez. Literally, I pray. I light a stick of incense and pray for peace, good health and spiritual well-being for the people of Juárez. If you pay attention to the news, you know my praying does nothing, but it keeps the city and its people in my mind and heart. Like most everybody else I’m overwhelmed by the bloodshed. I don’t go over there much anymore and I don’t write much here on my blog about the city. Other people do the writing much better that I ever could. Especially the journalist Charles Bowden. I emphatically suggest you read his new book Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields (Nation Books). Juárez has become his tar baby. He’s slapped it across the head a couple of times (see Note 1) and each time his fist gets stuck deeper in the goo. The bloody mess of flesh and bones. And the River Styx washes away the names of the dead. Violence, Bowden shows us, doesn’t work, no matter its scale. The citizens of Juárez must repeat this truth everyday of their lives, but the sicarios, the killers, they aren’t listening. Nor would they care if they were listening. As I write this well over five thousand people have been killed since the bloody reign terror began in 2008, over 800 have been killed in 2010 alone, and the homicides in April have been approximated at 205--more than double the number of 90 registered in April 2009 and four times the number of 55 cases in the same period in 2008. The month of May is keeping pace (Note 2). A few weeks ago, on just one day the killers found 22 more souls to dispatch to the other side. The governments and the mainstream media want to ascribe causes to the carnage. They are either liars, or they still believe in solutions. They certainly don’t look deeply into their mirrors. But the violence in Juárez is proving to be more like a viral epidemic, like AIDS or the Black Plague, except the host body is culture and government. There is no cure, no silver bullet. Its beginning is hypothesis, its end will not be found in the blather of politicians and talking heads, and certainly not by more violence--whether sanctioned by the government or not.

Murder City documents the year 2008, the year that the murdering began. It coincides, of course, with Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s infamous and duplicitous declaration of war against the cartels. Bowden, like Alice, does decide to walk into the mirror and see what awaits him. More than ever now, he becomes a subject of his writing as he wanders the streets of death with his list of names and places, trying to catch hold of some sort of understanding. Some theory to serve as anchor in the flood. Factual school-learned journalism doesn’t work. Statistics, names of the dead and descriptions of murder scenes don’t carve real substance into the readers’ heart. They don’t or won’t listen sincerely, the statistics become mottos for cocktail parties and e-chatter, the kind of abstractions that remain arms-length from the human heart. But Bowden wants his reader to feel the terror and inhuman evil of the epidemic. It’s the conundrum, although contrary, that a religious mystic confronts—how do you explain the experience of God to somebody who hasn’t experienced God? Bowden is pointing his finger at the blackest of moons. He finds us real live people to create a four-headed Virgil to guide him through this 21st Century inferno, these peculiar buoys that float up almost unbidden in the muck to direct him toward the deepest ring of hell:

Miss Sinaloa: a beauty queen from the state of Sinaloa. Her story begins as the archetypical story of the beautiful Mexican woman, but because of the glories of her body, she becomes trapped in the web of the narcotraficantes. She goes to a party in Juárez to have a good time, she's fed drugs and booze, she’s raped and sodomized for three days and then she finally re-surfaces at the “crazy place” where El Pastor looks after her. She becomes Bowden’s imaginary, but very real, companion in the City of Juárez. She’s a vision of lost beauty, she whispers truths in his ear and she understands the needs of the human heart and body.

El Pastor: the rehabilitated drug addict who went out into the desert and finds Christ (Note 3). On his return he builds “the crazy place” from the rubble of Juárez and there he houses and cares for the lost souls of the city, the lepers and untouchables of Juárez, people like Miss Sinaloa. He teaches Bowden about compassion and the meaning of love. He is no romantic. He is afraid. He knows he might die. In fact, as I write this, he might already be dead.

El Sicario, the hired killer: as far as I know, this is the first extended recorded interview with a Mexican narcotraficante since Terrence Poppa interviewed Pablo Acosta and documented it in Drug Lord. It’s a frightening interview. Not only the interview itself, but the details of finally getting in touch with this man who, because he has felt the presence of God, wants somehow to find a little bit of peace. Like with El Pastor, the discovery of God has found him some relief but the residue of his many murders still armors his body and mind.

El Reportero: Emilio Gutiérrez Soto, a reporter from Ascensión, Chihuahua (Note 4). He fled with his son to the U.S because the Mexican army was looking for him. They wanted to kill him. In 2005 he had reported about a specific incident of an Army patrol walking into a hotel where migrants stayed before their journey north in search of work. Migrants carry money and valuables, their tickets through their illegal passage. The Army knew this, and they robbed each and every one of them. Now the Army had threatened to kill Emilio. He fled for the border. He hoped he would get asylum, but what he got was a jail cell and a seven month separation from his son. Listen to what Emilio teaches Bowden:

It is possible to see his imprisonment as simply the normal by-product of bureaucratic blindness and indifference. But I don’t think that is true. No Mexican reporter has ever been given political asylum, because if the U.S. government honestly faced facts, it would have to admit that Mexico is not a society that respects human rights. Just as the United Stataes would be hard pressed, if it faced facts, to explain to its own citizens how it can justify giving the Mexican army $1.4 billion under Plan Merida, a piece of black humor that is supposed to fight a way on drugs. But then, the American press is the chorus in this comedy since it continues to report that the Mexican army is in a war to the death with the drug cartels. There are two errors in these accounts. One is simple: The war in Mexico is for drugs and the enormous money to be made by supplying American habits, a torrent of cash that the army, the police, the government, and the cartels all lust for. Second, the Mexican army is a government-financed criminal organization, a fact most Mexicans learn as children (page 202).

And Bowden plays himself, a reporter, a character like Dante who is really no longer Charles Bowden, but the character who he must stand up in his place. As a poet, I find Bowden’s personal improvisations riffing off the confrontations and conversations with these four persons the most interesting writing in the book. Sure, Murder City is full of facts and first-person accounts and description, but he employs the methods of novelists and storytellers, and, even more radical, of poets to tell the fractured stories of Juárez.

The only other writer to come close to Bowden’s writing about Juárez is Roberto Bolaño. The great novelist, like Bowden, came to see the city of Juárez as emblematic of our new world. Of course, Bolaño doesn’t write about Juárez. He writes instead about the city Santa Teresa that he invents from the cloth of his imagination in “The Part about the Crimes” in his epic 2666: A Novel. In fact, Bolaño wrote from Spain as his own life was running to its conclusion. He used as source material El Huesos en el Desierto by Sergio Gonzalez Rodriguez, as well as a long correspondence with Gonzalez, who appears in a fictional role in 2666. I’m pretty certain that Bowden used El Huesos also (Note 5). Bowden and Bolaño tell all this much better than I, so I’m going to shut up soon. I do want to emphasize to you to read Murder City. When you’re done, read 2666. These are not only important texts for now, but for the years to come, even those years when the killing fields move from Juárez to the next place. They will still be the same killing fields. The same ignorant federal laws of prohibition and the human greed which capitalizes (as in “Capitalism”) on those laws will still be feeding the global killing fields. I wish I could say differently, but I can’t. These killing fields are one of the by-products of the Age of Globalization—our brave new world, a world of centralized corporatization and governmental regulation that segregates us further and further from a real understanding of ourselves and our planet.

I will continue to light my stick of incense for the people of La Ciudad Juárez. And for us all.

●

Note 1. Juarez: A Laboratory of the Future and Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family.
Note 2. I get my figures from the Frontera List Serve. Molly Molloy at the New Mexico State Library monitors newspapers on both sides of the border and daily tabulates the ever-growing figures. I also recommend following Frontera del Sur, which also originates at NMSU through the Center for Latin American and Border Studies, especially the work of Kent Patterson. Thanks to all you guys. You do important work.
Note 3. People who write or talk about Bowden and his work rarely mention his ability to let others do their own talking. Both the Pastor and the sicario have had experiences of God. Those experiences are the foundations of their conversations with him. Bowden, on the other hand, is a big gregarious and hard-headed intellectual who did his apprenticeship with the likes of Ed Abbey deep in the outback, and he carries around a large backpack full of doubt like the rest of us in the intellectual community who read his books. Yet, he reports faithfully on these two men’s experiences of God without remark. And he likewise gives the late Esther Chavez Cano, an atheist, full voice in his description of her. Indeed, I think his writing on Chavez Cano is truly the greatest eulogy to this great lady that I have read Bowden understood her like he understood Miss Sinaloa and El Pastor and El Sicario and El Reportero. I applaud him. I applaud them all. And I might add, it’s almost impossible to write about Mexico without letting its peculiar and very complex spirituality seep into your writing.
Note 4. To read about Emilio in particular, you can read Bowden’s article online in Mother Jones: “We Bring Fear: A Reporter Flees the Biggest Cartel of all, the Mexican Army.”
Note 5. Maybe I’m wrong but I bet $10 that the woman Heidi Slauquet (page 31, Murder City) is the same party-hostess for the rich and famous who turns pimp for the narco-traficantes that Bolaño describes. She eventually ends up one more dead body on a road leaving Juarez.

The Streets are empty on the other side:

2010-04-27T17:10:00.002-06:00

Calle de las Novias, Juárez, January 2010

"I can’t imagine you really keeping all your selves apart from each other--when the whole is so great."
--from a letter from my friend Patsy Aldana, publisher of Groundwood Books. She lives in Toronto, but is Guatemalan and a frequent visitor to Mexico. She visited here a few years ago and she loved walking around the downtowns of El Paso and Juárez. She reads about the carnage and the sorrow and the chaos and, like the rest of us, she feels very sad and helpless.

Happy Birthday to Kankin, The Sutra Reader

2010-04-22T16:00:00.006-06:00

Last Thursday, April 15th, was my birthday. I am 68 years old. Shit. Who would have guessed? My brother died before he was 60. My dad died as a young man in a plane crash, training young men to fight in the war. My grandfathers on both sides didn’t live real long either. Lee and I were in San Antonio on business, and we spent my birthday evening--a low-key dinner at the Cove Restaurant--with our son Andy Byrd, his daughter Emma Birdie and Joe Hayes, my good and close friend all these many years. Joe’s been like a Godfather to each of our children. It rained most of the day and the San Antonio air was humid and cool, like silk, the smell of honey suckle and roses and pittosporum. I like Dogen’s comment about the sutras, holy text, being “transmitted and retained on trees and rocks, are spread through fields and through villages, are expounded by lands of dust and are lectured by space.”

After learning in practice as Buddhist patriarchs, we are barely able to learn sutras in practice. At this time the reality of hearing sutras, receiving sutras, preaching sutras, and so on exists in the ears, eyes, tongue, nose, and organs of body and mind, and in the places we go, hear, and speak. The sort who “because they seek fame, preach non-Buddhist doctrines” cannot practice the Buddha’s sutras. The reason is that the sutras are transmitted and retained on trees and rocks, are spread through fields and through villages, are expounded by lands of dust, and are lectured by space. --From Chapter Twenty-One, “Kankin, Reading Sutras,” in Volume One of the Shobengenzo by Zen master Eihei Dogen (13th century), founder of the Soto sect of Japanese Zen Buddhism as translated by Gudo Wafu Nijishima and his student Chudo Cross.

On April 3rd I took the vows during the Shukke Tokudo (aka “the Home Leaving Ceremony”) to be a Zen Buddhist teacher, or priest (I like the word teacher better), in the Soto Zen lineage, the Order of Clear Mind Zen. My teacher is Harvey Daiho Hilbert Roshi. He gave me the Zen name of “Kankin,” based on the Dogen’s text quoted above. The story of my Zen practice is long. I could even date it back to my high school days when, with Harvey Goldner, I’d got lost in daydreams about Kerouac’s Dharma Bums and the essays of Allen Watts and the poems of Gary Snyder. But the particular history of receiving this name Kankin is a much more particular story, an abbreviated version of which follows. I starting writing this as journal notes, but since it’s important to me as a poet I decided to publish it on this blog.

Three old men in the shadows:
Ken Hogaku Hogaku McGuire Roshi, Harvey Daiho Hilbert Roshi
and Bobby Kankin Byrd

I’ve been sitting zazen for a long time. In the beginning it was off and on, fits and starts. Being in El Paso for the last 30-something years, away from so many things, I stumbled along my own way. Finding things here and there.

“The path has its own intelligence.”

I agree with that. That’s what you learn walking up and down hills in the desert or the woods, the streets of a city even, no matter where. Some animal--a deer, varmints, cats and dogs, some unknown Buddhist, a little kid, whatever--has gone before you. Like even this quote itself I found on a business card that the poet and performer Joy Harjo gave me in Tucson. I hadn’t seen her in years. Our kids had gone to daycare together way back in the mid-70s at UNM in Albuquerque. So wonderful to see her. She gave me her card so I’d get in touch with her. And yeah, it was on that card I saw the statement, “The path has its own intelligence.”

Yeah, that's right. The path has it's own intelligence.

So at first I did zazen by myself, sort of catch as you can--five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 and even 20 minutes--, not knowing exactly what I was doing, looking from one book to the next for instructions, but definitely wanting something. A friend told me about Phillip Kapleau’s Three Pillars of Zen and that book in particular invigorated my practice. And of course Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginners Mind which I've probably read five or six times by now. But without others to sit with, my practice lurched along, bouncing off the walls. Sometime in the 1980s I attended sesshins with Rinzai teacher Joshu Sasaki Roshi, first a weekend in Santa Fe and later several week long sesshins at the Bodhi Manda in Jemez Springs. Joshu Sasaki Roshi is an astounding man (he’s 100-something now). My journals are full of memories of him and his words I heard from him, either in Sanzen or during his teishos, even for the little time I spent with him. He enlivened my practice. Illuminated it. I drove north to Santa Fe and Jemez Springs / Bodhi Manda to attend those sesshins, but as time passed I never felt at home there. Roshi was lost behind the rustling of student robes. The Sangha never felt welcoming to me. The people there were into their own rhythms and habits. The trip was a long journey away from family and job. I quit going. My sitting became irregular, sporadic. In the mid-1990s I started sitting again, strongly in fact, although again by myself, sparked by a strong sense of sorrow and hunger for something other than the man I felt myself to be. Ironically, my wife’s Christian practice--it was important to her, I could see her mature, especially in her works of compassion--made me realize that I needed a spiritual discipline to practice. Just not Christianity.

Then sometime in the early 2000s I happened to hear about the Las Cruces Zen Center of the Soto variety. I didn’t know much about the difference between Rinzai and Soto. The usual things. The Soto sit facing the wall, the Rinzai have their back to the walls. According to the legends, the Soto tradition comes out of a rural, farming mindset, the Rinsai have the taste of soldiering, of the samurai in their institutional memory. I just wanted to sit, and I didn’t much care if I was facing the wall or not. The LCZC Sangha met on Monday evenings at Harvey SoDaiho Hilbert’s house on Baylor Canyon Road below the Organ Mountains. Harvey was a disciple of Ken McGuire Hogaku Roshi who received transmission from Soyu Zengaku Matsuoka Roshi. I started driving to Las Cruces every week. An hour back and forth. An hour and a half of practice. At first I was cautious. I’m not a good joiner. But I enjoyed the services--the bells, the chanting of the Three Refuges and Four Great Vows, the Heart Sutra in English and Sino-Japanese along with the beating on the wood fish (mukugyo), but especially the two meditation periods separated by kinhin. Sitting zazen with others is powerful. And the sangha was friendly. They let me be but accepted me. They were happy that I was there. And Harvey’s dharma talks were very special. Good food for my home practice.

The services included a nice incense ceremony before tea was served. A piece of charcoal is lit and sits in the incense bowl at the altar. Each practitioner, if she or he so wishes, can approach the altar, bow to the Buddha, take some kernels of incense and drop them on the charcoal, bow again to the Buddha and then bow to the teacher. For a number of weeks I didn’t participate. I stood there, watching, my hands in gassho. It didn’t feel right to me. Bowing to a statue. Watching the smoke. Bowing to a guy I didn’t much know. I didn’t understand it so I didn’t do it. That was okay. After maybe a month or so, I did it. Something was happening in my life--I forget exactly what now--but I wanted to say a silent prayer.I bowed to the Buddha, which is a bow to the emptiness, the absolute, the dharmakaya. I let myself go. Just a little bit. The air felt good. I dropped a number of incense kernels on the charcoal and watched the smoke curl up into the air. I said my silent prayer. And I bowed again to the Buddha and I bowed to SoDaiho. It felt very right. I slowly began to meld into that community of practitioners.

A few years passed. My home practice became stronger. I was sitting 25 or 30 minutes in the mornings, lighting a candle, a stick of incense, doing abbreviated chants and a few prayers for my family and our communities, making vows for my own practice, sitting zazen. Perhaps a little bit at night. I was reading a lot of Zen literature and attending weekend sesshins as much as I could. I felt at home in my practice. It became a necessary part of my life. If, like when I traveled, I couldn’t find the time or place to sit, I would get nervous. There’d be an odd hunger in my head and heart and body.

Things change, of course. They always do.

The LCZC, through the help of Judy Daishin Harmon, had begun renting a small house on Mesilla Avenue for services and practice. Harvey Hilbert and his wife Judy finished their place off the grid above Cloudcroft and moved up there. Judy and then Mike Gozen LaTorra received their Shukke Tokudo ordinations and became priests. After a while they shared responsibilities as co-abbots of the LCZC. On several occasions Harvey SoDaiho asked me to receive the precepts, to do the Jukai ceremony. I treaded water until on April 2nd, 2005, after a weekend sesshin at the LCZC, I took my vows during a Jukai ceremony with several others. The name he gave me was Hen-shin, which means transformation or rebirth. There really wasn’t a lot for me to do by then. I had read all the books, talked with Harvey SoDaiho, talked with others. Being in El Paso I was sort of on my own leash. But I did have to sew my own rakusu. A black one, of course, to signify that I had received the precepts. I had sewed the thing together with my own hands. Thick clumsy hands they turned out to be. That was a task. The rakusu pattern is complicated and confusing. The directions were a puzzle by themselves. The whole process was a koan in itself. In the evenings and on Saturdays I sat there at the dining room table and sweated and even bled over that rakusu. Nothing makes a man more mindful than jabbing a needle into his ungainly fingers. Lucky for me Lee gave me advice with the pattern and even did some of the sewing for me when I thought I might weep.

The life of the LCZC, Clear Mind Zen and Harvey Daiho Hilbert Roshi its founder is a story I want to tell another time. But its history has not always been a smooth boat ride along a wide easy-going river. Nor has my relationship with Harvey. There were disappointments. “Confusion,” a good friend told me once, “is a relatively high state.” Like working on a koan, the relationship between a teacher and student. A few years ago, there was a riff in the sangha. The usual gunk that goes along with being human. It happens, no matter how long we sit and stare at wall. This goes for roshis, this goes for students and priests. The sangha bifurcated. The dance of an amoeba. The division process was not easy. By then Judy Harmon had gotten a divorce from her husband and as part of that difficult process she quit her position as co-abbot and left the Zen Center. Mike SoGozen LaTorra had remained at the LCZC as abbot. He and Harvey Daiho had a disagreement. Or “quarrel” would be a better word. The clash, on one level, was about practice and understanding the dharma. The word “enlightenment” was one of the sticks thrown on the flame. It was also about the teacher and student relationship. Zen in America stuff. And finally it was about very personal disagreements. Two men who perhaps understood the same thing differently. The sangha bifurcated. Like an amoeba. The division process was not easy. By then my friend Judy Harmon had gotten a divorce from her husband and as part of that difficult process she also left the Zen Center. Mike Gozen LaTorra had remained at the LCZC as abbot and Harvey Daiho went on his own way, formalizing his Clear Mind Zen organization which he had been talking about for years. Mike and Harvey--student and teacher, close friends, fellow Zensters--quit talking to each other.

It was not a fun time. But things change. The Buddha said that. You can quote me, he said. Mike SoGozen retained his position as Abbot of LCZC and he continues teaching there to a strong sangha. Harvey Daiho Roshi cemented in his mind and heart the Clear Mind Zen organization which he had been talking about for years. Zensters took sides, going this way or that. With others I tried to heal the riff, but that was not to be. At least, not immediately. The three pillars of Zen practice--Great Faith, Great Doubt, Great Effort--really made sense during this time.I kept in contact with Harvey Daiho, although at a distance. He was my teacher.
I realized this fact deeply. I felt really at home with his understanding of the dharma. I just didn't make the weekly drive to Las Cruces. Something in my practice had changed. His understanding of the dharma was and is crucial to the growth of my practice. I had started, with his blessing and sometimes participation, a small sangha in El Paso. I called it the Both Sides / No Sides Zen Community. I wanted practitioners from both sides of the border to feel at home there with us. At the time El Paso or Juarez really didn’t have a place to come together as a group and sit zazen.

And “small” is a good word to describe what we were doing. We sat at the home of Richie Barajas and Briana Armendariz, which also served as the office for Richie’s practice, Black Tortoise Acupuncture and Herbs. We sat there--many times just me, Richie and Briana, sometimes only two of us, sometimes only me--for over a year. Train tracks run behind the house, and I always found it interesting when a train came rumbling by during our zazen. Its long whistle provided good resonance in my body. Then, a couple of years ago, John Fortunato began sitting with us. He offered the sangha his home. He’s a bachelor, and he had, he said, a large sunroom that would be perfect for sitting. He was right. We’ve been sitting there for two years now. And our sangha has begun to grow. Any Saturday (services begin at 330pm in you’re in town) we’ll have six to eight people sitting with us. Several times during these years Harvey suggested to me that I take the precepts to be a teacher (aka, a priest), do the Shukke Tokudo. No, I didn’t want to do that. I don’t like the words like priest and disciple, I don’t like robes, I’m uncomfortable with the entire hullabaloo. I was happy sitting, helping to keep the doors of our sangha open and acting the part of a lay teacher.

During these years, besides reading, I had the opportunity to talk to others who were practicing in one way or another. Three, in particular, were providential and nourishing to my own practice. One was Claude Anshin Thomas, whose book At Hell’s Gate is probably the best book I’ve ever read about the struggles of being non-violent. Claude Anshin, with a small sangha, was walking the U.S./Mexico Border from Brownsville to Chula Vista, CA, on a pilgrimage for peace. (I wrote about him and his pilgrimage here.) He and his fellow pilgrims stayed in El Paso for a few days, I arranged a talk for him at the Unitarian Center and we had a gathering for everybody at our home. It was good time and a good chance for me and others to hear Claude Anshin and to witness his practice. Also, Mike Gozen LaTorra worked it out to bring punkster roshi Brad Warner to Las Cruces and El Paso, and then last year we brought him here again. Brad’s books have been important to me, not only for his ideas(he was certainly the best guy to open the door for me into Dogen’s Shobengenzo) but also for his iconoclastic rhetoric and tetchy rants about the touchy-feely practice of Buddhism in the U.S. That same rhetoric and his practice of Buddhism has helped me immensely in reconciling my poetics to my practice of Zen. (I’ve written about Brad here and here.) And finally there’s my good buddy and fellow poet JB Bryan, who can be as happily cantankerous as Brad when he’s talking about Zen (or poetry or whatever). JB is a leader at the Three Stones Zen Group in Albuquerque. The Three Stones folks are a delightful sangha, and they practice a non-denominational, anarchistic (aka "chaordic"), egalitarian and homegrown Zen, although their roots can be found in the work and teachings of Charlotte Joko Beck. (She has likewise been very important to me. It's wonderful to read a wise woman write about Zen practice.) The Three Stones is a perfect fit for JB. He’s always delighted to preach to me about institutionalized, hierarchical Zen with all its bells and whistles and bowing and scraping. His Zen heroes are old patriarchs like Han Shan, the Cold Mountain poet, and Hotei, the Happy Buddha.

So every week we rang the bell, we chanted and beat on the wooden fish with its eyes that never close, we lit incense, we sat on our zafus and practiced zazen, we did the silent kinhin dance, we sat some more, we chanted the Heart Sutra in Sino-Japanese (our voices so much stronger after sitting), and we sipped on our tea. It’s been good. Late last year, one of the men who had been practicing with us for some time told me that he wanted to receive the Jukai Precepts. I was delighted for him. But I said, “You’ll have to go find a teacher to practice with.” He looked at me and said, “I think I already have.” I was both startled and honored. But of course that meant, if I wanted to do things rightly, I had to take the vows and become ordained—to receive Shukke Tokudo. After much thought I went up to Las Cruces and told Harvey this story about the man who wanted to receive the precepts. I asked him if he would ordain me.

“Of course,” he said, laughing so hard I wondered if he would fall off his zafu. He said I wouldn’t need the robes. I could buy the brown rakusu. I had done my duty of making the black rakusu.

So this is how I came to receive the name Kankin on April 3rd. Before the ceremony we had a modified Zazenkai (one day sit) from 8:30 to 2:30. I sat strong. It was so good to sit with my friends. It’s the best way to be alone. Then people started showing up. We had about 35 in all. My family was there, folks from the sangha, friends and kids. Harvey’s teacher Ken McGuire Roshi and his wife Fern McGuire Roshi. Ken and his wife Fern both studied with Matsuoka.You can see photographs here that Lee took.

Tokudo means ceremony, and Shukke is leaving home. Thus, “The Leaving Home Ceremony” or “Home-leaver’s ceremony.” In the old days monks-to-be left home and went into the monastery. Not so much anymore. Especially for American Zen Buddhists. Here Zen is much more a householder practice. But “leaving home” is still a very important concept. I like to think of “leaving home” as leaving that comfortable place called home or the ego to serve something greater than ourselves. In a way we all leave home, we leave the ego, when we do our home practice, the wall in front of us, alone with our breath and the universe in which we live. No separation--the absolute, the universe, the breath, breathing together in and out. We do this too when we come together to sit and practice as a Sangha. And we do this when we climb off our zafus and take our practice out into the city, the place of our life, where the 10,000 things thrive and multiply.

During the ceremony I vowed to practice and to teach others, if they so wish, the Way of the Dharma as I understand it. I vowed to appreciate my whole life as the life of the Three Treasures--the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, and I vowed to serve Family, Sangha and Community and to practice right livelihood.

I take Refuge in Everything That Is (Buddha)
I take Refuge in Reality and its Teachings (Dharma)
I take Refuge in Humanity (Sangha)
I vow to cease creating evil
I vow to do good
I vow to work to create abundant good for all beings

So this is my birthday present to myself. Good luck, huh?
Bobby

Robert Creeley died Five Years Ago

2010-04-14T12:10:00.001-06:00

THE OBIT PAGE
In Memoriam to Robert Creeley
Born: May 21, 1926, Arlington, Massachusetts
Died: March 30, 2005, Odessa, Texas

NOTE: I wrote this piece for the Texas Observer soon after Bob Creeley died. It's on the TO website as well as elsewhere, but I just realized it's been a few days over five years now since he died, and I wanted it here on my blog too. Creeley, one of the most influential American poets of the 20th Century, died in Odessa, Texas at the age of 78. He had just begun a two-month residency in Marfa as a resident of the Lannan Foundation when he took ill and was rushed to the hospital in Odessa. Among his many awards, he has received the prestigious Bollingen Award in 1999 and the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001. Creeley has always been a crucial influence on my work as a poet, writer and publisher.

“I believe in a poetry determined by the language of which it is made. I look to words, and nothing else, for my own redemption. . . . I mean the words as opposed to content.”

—Robert Creeley, somewhere around 1960

POET ROBERT CREELEY died in Odessa, Texas, of all places. A Creeley poem would have smiled at the irony, wondering in short gasping breaths about sadness in the Ukraine at the edge of the Black Sea, wondering if that human sadness was the same sadness he saw in the face of the black nurse in Texas who was watching him die. Then a few days later the Pope died in Rome. Where he was supposed to die. The media made sure that the whole world followed the Pope on the journey to his new status as Holy Cadaver and Future Saint. But news of Creeley’s death, not withstanding his importance to American cultural history, was muted, traveling mostly by short newspaper obituaries, emails and telephone calls. For poets of my generation the news was like a switchblade slicing across the chest. It wasn’t supposed to happen, but it did happen. Quickly, almost painlessly.

During the extravagant media-driven spectacle of the Pope’s dying while still carrying my own personal sadness for Creeley’s death, I was reminded of Paul Blackburn’s poem “Obit Page.” There, in a few short lines, Paul coupled the deaths of Roger Hornsby, the greatest right-handed hitter of all-time, and the great American poet William Carlos Williams who had followed Hornsby into the void. Blackburn’s short eulogy was a celebration of pure Americana and the American idiom. WCW had entered the Hall of Fame where he belonged. But Creeley and the Pope within a few days of each other? Creeley was an existentialist poet, a romantic, a believer of words as he wrote them on a blank white page or on a computer screen when that time came--nouns and verbs transforming into a poem, content and life always in a state of change and becoming. Here he was riding in a rickety boat crossing the River Styx with El Papa, the last great Sun King, the man who had been perched atop the monolithic throne where truth and answers were promised packaged neatly in a book. This image is the antithesis of Blackburn’s elegiac celebration. It’s more like a good lucha libre bout on Mexican television.

Creeley was 78 when he died, a member of the remarkable generation of poets that Donald Allen immortalized in the Grove Press anthology The New American Poetry, 1945—1960. In the 60s I was young man at the University of Arizona BCW (Before “Creative Writing”) first experimenting with the making of poems. Creeley and a host of his peers came through to read, thanks to the largesse of the Ruth Stephan Poetry Center and its board of teachers and writers like Keith Wilson and Barney Childs who were plugged into the Allen anthology. We heard folks like Creeley, Robert Duncan and Gary Snyder, among others.

And Creeley became my hero. His poems were intense personal revelations that seemed so accessible at first reading, but the closer I got to them, the more mysterious and deep they became. His poems--and this is still what I find so extraordinary about Creeley and his generation of poets--reflected exactly the poet who was writing them. Form was the constant subtext, his poems seemed to say, the place where a true revolution was being waged. The “new American poem” was an organic mechanism, a reflection of the poet in constant flux, but more like staring into a creek or a lake than staring into a static mirror. The “New American Poets” gave my generation this gift, and they had received it likewise from Williams and Pound who had received it from Whitman.

Etcetera.

Creeley was a handsome and charismatic guy in a disheveled and very personal sort of way. He had been blinded at an early age, so he wore a patch over his bad eye, which made him even more attractive. He loved fervent conversation, especially about poetry. He took young poets seriously and easily invited us into his circle. He would sit down, elbows on the arms of the chair, hands clasped; he would lean forward and peer at us at us with that one eye; and he would answer our questions about how a poem is made. He would talk about content becoming form and form becoming content, about using a typewriter or a pencil, about legal-sized pads of yellow paper opposed to notebooks, about all these many things. And he would tell us stories about Kerouac, Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Charles Olson and Williams Carlos Williams. Not gossiping stories, but stories with an intent to reveal something about poetry and living life like a poet with eyes and ears wide open. His stories became parables in our hearts. It was a paradise. I wanted so much to be a poet.

Creeley and his poems were addictive. If you read too much Creeley, which I of course did, then you started writing like him with short perfect lines, simple nouns and verbs, short little ditties that were oblique and tantalizing with innuendo. Opening up any poetry magazine of the time you could find young poets scattered across the United States who had been snorting and smoking too much Creeley. But if you were serious about your craft, and you understood Creeley’s ideas about form, then you would go find other poets and sources that led you back home to yourself. It was exhilarating.

As the years passed I’d bump into Bob Creeley in various places. We’d talk like old friends and compare notes, we’d drink wine and laugh, and he’d tell me stories about poets and poems, peering at me through that one mysterious eye. The cadences of his conversation were the same cadences of his poetry. I was always scuttling back to his poems, more sure of myself, reading them and being amazed. And I would always be reminded of the sense of a community of poets that Creeley had passed along to me and my peers. I still feel that when I hear and read poems I like, and when I write poems, or an essay like this. I feel like I am participating in community. That together we are feeding the luminous beast which is poetry.

Ezra Pound said poets and artists are the antennae of their race, and Creeley loved to remind his listeners of that statement, wondering aloud what it meant. That’s why I put Creeley and Pope John Paul II together on Charon’s rickety boat floating on the River Styx toward the other shore. The Pope feels confused and out of place afloat the dark waters. His tenure on the Spaceship Earth was as the spiritual leader of a feudalistic institution that wields enormous sway in the world he has just departed, but its symbols and paraphernalia of a God-ordered universe no longer seem to catch hold. Its power and majesty are subsiding. In the quiet of his heart the Pope understood that the struggle was about ideas and mythos, but he was never able to grasp evolutionary theory and the New Physics. Those ideas didn’t fit comfortably inside the Cathedral. And now the Pope sits facing his companion, a goofy one-eyed poet with an unkempt beard. The guy seems nervous and unsure of himself, but he’s scribbling on a piece of paper.

“What are you doing?”
“Writing a poem.”
“About what?”
The poet leans forward and says, “Well, I don’t know yet. I let the poems bubble up from the mud. It’s sort of like everything else.”
“But what does your poem say so far?”
“It says, Death is so much emptiness, huh?”
“Well, maybe,” the Pope says.
Charon, the ancient ferryman, dips his pole into the dark water and pushes his boat toward the other shore.
He says absolutely nothing.
He never will.

**

An excellent place to begin researching Robert Creeley’s work can be found at the Electronic Poetry Center here. And there's a wonderful electronic archive of poetry readings here. I'm pasting below a photo that I copied off poet Larry Goodell's facebook page (Larry is publishing all sorts of wonderful photos from back in the day) when Creeley and Bobbie Creeley (aka Bobbie Louise Hawkins) and kids lived in Placitas, NM, above Albuquerque. Larry is hunkered down, poet Ron Bayes is the third man in the photo. Below the photo is a poem I wrote not long after Bob died. His poetry was echoing around in my thoughts. Lee and I were driving I-10 east, south of Odessa, north of Marfa. For Love, of course, was Creeley's first big book, a collection of poems. I have my original copy of that book somewhere, all dog-eared and used up.

For Love on I-10, West Texas

Ivan Ilych was dead before we got to Ozona.
He answered his koan.
His bones began to rattle like my mother’s rattled.
And then, like my mother, he let go.
I started thinking about Robert Creeley.
He died up north of here in Odessa—
Strange place for a poet to die.
Especially Creeley,
No big car to drive, his hip New England riff
Useless in all this emptiness of sky.
Then our van ran out of gas.
A sheriff’s deputy—
Big square-jawed man in a cowboy hat—
Showed up with 5 gallons in a red plastic can.
He had two sidekicks, a white guy and a black guy.
Big smiles all around.
Is this the 21st century dream of Texas?
I hope so.
All three of them nursing an adrenalin rush.
They wanted to help somebody.
Anybody.
They had just cleaned up a bloody mess on the highway.
An SUV going east, a young couple and their three kids,
The front right tire blew out, the vehicle rolled
Over.
And over.
And over.
It was ugly, the deputy said.
And bloody.
The emptiness surrounds us. Nothing
To do but drive, he said.
We shook hands all around. The black guy said,
Look out where you’re going.
Yeah.
And I thanked them for the gas.
I didn’t ask how many people were killed.
I didn’t want to know.
What kind of news would that be?
How would it get us to Ozona?

A Garden of Lettuce

2010-04-01T14:05:00.000-06:00

We live in El Paso, the Desert of Chihuahua, so all winter long we eat fresh lettuce from Lee's lettuce garden. It's not a big space--maybe 4'x12'--half of which Lee uses for her lettuce. I double-dig beforehand. A manly chore. Then Lee plants seeds. A mixture of seeds from Cook's Gardens and Seed Savers heirloom seeds. The ritual begins sometimes late September. Maybe October. The seeds sprout. "My little babies," she calls them. Grandkids gather around to watch and help. She waters the garden, she tends the tiny plants, and in three or four weeks she's thinning and pulling leaves from the larger plants. She's putting little plants in our store-bought lettuce salads. The plants thrive in the cool desert air. If the weather promises a freeze, she's out there laying sheets over the bed. Soon we're eating salads with lettuce totally from the garden. Fresh lettuce during the Christmas holidays is exotic and delicious. Lee makes a wonderful salad--feta cheese, red onion, red bell peppers, salt and pepper, olive oil, balsamic vinegar. We feast on salads. November. December. January. This last January we went off to Boston for a conference. We figured the garden would be gone when we got back and Lee was already planning what seeds she would be planting to get us to April. But January was peculiar. A very wet month. We came home to a flourishing garden. Now the heat is coming, the hot winds of spring, and Lee has an abundance of lettuce. The lettuce won't last much longer. We've not bought lettuce from the store in months. She making gifts of lettuce to neighbors and friends. Our evening salads get larger and larger. Tonight again we feasted on a wonderful salad. Such a pleasure. Below is a poem I wrote several years ago about Lee's garden.

● ●

This morning I made love with the lettuce picker

Every year the lettuce picker plants her lettuce in October.
Lettuce loves October in the Chihuahua Desert.
October passes and November comes.
The lettuce grows leafy and happy.
The lettuce picker slips out to the garden in the morning.
I will not tell you how old I am.
I will not tell you how old she is.
But her legs are white, her rear end
is clad in purple pajamas
and is raised like a flag planted
in the dirt
for the preservation of love.
Today is Sunday, the day of Sabbath.
A day to remember ourselves.
A day to worship all that is holy.
This is what we do when we make love.

● ●

Reading this poem after all of this time I think of Judson Crews. Just yesterday I saw a picture of him on Larry Goodell's Facebook page. Good old Judson. He's alive and still doing a little bit of kicking. Living up in Taos. Women around him, of course. An ancient man now. He certainly understands what wild and beautiful stuff can happen between a man and a woman when they are together harvesting lettuce from the garden.

Joe Somoza & the Other

2010-03-11T15:26:00.000-07:00

Acquarium by Jill Somoza

Mark Weber has a nice article about Joe Somoza's poetry at the Metropolis Free Jazz Network site. After reading the article, scan on down for another of Jill's paintings, plus some poems and audio of Joe reading his work. Mark's article gave me the opportunity to blog up one of Jill's wonderful translucent paintings. I thought of the painting as "Blue Wings" but Jill said:
I called it "Aquarium" because I painted it after we came back from Chicago where we had walked around their great aquarium one whole afternoon and I loved being able to "walk under water" it seemed like. But actually, as usual, it didn't start out to be anything, it just became that.
Lee and I are fans.

Jornalista John Ross busted for possession of political wisdom in El Paso

2010-03-04T16:11:00.000-07:00

John Ross busted in El Paso for possession of political wisdom

If you want to be shook up from your daily slumber, you need to have a dose of one-eyed John Ross. 72 years old now, he dodged a cancerous death and still rejoices the verbal and written firebombs he lobs into the halls of power. So Lee and I got lucky. John was on the Texas leg of his book tour celebrating El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City just out from Nation Books, so he took a room at the Casa Byrd for a few days.

Keep up with John, his Blindman Buff weekly dispatches and the itinerary of his journey at his website here. Also, check out his favorite good-works project, The Collateral Repair Project created to help the displaced, injured and hungry of Iraq. Especially the children.

John is an old school radical writer--he planned and organized the journey himself. Ham Fish, President-Emeritus of Nation Institute, told me once he was a publisher’s dream. “He loves getting his hands dirty selling books.” I agreed. In 1998 Cinco Puntos Press had published his epic novel about Mexico at the end of the century Tonitiuh’s People: A Novel of the Mexican Cataclysm in 1998. Now in 2010 his book tour is meandering through universities and radical book stores and community centers. Everywhere he goes he enthusiastically hustles his book and his wild leftie vision and his poetry. He writes a good story, he tells a good story. He’s funny and wise and blind and cancer free and curious. He gives a great and memorable performance, and afterwards he’ll tell stories from deep in his memory. His memory--faces, names, places, ideas, numbers--is a very deep well. He says he keeps the waters of that well clean and pure with the smoke of the weed. Everything he needs is always bubbling up tot he surface. At UTEP, a stone's throw from where Madero crossed over the river to do battle against Porfirio Diaz, John gave a primer on the Mexican Revolutions--1810, 1910 and what's going to happen in 2010. We talked 1950s Greenwich Village, Kobe Bryant (even John has his peccadilloes), Human Shields in Iraq (yes, he was there), Ferlinghetti and Michael McClure and Amiri Baraka, Subcomandante Marcos, Palestine, the Mexican Drug War, and then some more. John is never lost for conversation. I’m reading El Monstruo now. It’s a great read. Puro John Ross. Fun and wacky and dead serious. Here’s what Nation Books says.

John Ross--poet, journalist, and globetrotting troublemaker--has lived in what the Aztec-Mexicas described as "the umbilicus of the universe" since the great Mexico City earthquake of 1985 crushed out as many as 30,000 lives. Over the years, he has watched the city--El Monstruo--pick itself up, bury its dead, and come battling back. But he is filled with a gnawing unease that Mexico City's days as the most gargantuan, chaotic, crime-ridden, toxically contaminated urban stain in the Western world is doomed, that the monster he has grown to know and love through a quarter of a century of reporting on its foibles and tragedies and festering blight will be globalized into one more McCity.

Covering 4,000,000,000 years of history from the primal broth that first spewed out the monster to the Aztec-Mexica oblivion through centuries of rapine and revolution all the way to the Great Swine Flu Panic of 2009, El Monstruo is a phantasmagoric retelling of the story of Mexico City, with which Ross's own history has become hopelessly entwined.

In the tradition of Suketu Mehta's Maximum City, Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives and Joseph Mitchell's Up At The Old Hotel, Ross's El Monstruo is a unique exploration of the mother of all mega-cities. Never before has anyone told from ground level the gritty, vibrant histories of this left city of 23 million faceless, fearless souls, listened to the stories of those who have not been crushed by the Monster, deconstructed the Monstruo's very monstrousness and lived to tell its secrets.

Sabbath the News & Do the JB Manifesto Dirt Boogie Waltz

2010-02-25T12:32:00.001-07:00

JB Bryan & his Drum Kit

This morning I avoided the news. I'm letting the long reptile of history slither along without me for a few hours. So instead of the news, I re-read a manifesto from my buddy J.B. Bryan--cantankerous poet & painter & book designer / publisher & zenster & now odd-ball musician. J.B. is good with the manifestos. He's always hammering them out. They never seem to work quite right, the world doesn't listen, his friends don't listen but that's okay. He'll discover another in the weeds or the pumkin patch. He'll send out into the ether free of charge. Of course he'd accept in trade something from your garden or a polka dot shirt or perhaps a good bottle of wine (red).
.
▲

NEED TO BE

I worship the sun.
I don’t worship a Sun God or the Son of God.
I don’t worship the works of mankind.
I live happily as part of the earth.
Where else are there lilac bushes?
Apricot blossoms may or may not bring apricots.
Everything gets to know earthworms.
Let us, at least, honor the miracles we live as.
Human beings have been drawing pictures
as long as they have been singing,
or whistling.
I worship the present moment.
The best language is sign language
or wildly beautiful clothes.
I do like the photovoltaic cell,
something powerful enough
to power a small vehicle for free.
The human race may or may not be smart.
We should go back to horse power.
Saddles and wagons, even go bareback.
We need to eat off cups & plates
made out of clay dug from our own backyards.
We should be living in one horse towns.
Horses should be fed from our gardens.
Theories don’t help.
The actual use of plants matters most.
We need chlorophyll as much as any other hunk of biology.
Horses love grass,
their shit makes flowers bloom.
I worship watermelon sugar.
This planet is known as Water Ball.
We live briefly upon it as we circle the sun.
I worship hydrogen & oxygen.
I worhsip every galaxy.
This planet doesn’t need saving,
it’s just our own home we’ve screwed up royally.
Even Kings & Queens of Industry shall perish.
For God’s sake, don’t use the word “Lord.”
Even frogs will have their revenge.
I worship common sense & kindness.
“Hoka Hey! It is a good day to die.”
I need to be as lovely as a pumpkin or else.

JUAREZ, JUAREZ: The March of Februay 13

2010-02-15T14:39:00.001-07:00

Juárez, Juárez, no es cuartel
Fuera ejercito de el

This is video I took last Saturday in Juárez during the march protesting the nightmare of narco-violence and the army's occupation of the city. Ben Sáenz and I had walked over the bridge to be a part of that. There's not much else we can do. It’s a deadly waltz, these two dancers--the narco traficantes and the Mexican Army. The music is courtesy of the federal governments on both sides of the river. The Mexican government plays the guitar and the trumpet, and the U.S. strums on the bajo sexto, keeping the beat. Everyday citizens, like Gabriel who works for Lee and me, will tell you they don’t know what’s worse--the traficantes who are murdering each other and innocent bystanders, or the soldiers who are abusing the citizens and the society that are supposed to be protecting. The citzens are deathly afraid of both. Ben and I were happy we went. It was invigorating. Mostly young people (1500 by one count, "hundreds" by other count and I guessed it as 1,000 at least), lots of enthusiasm and vitality and joy, lots of anger, lots of solidarity and friendship. The marchers walked from the Parque de Benito Juárez to Avenida Diez y Seis de Septiembre to Avenida Juárez and then north to the Santa Fe Bridge where the pink cross stands commemorating the deaths of women in the city over the last two decades.

The events that triggered the rally and protest march are complicated--simply said, the people are angry and scared and fed up--but several recent incidents are the immediate cause:

The very highly publicized Massacre of January 31 which stunned Mexico and the world and the ensuing confrontation between Luz Maria Dávila (mother of two teenage boys who were killed) and Mexican President Felipe Calderon. On th night of the massacre hired assassins working for one cartel or another carried out a premeditated attack on a high school celebration and murdered 15 people, mostly teenagers. The Mexican government, stunned by the national and international outcry, quickly arrested two individuals who supposedly participated in the attack. If you like irony, try this--the continuing violence between cartels has accounted for the death of over 4,500 people in Juárez since January 1, 2008, and well over 90% of those murders have gone unsolved and unpunished.

And the much less publicized assassination of Josefina Reyes on January 3. Josefina was a political activist, known for her work in protesting the femicides in Juárez as well as her fight to protest installation of a nuclear dump in Sierra Blanca, TX. In recent months she had denounced the Mexican army’s human rights abuses in Juárez and condemned the military presence in the city, calling it unconstitutional. Josefina had been harrassed and received numerous threats from the army and others.

The poster reads: "For condemning the abuses of the military, the government killed me.--Josefina Reyes"

POETRY MACHINE

2010-01-06T17:00:00.005-07:00

Rumor is that all the 7/11s in El Paso will soon be putting in Poetry Machines near the candy bars. To learn how to get your own poetry machine, check out MOLOSSUS, an online broadside of world literature. Good stuff. Viva for everybody who makes poetry machines.

SUSAN KLAHR, ARTIST

2010-01-04T11:02:00.000-07:00

"I’m part of the story, it’s my story now and it goes on and on and on."

--Susan Klahr

Artist Susan Klahr died before dawn New Year’s morning. For the last several years, she had been struggling with cancer, and finally the disease asked her to cross to the other side. She is survived by her husband David and her two sons Sito and Arlo.

Susan has long been an important force within the intellectual and artistic community that makes El Paso/Juárez unique along the U.S./Mexico Border and in the United States. Her art spoke of the world she witnessed before her, especially the people that populated her imagination, people who in her paintings radiate a spiritual presence through Susan's imagination. A few years ago Lee and I asked Susan, because of her own Jewish immigrant heritage, to paint the cover image for the YA novel Double-Crossing by Eve Tal that Cinco Puntos was publishing. (Last year, during her illness, she painted the cover for its sequel, Cursing Columbus.) During our conversations about the novel, we expressed our admiration for the two paintings I’ve pasted above, Celia and Rose. [Excuse the poor snapshot quality of the images. I took the photographs this morning inside the office with my little Nikon.] One day she showed up with the paintings and asked us to hang them in our office. She wanted people to see them, she didn’t want to roll them up and put them in storage. They’ve been on loan to us ever since.

The paintings are really one piece--Celia is Susan’s grandmother, who died shortly before Susan was born, and Rose is her mother. Rose died when Susan was 14. Susan painted black and white death masks of her grandmother and mother from old snapshots, she then dressed herself in their clothes and was photographed holding the masks in front of her face. Then she painted portraits of herself as her grandmother Celia and her mother Rose. We’ve been lucky here in the offices at Cinco Puntos to see these paintings everyday and to tell admiring visitors about them. Her illness made these paintings even more poignant and powerful, revealing how our presence continues to live in our families and in the work that we do.

Below, beneath the close-ups of Celia and Rose, are the inscriptions that Susan wrapped in the blue border around each of the paintings. And below those is the story of her grandfather Max and grandmother Celia and mother Rose that Susan wrote for the display of the paintings.

●

CELIA

I never saw her.

The one of five sisters.

The one that Max picked.

The mother of Rose.

ROSE

It's a painting of my mother.

How I never saw her.

She's in my body

and I was in her body.

●

THE STORY OF MAX MY GRANDFATHER

AND CELIA AND ROSE

Whenever I think about telling a story, I think about Max. Max was my grandfather and he had one of the two bedrooms in our apartment and he had a big steamer trunk in there. When he opened the trunk for me it was like magic. It was like this… Once upon a time there was a strong young man named Max and he lived in Chernobyl, near Kiev, in the Ukraine. He called it Russia and he had brothers and sisters, and the youngest sister, in the photo he always showed me, so many years later, looked out at me across time, across the ocean with eyes so large, so luminous (like my son Arlo’s) and hair so black, I wished I could have known her but Max came by himself with his trunk; he braved the unknown alone. He was young, 17 or 18. He made his way across Europe to England or Scotland, speaking not a word but Yiddish, and got on a freighter or a steamer or something and his cousin Joe met him in Philadelphia and gave him a banana and he started eating it with the skin on and what a joke! You greenhorn! Laughed his cousin and Max loved to tell it over and over. He went all the way back a year or so after and came back to America and that was the very last he ever saw any of his family again.

In Chernobyl, Max’s father was the town butcher. I would see them in my mind wandering over hill and green fields, going to neighboring towns to do business. Back there was green and wintry snow and the old life and here (he loved America) was opportunity and no pogroms. Everything was Yiddish, he didn’t need English to make good--leave that to his children. And he was strong and handsome and tall. His shoes were size thirteen and he worked hard. He was young and he worked in a butcher store in New York and upstairs from the store lived a mother with five daughters and this mother came from the old country by herself with her five daughters and she was tough and she was strong and nobody seemed to know how many husbands she had and what happened to them. Her daughters all looked different and she lived to at least one hundred years old and she was my mother’s grandma and she was bubbe to me.

But Max was handsome and he visited upstairs and they would giggle and talk and there were five girls: Celia, Clara, Fanny, Esther and Becky. Clara was the oldest. When I knew her she was a big, square woman with legs that looked like tree stumps to me. Fanny I never knew. In the pictures, she looked thoughtful, exotic. Becky never married. She was fussy and critical, the corners of her mouth turned down. Esther looked like a shiksa. We thought she was pretty. Not dark and mysterious and beautiful like Celia but she was pretty and she put rouge on her cheeks and she was always smiling and kind and generous.

One day the Mother looked at robust Max and put her hands on her hips and said “enough! Which one do you mean?” And Max picked Celia, the most beautiful of her sisters. And she had deep eyes and dark hair and a delicate face and he courted her. So he married Celia and he worked hard and he opened his own butcher shop in the Bronx and he had his picture taken behind the counter and he’s big and strong and proud. In America. And Max and Celia had a daughter and they named her Rose. Rose, an American name for an American girl. Rochel was her Jewish name.

Rose was my mother and this story goes on and on and on. Celia died shortly before I was born and Rose died when I was fourteen years old. I lived with three men, my father, my brother, and my grandfather. It was amazing for me to put on the faces of Celia and Rose: to feel them in my very being. I’m part of the story, it’s my story now and it goes on and on and on.

--Susan Klahr

Happy New Year Cooking Beans

2010-01-01T01:00:00.047-07:00

It’s 2010, a New Year, a new decade. In Memphis where I grew up Tula (Darthula Baldwin, the black woman who worked for my mother and who helped raise me) would cook up black-eyed peas and turnip greens to celebrate the New Year and bring good luck for our family and all of our loved ones. Usually she served the feast with pan-fried cornbread. Good and cheap delicious stuff (1). Now that we’ve lived in El Paso these 30-something years we’ve traded in the black-eyed peas for beans .

A while back I wrote a poem about my beans and folks have asked me how I cook my beans. So this is the way I make beans. Pinto beans, that is. I live in the El Paso and so if I say I’m going to make beans then I’m going to make pinto beans. Refried beans or ranchero beans or gringo vegetarian beans. Beans are pinto beans. If I’m going to cook black beans or navy beans, then I say I’m going to cook up some black beans or some navy beans(1). Now, be forewarned, I cook gringo vegetarian beans. And I make a big pot of them, three or four cups of dried beans at least. No sense of having beans on one day only. We like them for a main course the first night and then from then on we eat them however we want them. We garnish them with chopped onions, tomatoes, Monterrey Jack cheese and salsa, and I chop up a clove or two of fresh garlic and drop them on top of my beans. That way I’ll live forever.

So before I go to bed I rinse the beans, cover them in a pot with lots of water and then soak them overnight to soften them up. In the morning after breakfast and coffee I drain those beans. And then I pour in a box of Pacific Organic Mushroom Broth. Good stuff. It was worth a shot. After cooking beans for at least 30 years, I discovered mushroom broth a couple of years ago. Brilliant idea that really happened by accident. We had a box lost in the pantry for some reason and I'm always experimenting with my beans, so why not? The broth adds a dark and earthy taste to the beans. I put the beans sitting in the mushroom broth on the stove and get them started toward a boil. I also set the oven at 250 degrees. And I start throwing in stuff. I find the biggest onion we have, chop it up and throw it in. At least four large garlic cloves chopped up. 1½ teaspoons of ground cumin. 1 teaspoon of curry powder. Maybe more. 2 or 3 teaspoons of salt. Same with pepper. Just how I feel. I never keep count. 4 tablespoons of Extra Virgin olive oil. Maybe I shake in some Italian Seasoning. Whatever. When it all comes to a boil then I stir it up and open another box of broth and add another inch or so of liquid. Sometimes I just add water if I’m tired of wasting money on my beans. I need to make sure that there’s enough liquid in the pot so I can forget about my beans. I get distracted. I like to cook things that don’t need me to pay too much attention. Before I finish I might add a can of organic tomato sauce or chopped tomatoes or even tomato paste. Cooked tomatoes are supposed to be good healthy stuff for being a man. I think about things like that. It makes cooking more interesting. I put the pot in the oven and go away. The beans cook for five hours or so at 250 degrees.

Like I said in my poem, people like my gringo vegetarian beans, but I’m not averse to meat in my beans. You can’t eat beans in a Mexican restaurant in El Paso without getting some meat in your beans some way or another. If you’re eating refried beans, then those are usually are flavored with some lard. That’s okay. There’s no better place in the world to eat beans than in El Paso. Still, if I cook vegetarian beans, more folks can enjoy them. Lots of vegetarians running around these days. Son Johnny Byrd's novia Ailbhe is a vegetarian. Joe Hayes is a vegetarian (well, he eats fish). I used to be a vegetarian. Still, I will use meat under one condition--Somebody gives me a hambone. Especially a Honey-Baked hambone with flakes of ham still hanging from the bone. Those bones make delicious beans.

So that’s how I make beans. With my first pot of beans in this New Year, I wish for good luck, peace and justice for our friends and neighbors—our brothers and sisters—in La Ciudad Juárez across the river from where we live. My first pot of greens will be for our children and grandchildren, for all of our friends—may we all be blessed with good health and spiritual well-being.

Happy New Year.

Notes:

(1) I still cook the turnip greens, and I cook them mostly the way Tula taught me--lots of greens, onions, garlic, spices but I do them vegetarian style, olive oil instead of a hamhock, sometime I use vegetarian broths of some kind or another. I simmer them all day long on the stove top so that the smell and the humidity from those greens saturate the house and make me want to weep with all those memories. Lee, by the way, is in charge of the cornbread. It’s juicy with butter. It’s the grandkids’ favorite.

(2) I’m sorry, JB, but that’s the way it is. That’s life, the way we live it here.

ESTHER CHAVEZ CANO (1933-2009)

2009-12-30T11:08:00.005-07:00

Esther Chávez Cano died in Juárez on Christmas Day. She was 76 years old. She was a hero, a fronteriza woman who in the early 1990s in Juárez saw the continuing tragedy of women being killed and decided to do something about it. With much help she started Casa Amiga near downtown Juárez. At the time it was one of only six rape crisis centers in Mexico and the only one on the U.S./Mexico Border. She brought international attention the continuing murders of women in Juárez and the uncaring and apathetic response by the Mexican government on all levels--city, state and federal--to these murders. Indeed, as we now know, law enforcement was more concerned with supporting the flow of illegal drugs into the U.S. than it was with investigating and prosecuting the murders of women. If anything, the authorities wanted to keep activists like Esther quiet because she brought attention to the vacuum of justice in Juárez. She has received many awards for her work, as the number of obituaries state, but she never veered from the task at hand--helping the women of Juárez.

In 2002, when Cinco Puntos Press was putting together the anthology PURO BORDER: DISPATCHES, GRAFFITI AND SNAPSHOTS FROM THE U.S./MEXICO BORDER, three of us--novelist Jessica Powers, who worked for us at the time, Lee and I—walked over the bridge and went to visit Esther at Casa Amiga. She was a diminutive and very hospitable woman with a quiet way about her but she had a presence that commanded respect. Her work at Casa Amiga was self-evident--women and children were coming and going, and some were staying, being protected inside the walls of the center from husbands or boyfriends who would harm them if they had the chance. Indeed, in December 2001 her receptionist, who had come to the center as a client, was killed by her husband in front of Casa Amiga. When we asked her why she started Casa Amiga, she replied quietly--

“Because I am a woman, because I felt helpless and because I have a conscience.”

Below I am pasting the mostly unedited notes that Lee took during that visit that I found in our archives (Lee also took the photograph above), and below that I am pasting an article by Tessie Borden that originally appeared in the Arizona Republic and that we republished in PURO BORDER. But first, Casa Amiga as always needs financial help. Those who wish to help may do so by making a donation to their account:

**BANCO SANTANDER**
No. Cuenta: 65-50227820-0
CLABE 014164655022782007
Titular CASA AMIGA CENTRO DE CRISIS AC
1427 Suc. Plaza las Torres
Cd. Juárez, Chih. C.P. 32575

●

Notes from Esther Chávez Cano Interview, June 24, 2002

There is terrible violence against women right now in Juarez. She will give us her list of the names of murdered women with pleasure. She gathered the list from reading the newspapers. She only includes the names of murdered women, not of children, or of people who have disappeared. We asked if she thought the authorities had a bigger list and she said it will do no good to check with the authorities. The authorities will not give us access to names. Everyone who has a list has gathered their information from the newspapers. But what of the women who never get mentioned in the newspapers?

She said, Here is an example of a girl who has disappeared and of what has happened with the mother. She shows us a photo of a girl, Brenda Esther Afrara Luna, who disappeared two years ago when she was 15. Several months ago (time is uncertain), the mother was told by the authorities that her daughter has been found. But the mother went and looked and it wasn’t her daughter. Then they told her again they had found her. It was not the body of her daughter, but the body was wearing her daughter’s dress. It was very confusing. Esther said there are many cases like this. The mother in this case has endured a lot of domestic violence herself.

Casa de Amiga was started on February 9, 1999, about three and a half years ago. Esther is the founder. We asked her why she started it. She said because she’s a woman, because she felt helpless, and because she has a conscience. It was funded initially with $31,000 from FEMAP. Last week they received $25,000 from the U.S. embassy [see article below]. It is earmarked for a project to provide therapy for women who suffered incest, rape or violence as children.

Casa de Amiga is the only center of its kind all along the border, the only one in Juarez. There is nothing for battered women.

She mentioned that there have been two deaths in Chihuahua that have similar M.O.s. Why is it different here, we asked. Why is there more violence? This is the border, she said, with its traffic of drugs, its maquiladoras. Poor people come here to seek opportunities, they want to cross the river to live the American dream. In this city there are 500 gangs. There are no opportunities here, conditions are very poor. Have you been to Anapora? It’s a terrible place.

The police hate her. They don’t ignore her. “I would like it if they would ignore me,” she said. They campaign against her. One year and seven months ago, they began their campaign. Governor Patricio doesn’t like her: according to him, she doesn’t do anything right—she’s a terrible director, she steals the money, she herself is a violent woman. And so the stories go. When Esther began talking about the women, Patricio tried to silence her.

In this building, last December 21, 2001, her own receptionist was killed by her husband. This receptionist had four kids, eight years on down, and she was a wonderful worker, good, hard-working, prudent. The husband came to Casa de Amigo to kill her here. From jail, the husband has called for custody of the kids.

When we expressed dismay over this, she said that last week, she had to go rescue a woman who was impregnated by her father. She was 19 and had been raped by him for the last 8 years. She’d had two children. One, a little boy, died of malnourishment. The other, a little girl of 3.5 years, was asked by Esther what had name was. The girl said she had no name. When Esther took the 19 year old woman away, the father went to the Human Rights Agency and demanded that his daughter come back and they agreed to his demands.

There is another girl now who is 11 years old and in the fifth grade. She’s 7 months pregnant. Some woman, a neighbor maybe, took her to a man and he raped her. The father and mother of this girl are separated and she is treated like a puppet.

●

JUAREZ CENTER FIGHTS FOR FORGOTTEN WOMEN

By Tessie Borden
Arizona Republic Mexico City Bureau
Feb. 26, 2002 12:00:00

JUAREZ, Mexico -- It’s 9:30 a.m., and Esther Chavez Cano’s daily personal war with the unwanted problems of this largest of the border cities has begun.

She rushes into her office at Casa Amiga, the rape crisis center that grew out of the violence that has claimed the lives of more than 200 young women here in the past nine years. Close behind is a staff member describing this morning’s emergency: a neighbor found two girls, 8 and 10, wandering in the city’s El Chamizal park the previous night. They told the woman they were running away from their father’s beatings.

Chavez Cano immediately calls the local district attorney’s office, and one gets the feeling she has done this hundreds of times. In a firm but friendly tone, she calls on the attorneys there to take charge of the children and investigate what they say.

“The authorities just don’t do anything,” she whispers while on hold.

Chavez Cano’s Casa Amiga is the only center of its kind on the Mexican side of the 1,950-mile line that separates the country from the United States. Established in February 1999, it receives funding from both U.S. and Mexican organizations.

Chavez Cano, 66, a diminutive, retired accountant whose mild manner causes listeners to lean in just to hear her, is perhaps the most outspoken and militant voice here on violence against women.

In 1993, she noticed a trend among crimes committed in Juarez: dozens of young women were turning up slain in the surrounding desert. The bodies showed evidence of beatings, rape and strangulation. Many of the women fit a distinct profile: tall and thin, with long, dark hair and medium skin, between ages 11 and 25. Often, they came from the ranks of workers who yearly swell Juarez’s population from other parts of rural Mexico to work at border assembly plants, or maquiladoras.

Prodding the police

“They try to pretend these are not serial crimes,” Chavez Cano said of the local authorities. “It just brings your rage out. It makes you boil.”

Chavez Cano and others formed the Liga 8 de Marzo, an awareness group that collected data about the slayings and prodded police to give the murder investigations high priority - often by picketing the police station, holding crosses bearing names of victims.

No one agrees on the exact number of killings that are related.
Chavez Cano says about 230 women have been found in the past nine years, the most recent in November when eight bodies were discovered in a shallow pit. Some slayings have been traced to jealous husbands or drug traffickers. But a large number share characteristics that make investigators believe a serial killer and perhaps copycats are at work.

After raising awareness of the problem to a national level, Chavez Cano decided someone should work to prevent the deaths, rather than just clean up after the murderers.

Help from elsewhere

With start-up money from the Maryland-based International Trauma Resource Center, the Texas Attorney General’s Office and the Mexican Federation of Private Health and Community Development Associations, Chavez Cano opened Casa Amiga near the city center. A paid staff of four and an army of volunteers served 318 clients in Casa Amiga’s first year, providing a 24-hour hotline, counseling and group therapy.

Last year, the center added three staff members and served 5,803 clients, of which 1,172 were new cases.

Chavez Cano now worries about a troubling side issue: child sexual abuse and incest. Fifty-seven of her clients in the first year were raped children. So among her most successful programs is a puppet show that teaches children about “bad” touching and instructs them, in a gentle way, to respect their bodies.
The center takes most of her attention, but Chavez Cano does not let the police off easy when it comes to the slayings of women in the desert. They, in turn, have lashed out at her.

An attitude of disdain

Arturo Chavez Rascón, Chihuahua state’s former attorney general, came in for some of her sharpest barbs because of his comments implying the victims contributed to their own deaths through their dress or lifestyle. It’s an attitude shared by police officers on the beat, who Chavez Cano says discourage families from associating with Casa Amiga.

The center used to receive about $3,000 a month from Juarez for rent and salaries, but that stipend has been cut, Cano said. Now, the center relies on money it gets from donations and showings around Mexico of the hit play The Vagina Monologues.

Tragedy close to home

Recently, the center suffered a blow of a different kind.

In December, Maria Luisa Carsoli Berumen, an abused mother who had become a client and then a staff member at the center, was killed in front of Casa Amiga, witnesses say, by her husband, Ricardo Medina Acosta. The two had had a long and violent history that led to Carsoli Berumen leaving him. A court granted custody of their four children to Medina Acosta. She stayed in town, planning to wait until after the Christmas holidays to resume the custody fight.

On the morning of Dec. 21, the pair argued and struggled outside the center, and she was stabbed twice in the chest as she tried to flee. A black bow at the door expresses the staff’s grief. No one has been in arrested in Carsoli Berumen’s death.

Fighting for respect

“The death of Maria Luisa forces us to work more intensely to instill respect in children, men and women, and to sensitize the authorities to the grave risk for families and all of society that domestic violence represents,” Chavez Cano wrote in a column in the local newspaper.

“Rest in peace, Maria Luisa, and watch over your children so they remain united and sheltered by your loved ones who lament your absence.”

Joe Somoza at El Bar Palacios

2009-12-28T10:47:00.003-07:00

I want to catch up now on some things that have been on the back burner for a while.

In October I drove up to the Palacio's Bar in Old Mesilla a few minutes outside Las Cruces. For years now a group of poets have been hosting an open mic poetry series the 3rd Tuesday of every month. Joe Somoza was one of its founding members. Joe has long been a fan of open mic series. He likes the democratic ambiente. I don't go to many but when I do I enjoy myself. Anyway the night I was there Joe read two poems he had written that week. He said he was still fiddling with the poems and reading them aloud to an audience gives him a way to listen to the words different. I enjoyed his reading and the poems very much--playful and pensive and, if I may say, lonely in that way that happens along when we get older. I know the feeling. I drove home (50 miles) with enough energy to write in my journal and take some notes on some poems I've been working on. And I wrote to ask Joe if I could paste the poems in my blog. Here they are.

●

Late Quartet

Beethoven must’ve been deaf

by then. But not blind—though

what does that mean?

That two “buts”

don’t make an “and”?

Outside the window, sun and leaves

don’t concern

themselves with my phrasing.

They’re making love this morning,

turning sunlight to

maple trees

for later generations to sit under

the boughs,

or look out their windows

at them while smoking

pensively, as we did,

when cigarettes, cheap then,

made you feel cool, not

contaminated,

though everything you do

kills you

eventually. Is this why Beethoven sounds

so sad, so richly

melancholic, so continually

expressive

in the darker tones—that he saw

when he could no longer

hear?

______

The Private Lives Of Words

I don’t want to sound

“public.”

I don’t want, even, to pretend

to some importance.

So why set the words

down—preserving them.

For others?

Clarifying them

for myself?

Already, you see patterns

start to form.

The words, once

written down, call

to other words.

It’s so lonely

on the long, blank page,

so isolated living in your head,

behind eyes that are

forever looking

at the surfaces of things

from their secure

outpost, wondering

how it would be

inside—

inside a locust tree, for instance,

or a hummingbird.

Even inside that old rocking chair

sitting in the living room

since Mary, the ex-neighbor, sold it

at a yard sale.

And it’s stayed

against that wall, overshadowed

by the piano, hardly noticed

beside the shelves of multi-colored novels

that probably

commune

with each other nights—

Hemingway continuing his belligerence

with Fitzgerald. De Maupassant

chatting with Flaubert.

You get some words together, and you

never hear the end of it.

Will U.S. Government, World respond to Border S.O.S.

2009-12-11T19:31:00.011-07:00

Will Government, World Respond to Border SOS? This is a good article. For those of you who don't live on the border, I recommend highly keeping up with Frontera Norte Sur, a non-commercial news service located at NMSU in Las Cruces, NM, just up the road from El Paso. It has long been one of the true sources of border-rooted journalism in the area north of the wall. They their eyes and ears on both sides of the wall, and they keep their shoes and hearts on the ground and among the people who live and so often suffer in our region.

A friend sent me these photographs from the December 6 "Marcha para Solucion" en Juarez. Writing this I hesitate to use his name or the name of the photographer which he sent me. So I won't. But I will if he writes me to do so. The march included organizations and people from all political persuasions--juarenses are exhausted, they want and need help. A note about the young boy holding the "NI UNA MAS" sign. He's 12. Six years ago, when he was 6, he carried the same sign in solidarity with the women who were being killed, their murders ignored by the judicial systems at all levels. He told his dad that he wanted to sell hot-dogs to raise money and donate, so that the murder of women in Juárez would stop. Now there's this other thing, this monstrosity of violence as two cartels war on one another for control of the Juárez plaza (the franchise for using the region to transport illegal drugs). The psychological toll on his generation of young people is enormous. These memories don't go away.

Marching for Peace & Justice in Juárez: December 6, 2009

2009-12-07T16:33:00.007-07:00

Antonio Briones turned towards the City Hall of Juarez and demanded that something be done to stop the violence. (Vanessa Monsisvais from the El Paso Times. Read more at the EPT website and also the Diario de Juarez [and here] website. Problem with the EPT website is that they don't keep their work online after two weeks but it can be purchased. I don't know about the Diario.)

Sunday on December 6 between 4,000 and 5,000 juarenses mixed with some folks from El Paso marched yesterday asking for peace and justice for their beleaguered city. The drug war between La Linea (the Juárez cartel) and Chapo Guzman's Sinaloa cartel continues. It's merciless, fed by the three poisons of greed, hatred and delusion--maxed out and insane. Nearly 4,000 people have been killed since January 1, 2008. Presidente Calderon sent in federal troops, but they've not been trained in the niceties of urban policing and citizen rights so they've caused more problems. The U.S. leadership, of course, cannot understand our own collusion in the bloody chaos. We think our hands are clean, yet our jails and prisons are full of citizens using the drugs or out to make a shadowy living by selling the stuff. The video link below and the photo above are from the El Paso Times. I hope they will continue to keep this video on-line and not archive it. It's inspiring. May the New Year bring peace and justice for the people of Juárez and may the New Year bring sane and just drug laws for the United States. Our drug laws are directly responsible for this madness.

The December 6th March for Peace and Justice in Juarez

John Daido Loori Roshi, a little something for his grave

2009-11-17T17:42:00.011-07:00

Half of a Sonnet

1. He wants to feed the whole congregation all at once.

2. What is wrong with them? I’m afraid they’ve all fallen into the same pit.

3. Hoping for a sign of life he stirs the pot again.

4. A live one has appeared. Not all is lost after all.

5. The entire teaching of countless generations is right in his face.

6. Too bad. After all, the teacher can’t do it alone.

7. Although you bump into it everywhere, it’s still hard to talk about it.

========================================================

This is a found poem in memory and celebration of John Daido Loori Roshi. After I heard about his death on October 10th or so (he died on the 9th), I spent an afternoon reading stuff about him and written by him. These seven lines are the footnotes to his Teisho on Juifeng’s Rice Cake. I liked how they sounded all alone like this, they make some kind of odd sense and so they became my little homage to his life's work. Seven lines for his grave. A half of sonnet. Of course, I never sat with him or met him. My connection was purely through his two books--The Heart of Being: Moral and Ethical Teachings of Zen Buddhism and The Eight Gates of Zen: A Program of Zen Training. They're strong books, stern books, good books. They were important to me. They gave me the energy to sit and stare at the wall. Loori called himself a "radical conservative" in regards to keeping the traditions of Zen. If you read his books, you'll understand why. He was also a photographer. The photograph of the rocks in water is his.

JIM CARROLL, R.I.P.

2009-11-05T15:46:00.000-07:00

[Note: Both poet Tom Clark and poet Ron Silliman have much more intimate knowledge and understanding of Jim Carroll and his work. If you want to know more about Jim Carroll, please visit their blogs and do a search for Jim Carroll. I promise you--it's worth the journey. My thing here, for what it's worth, is a dreamy meditation on a man and a poet I did not know. bb]

Jim Carroll (and here) died a few weeks ago. “The Basketball Diaries” Jim Carroll--the playground b-baller who became a poet rock star celebrity. Pure New Yorker type of guy. 16 years old and he was running with the New York City poets I loved. The St. Mark’s poets. 2nd generation. Tom Clark was publishing him in the Paris Review. Jim was going to be the next Rimbaud. That's what "they" all said. Then he was a rock star and Keith Richards of the Stones was playing behind him. Jesus. It must have been a rush. I never knew Jim Carroll. I don't think I wanted to. And I really didn’t pay much attention to the Diaries or his poetry. Maybe I avoided them. I didn't want to step inside. Yet there he was in my psyche living the life. The rep and the rumors and the talk. Yeah, I guess I can say all that scared me. I always figured if I went off to NYC to be a poet that I would get lost in the jingle jangle. I could have walked into Jim Carroll’s song “People Who Died” and live right there in the ether. I loved that song. I didn’t want to die but I could die. I could go that way. The first time I heard it a local hero rocker here in El Paso was covering it. I wanted to scream and shout and weep and laugh.

"People Who Died" by Jim Carroll
(lyrics lifted from St Lyrics website here)

Teddy sniffing glue, he was 12 years old
Fell from the roof on East Two-nine
Cathy was 11 when she pulled the plug
On 26 reds and a bottle of wine
Bobby got leukemia, 14 years old
He looked like 65 when he died
He was a friend of mine

Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

G-berg and Georgie let their gimmicks go rotten
So they died of hepatitis in upper Manhattan
Sly in Vietnam took a bullet in the head
Bobby OD'd on Drano on the night that he was wed
They were two more friends of mine
Two more friends that died

Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Mary took a dry dive from a hotel room
Bobby hung himself from a cell in the tombs
Judy jumped in front of a subway train
Eddie got slit in the jugular vein
And Eddie, I miss you more than all the others
And I salute you brother

Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Herbie pushed Tony from the Boys' Club roof
Tony thought that his rage was just some goof
But Herbie sure gave Tony some bitchen proof
"Hey," Herbie said, "Tony, can you fly?"
But Tony couldn't fly, Tony died

Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Brian got busted on a narco rap
He beat the rap by rattin' on some bikers
He said, "Hey, I know it's dangerous, but it sure beats Riker's"
But the next day he got offed by the very same bikers

Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Teddy sniffing glue, he was 12 years old
Fell from the roof on East Two-nine
Cathy was 11 when she pulled the plug
On 26 reds and a bottle of wine
Bobby got leukemia, 14 years old
He looked like 65 when he died
He was a friend of mine

Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

G-berg and Georgie let their gimmicks go rotten
So they died of hepatitis in upper Manhattan
Sly in Vietnam took a bullet in the head
Bobby OD'd on Drano on the night that he was wed
They were two more friends of mine
Two more friends that died

Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Mary took a dry dive from a hotel room
Bobby hung himself from a cell in the tombs
Judy jumped in front of a subway train
Eddie got slit in the jugular vein
And Eddie, I miss you more than all the others
And I salute you brother

Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Jim Carroll was like my friend Jimmy Walker. Carroll (b1949) started doing cocaine on the streets in NYC at the age of 13. Me (b1942) and my friend Jimmy Walker (b1941) started drinking together when we were 13. Different places, different times. Another difference, it seems, was that Jim Carroll had a father, a bartender in a conservative Irish neighborhood. Both of Walker and I were fatherless, me literally, Jimmy figuratively. Harvey Goldner, another founding member of our drinking club (aka "gang" or "pandilla"), had a figuratively dead father who was happy enough to come home from work and get drunk. And a little bit later Jimmy Douglas, who like me had a father they had put into the ground. All of us fatherless one way or another. We drank hard and often all the way through high school. I’m not proud of that. It’s what happened. We were lost and shy and foolish. Booze was our shield. We battled against the world with our booze. It could have been cocaine very easily but cocaine wasn’t an option in 1954 East Memphis. After high school Jimmy Walker--who like Jim Carroll was easiest the craziest of us all--quit school and went off with the carnival. Then he joined the Army and before long he had jumped off some tower in Germany (the Army said he fell, Jimmy Walker would never fall / he loved climbing the tall trees in his Friday night drunkeness) and he came home packaged in his uniform lying inside a box. But Michael Clemmons was first into that void. I know because Jimmy was with him. Another of the fatherless. They were floating on a log in the Mississippi--Mike and Jimmy, my little sister Patsy and Harvey and somebody else. (I was elsewhere, saying goodbye to a girlfriend). The river swallowed Mike whole. We were 18 then. Mike was a sweet-faced boy who wanted to be a poet. Surely he was gay but it was before that time when he could say, "Sure, I’m gay. What of it?" I hope we would have understood. They found his water bloated body the next day snagged into some eddy on the banks of the river. The undertaker fixed him up fine for his mother. Next in line was Bert Ringold. He put his father’s shotgun in his mouth and pushed the trigger with his toe. And there were others--Horace and Kemp and red-headed Bobby. In the 70s tall David Telder bought himself a gun at an El Paso pawnshop and went into the desert. He was a good friend. I never guessed at his sorrow. It’s happening more often now. Dead people. Jimmy Gardner from AIDS. My little sister Patsy from viral pneumonia and obesity and struggles with depression and addiction. My big brother Bill from alcoholism and a heart attack and depression. Steve Sprague from meningitis. Harvey Goldner from cancer.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened to me if I had gone to New York. The thing is, I didn't. But I did leave Memphis and all the baggage of my growing up. I wanted to be a poet. I needed to be away from my family. From some daydream I wanted to be in the desert. I went west and not east. Arizona and Colorado and New Mexico and now El Paso. I think the work of Snyder and Kerouac pushed me in that direction. I was interested in Zen, whatever that was. I didn't know anything about myself. Whatever would happened, happened. I’m glad I found El Paso. Like they say now, it is what it is. A cliche that makes sense. It wasn’t planned. Jim Carroll’s life was probably like that. Not planned, I mean. Just one day after the next, following our noses. Now Jim Carroll is dead. Why his death leaves a hole in my psyche, I don't know. I plan to buy his books and find out. Meanwhile here Lee and I are on Louisville Avenue in the old Five Points neighborhood of El Paso. We've been in this house 30 years.

If you're reading this on Facebook, go here to watch the video.

I miss Jim Carroll. I miss not knowing him.

May he rest in peace.

Pilgrimage to Cristo Rey Mountain

2009-10-26T14:46:00.013-06:00

Woman at the top, kneeling at the statue of Jesus on the Cross, weeping into her cellphone--"Hi, mom. I'm up here on the top. I up here with Jesus. I love you, mom, I love you."

Tattooed man on a cellphone--"Okay, sweet baby, I'm going to hang up. We're going to pray now."

Woman to her mother, hugging her and crying--"He called me a super bitch, he said I don't know what I'm doing."

In the midst of life, we are in death.

They said in the paper that the best guess was that 30,000 people climbed Cristo Rey Mountain last Sunday. I’ve been in El Paso 30 years now and most of those years I’ve said to myself, I need to make that climb with everybody else. Finally I did. The trail is 2½ to 3 miles to the top, depending on where you start; somewhere between 800 to 1000 feet in altitude. The mountain sits at the intersection of three states--Texas, Chihuahua and New Mexico. It was a beautiful day, a cloudy sky to shade us from the sun, just a little bit of a breeze. I started walking about 945am. The trail is only 8 feet across in most places, thick with dust and gravel and stone. I got lost in all the people, just one more pilgrim in the midst of the horde, most of us going up, but others already coming back down--a sea of brown faces, some gringos like myself, the faces of El Paso--kids and babies and parents and abuelitos, cholos and pretty girls, high school kids, tourists, reporters, a barefooted monk from Guatemala in his white robe and purple sash, many other barefooted pilgrims saying their prayers and their Hail Marys, giving thanks and asking for forgiveness. It’s a hard walk. The sore muscles, the bleeding feet, the beating heart, the shortness of breath, the chatter of people, the thirst, the laughter, the worry about death, the drumbeat of the Matachines atop the mountain pulling us along. It was the Feast Day for Christ the King, the last Sunday of October. My friend novelist and poet Ben Saenz once told me the closer you get to the border, the closer you get to Mexico, the more religious the language becomes. And he’s right. The language becomes charged with God-words. blessing-words, prayers. In the midst of the sacred though, people don't forget the profane--they go about their business selling burritos and water bottles, they talk on cell phones, they laugh and hold hands and make promises of love, they trade secrets and they gossip. I got to the top before noon. The Matachines were dancing, the Church bazaar vendors were selling water and pelotas and soda and pan dulce. At the very top loomed Christ on the Cross. We circled the huge statue. Some were kneeling and praying, weeping, lighting candles. A woman slowly sang “Amazing Grace.” Others, like me, took photos and looked down into the valley. A crowd had taken their place, waiting for the Bishops--one from Las Cruces, the other from El Paso. I saw them on the way back down. One was walking, the other (a pudgy guy with big lips) in a white jeep. The jeep was lost in an entourage of banners and people. The trail was only a few feet wider than the vehicle, so we had to climb up on rocks to let them pass. The two bishops blessed us as their entourage crawled higher up the mountain. They were doing their job. I was on the way back home. The downhill journey can be a struggle too. My leg bones ached, my knee twisted when I slipped on some rocks, my feet felt hot and tender. But I was happy and at peace. At the bottom church ladies were making food. I bought a plate of three fresh gorditas for $4 and I wandered back to my car hungry and thirsty and exhausted. I’ll do it again next year.

More photos of the journey on my Picasa account here.

PLAYBOY does El Paso

2009-10-26T10:00:00.002-06:00

Luis Alberto Urrea's article about El Paso is in the November issue of Playboy and it’s now on the newsstands. From what we hear, the issue is destined to be one of Playboy's most read issues because Marge Simpson is the cover girl. It's good PR for El Paso. Nationally, El Paso is usually dissed by the media. People wonder why we live here. How come Cinco Puntos is here? In the 1970s when Lee and I first moved from Albuquerque south in search of a job, we asked friends where we should live, El Paso or Las Cruces. “Oh,” they said, wrinkling up their noses like they caught the whiff of something spoiled, “Las Cruces. You don’t want to live in El Paso.” (Why that is / is a whole other subject.) Anyway, Luis’ piece will help people begin to think differently about El Paso. And people (yeah, yeah, 90% are men) do READ Playboy. There are things to do, places to go, people to see. Yes, Juárez is a few minutes away across the river, its suffering remains in our thoughts and prayers, we worry about friends and families, the narco-wars in the recesses of our dreams, but here in El Paso is great music, a vibrant intellectual and cultural life. It's the paradox that Luis was commissioned to write about.

Luis stayed with Lee and me during his visit. I drove him around some during the day, historian David Romo did the same and daughter Susie Byrd took him out for some nite-time excursions around downtown and the Central Side (as opposed to the East Side and the West Side and the North East--El Paso enjoys its multiplicities). I wrote two blognotes here and here about his visit.

Odd thing is that the piece has created a little political controversy in the parochial parts of the El Paso psyche. The reason: Susie is District 2 Representative on the City Council, and her good friend County Commissioner Veronica Escobar made a cameo appearance in the article because she joined Susie on a night-time excursion. Of course they had fun. Susie and Vero, both known for their progressive straightforward politics, are fun to be around. They joke and riff and laugh loudly and they dance. Their faces light up with happiness. Luis fit right in. No wonder, like the rest of us, he loves the fronterizo sounds of the band Radio La Chusma. He gave La Chusma big kudos in his piece. Indeed, he gave kudos to the vibrant rasquache energy of El Paso. In a letter to me he said the Playboy editors wanted him to make the piece meaner, they wanted him to put some diss into his language. But no, he wanted his writing to churn up some love for El Paso. [He was disappointed when the editors chopped his paean to Papa Burgers on Piedras Street.] So he was dumbfounded when a few of the city’s radiomouths started squabbling and bloviating and throwing mud at him and Susie and even Vero. Luckily for me I escaped the onslaught, probably because I’m only a poet and publisher, two occupations that are considered inconsequential among the blabbering class.

Oh, well. Playboy is making some El Paso bucks. I went to the Westside Barnes & Noble and bought three copies for our archives. The clerk told me he was selling them like hot cakes.

MAKE TACOS NOT WAR
Self-portrait with Luis at the Smeltertown Cemetary

George Carrizal, 1945-2009

2009-10-11T15:56:00.006-06:00

El Paso artist George Carrizal is dead. David Fleet called me up last Wednesday to tell me. “He was my friend and once he was my lover who I talked to every night. He cared for me and worried about me until the very end.” Artist Cesar Ivan put together a wonderful blog of photographs and paintings to honor George and David wrote a moving tribute to his dead friend which he read at George’s funeral yesterday (Saturday, 10/11/09). This is an act of re-membering in the old sense--putting a life back together in one’s memory, in the collective memory.

I make a good pot of beans

2009-10-07T09:30:00.001-06:00

I Make a Good Pot of Beans

Christians like my beans.
Right-wing, left-wing—they like my beans.
Buddhists like my beans.
Muslims and Jews like my beans.
Agnostics and atheists.
Mexicans and gringos.
Vegetarians and meat eaters.
The drunks down the street like my beans.
I know some politicians who like my beans.
Likewise some ex-cons and thieves.
Friends of mine.
All of them.
Poets of course like my beans.
Probably some novelists.
A few holy men, a few holy women
(not too many out there).
Even my kids and grandkids like my beans.
Write me a letter.
I’ll send you the recipe for my beans.

***

Image from the “Simple Mom” website

Youtubing Lee & Me: Literary El Paso

2009-10-01T15:29:00.004-06:00

Marcia Daudistel has edited LITERARY EL PASO for the TCU Press Series which features the literary traditions of Texas cities. I promise you: El Paso's literary history can stand up to that of any city in Texas. LITERARY EL PASO will include John Rechy, Arturo Islas, Benjamin Alire Saenz, Dagoberto Gilb, Antonio Burciaga, Ricardo Sanchez, Rick DeMarinis, Denise Chavez and many many others. It's a humongous book (600-pages plus)--at $30 cheap for its size--and will be available at the end of this month. Lee contributed a story, "When He Is 37" from her collection My Sister Disappear and I have two poems, "The Gavachos in the Photograph" (The Price of Doing Business in Mexico) and "One Way for Middle-Aged Persons to Meditate" (Get Some Fuses for the House). Marcia and El Paso Magazine asked us to make youtube short videos as part of the promotion. If you're in the neighborhood, Barnes & Noble on the Westside will be having an event on October 24th, 4pm, celebrating the arrival of the book. Below are the videos. Lee only reads the first section of her story, and I read "The Gavachos in the Photograph." If you're reading this on FACEBOOK, which doesn't download video from Blogger, click here for Lee's performance and here for mine.

By the way, the photograph at the top (also in the video) is by Pedro Rueles Alvarez. Here's the note in the back of the book about the protographs: "Pedro Ruelas Alvarez, a street photographer, took the photograph of Lee and me sitting in the corner booth by the front window of the famous Martino’s Restaurant on Avenida Juárez just on the other side of the 'free bridge.' We were living in Las Cruces at the time, and we had no idea that we would ever move to El Paso. Ruelas, who charged us three dollars for the photograph, is now dead, but many of the waiters--including my favorite, Moisés II, a dead–ringer for Peter Lorre--are still there. They all make exquisite martinis right at your table while you sit and watch." Now Moises II is no longer there, and with the insane violence of the drug wars keeping the paseños away from Juarez, Martino's is hanging on by the slenderest of threads.

Where was the Drug Czar? Where was the Border Czar?

2009-09-21T17:46:00.019-06:00

Drug Czar: Gil Kerlikowske

Alan Bersin: Border Czar

Yeah, where were they? We know they weren't in El Paso Monday and Tuesday, September 21st and 22nd [See Footnote]. That's when the "Global Public Policy Forum" convened to discuss the U.S. War on Drugs 1969-2009. Yes, 2009 is not only the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, it's also the 40th anniversary of Richard Nixon's declaration of the War on Drugs. If I didn't enjoy irony, life in the real world would be a lot more boring. The War on Drugs, of course, has failed miserably. In El Paso we only have to walk down the street and cross a concrete ditch of a river over into our sister city of Juárez to know this is a fact. 3200 people have been killed over there in the last 20 months as the El Paso/Juárez Cartel battles it out with el Chapo's Sinoloa Cartel. The forum was arranged in a unique collaboration between academia--led by Drs. Kathleen Staudt, Josiah Heyman, Howard Campell of UTEP and many others--and the city of El Paso led by City Councilperson Beto O'Rourke. The El Paso City Council, you might remember, created a national buzz earlier in the year when it unanimously resolved to ask for a national open and honest discussion about the drug war. Although vetoed by Mayor John Cook with a number of frivolous charges, that resolution and its veto was the stimulus for the El Paso Forum.

The speakers and panels, for the most part, were interesting and very well-informed, and they came from Mexico and the U.S., from the academic, media, political and legal communities. The gist of most of their talks were--as reformed drug warrior Terry Nelson kept hammering at--was that the huge problems caused by the sale, the use and addiction to illegal drugs (everything from the cartels and the costs of drug interdiction) was not the drugs themselves, but the prohibition of those drugs. Hello! The one naysayer to that point of view was Anthony Placido, the Chief of Intelligence of the Drug Enforcement Administration. His speech on Tuesday was compelling simply because it was full of fear-mongering (full of horrific show and tell of dead bodies and brains with holes in them) and faulty logic. The job of the "state," as he kept referring to the government, was security, and the state had to balance its perceived notion of security against civil rights. Very Cheneyesque.

Anthony Placido: Chief of Intelligence, DEA

Actually, I was not going to mention Placido's talk in this brief description, but Tuesday night I heard a chilling story from a high school teacher in the El Paso Independent School District. He was in class, getting ready to give out a test, when police officers arrived at the door of his classroom with drug-sniffing dogs. They ordered all of the students out of the class and into the hall way where they were lined up against the walls while the dogs searched the room for drugs. Like I say, I was horrified. This is Big Brother scary kind of stuff and it's certainly not the way to go about teaching kids to be open-minded and curious about their lives and the world in which they live. I do not understand why the EPISD, the school administrators, the teacher's union or a group of parents have not loudly protested this invasion of the high school. Meanwhile, as was pointed out during a number of the forum panels, it's easier for students to buy marijuana out on the streets than it is to buy alcohol.

Please, Mr. Placido, sit down, take a deep breath and smell the roses. We need to inform you that the drug war has been lost. Not to worry. The cartels have made enough money so they will not go away. There will be plenty for you to do.

Oh, well. I'm told that soon the whole forum will be on-line and I will put links up to the various panels and discussions. You'll be able to be the judge. In the meantime, I'll list several of the on-line resources that speak for some of the speakers, plus newspapertree.com's article linking to some of the many national and internation media articles arising from the forum--

The newspaper tree link. Also, there are a number of other articles there about the forum as well as other pieces about the drug war and life on the frontera in genera.

Judge Jim Gray, a Republican judge from Orange County, gave one of the most compelling speeches. He didn't break any new ground. He simply stated his own history of realizing that the drug war wasn't working and his journey of research to write his book Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed. He could have been talking to the Chamber of Commerce or to a religious congregation and his speech would have been the same--full of common sense and honest.

Terry Nelson, a tall gangly ex-DEA agent, spoke with the grit and humor of a guy who has been in the trenches on the other side and realizes he's doing the wrong thing. He's on the board of LEAP, aka Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. He's a fun guy to listen to. He came to El Paso earlier in the year to lobby the city council members to stand up to Mayor Cook's veto. Four did (one of whom was daughter Susie Byrd), four didn't. Oh well. Terry Nelson is the kind of guy you'd like to have over simply to listen to his stories.

Ethan Nadelmann founded and is the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. Ethan is a drug policy savant, the kind of guy you don't want to be on a panel with because he knows the answers to most all questions, and he answers them with wit and enthusiasm. The Drug Policy Alliance is hosting its annual International Drug Policy Reform Conference in Albuquerque, November 12-14. It should be a good event. The times, as Bobby D used to sing, are a changing.

Congratulations to UTEP and to the City of El Paso for hosting this event. It made us proud. Below is a trailer to the conference, but if you are on facebook reading this, then follow this youtube link.

Footnote. I should also note that a number of elected officials did not show their faces or send representatives. I saw six City Council members there sometime during the two days (Carl Robinson and Rachel Quintana were no shows). Mayor Cook spoke at the beginning and his assistant Robert Andrade was helping organize during both days, County Attorney Jose Rodriguez spoke on one of the panels and attended several discussion, Congressman Silvestre Reyes sent a representative, likewise State Senator Eliot Shapleigh. It would have been nice to see our District Attorney Jaime Esparza, somebody from the police administration, somebody from the Sherriff's office. The Governor and Texas Senators should not be expected to attend because...well, somehow El Paso is not really part of Texas. Why? I don't know.

Sunday Morning El Paso Texas

2009-09-20T14:05:00.006-06:00

Sunday Morning in Sunset Heights,
A Discarded Rose

El Paso & Juárez Sunday Morning
from the little park at the top of Scenic drive

Sunday mornings, when I have the chance, I ride my bike from the Cinco Puntos Press National Headquarters (as John Byrd calls it) through downtown and up through Sunset Heights and Kern Place and across Scenic Drive which skirts around the southern edge of the Franklin Mountains. The mountains on the other side are the Sierra de Juárez. The Rio Grande (aka Rio Bravo) cuts through the two ranges of mountains. Hence, El Paso, the Pass. It's a beautiful ride. CPP is a few blocks from the tall buildings on the eastern edge of downtown. If you look closely between the clumps of buildings you can see one of the bridges that crosses into Juárez, but besides and a few other telltale signs recognizable only by folks who live here it seems to be one city. It is one city. A divided city. This side and that side. They say the same thing on the other side. But they say it Spanish.

And it's harder and harder to go back and forth.

Spotting the Almost Extinct White-Legged Byrd in the Wilderness

2009-09-15T16:16:00.018-06:00

Hiding out from the rain and eating a cold cheese and sausage burrito

Son Johnny, who is the guy who mostly manages the workings of Cinco Puntos, invited me on a camping trip to the San Pedro Park Wilderness which is northwest of Albuquerque about an hour and a half, just north of Cuba. We've been up there several times together, sometimes with my close friend and Johnny's godfather Steve Sprague. It's the first time I've been backpacking since Steve's a few years ago. It's taken me a while to recuperate from the journey--the altitude, the 40lbs of backpack (we always carry too much), the old joints and muscles. But it was an incredible journey. My friend Joe Somoza wrote and asked how it went. This is what I wrote him.

■

Joe,
It was a good trip, but not a simple and easy trip. It was so good to be with Johnny. He sort of took care of me the whole trip--helped me put on my pack, took care of cooking, this and that, a true pleasure. Drove up Tuesday morning and of course stopped at REI where we spent too much money, slipped through Cuba (speeding ticket for $71 on the way to the wilderness, 55mph in a 45mph zone, curling up into the mts, a nice cop though) and got to our car camp at the trailhead about 530. A beautiful night with lots of stars. A steak, a beer, the simple business of being a camper is so nice. Tent. Pots and pans. Sleeping bags. How to get up and piss at night. This needs to be done, that needs to be done. Sleeping is hard to get used to without a comfy mattress. The next morning (39 degrees) oatmeal and coffee and packed our packs and headed up-trail. It was harder that I remember. The higher altitude. 40lbs on my back. And yes, maybe I am older, maybe those goddamned leaves have turned against me, but I pushed on. Would walk maybe 40 minutes and we'd take a break. So beautiful. A little butterfly followed me along, orange-red and black wings, and by god that butterfly was laughing at me. Old man old enough to die. Close to 1pm the skies started to hail. Well, we all know that hail blows away real quick. But not this hail. It kept on. Then it turned into rain. Shit. We climbed under a rock overhang in the midst of a dark forest, the rain dripping here and there on us. It kept up for an hour. We ate a burrito (cold tortilla) with summer sausage and cheddar cheese with Louisiana hot sauce. It was delicious. The rain slackened. We decided to walk some without our packs to find out where we were. After a while the trail opened into a big meadow. A good place to camp. The rain came and went, but we had on our raincoats and stood under trees when it got too heavy. Ran into a fancy grouse hunter with his gun strapped across his back. He said it might rain all night, said maybe it would stop. Thanks a lot, huh? We decided to go get our packs and come back and find a camping place. If it was raining when we got back, then we'd trudge back to our car and spend the night in Cuba. If it cleared, then we would stay. So that's what we did. We came back and the clouds were breaking and the sun was poking through. We had a wonderful campsite high above the creek, enough sun shining through "the ambiguous clouds" (Johnny's phrase). We got very lucky. No more rain. We were able to hang damp clothes and sleeping bags on rocks and got everything (except cotton stuff) mostly dry. We started boiling water to purify and to make coffee and we settled into a wonderful view and later a good dinner. The fire was hard to start--an hour long project where we ripped pages from poem books and novels and used toilet paper and all sorts of fancy teepee structures. Everything was simply wet or damp. Shit. Finally, John remembered a Tom Brown book where TB said to shave sticks for the dry wood inside. So we did that and to make sure we poured a thimbleful of white gas on top. The wood slowly started, and we nursed it and soon we had a good fire that would last us through the evening as long as we dried more sticks before burning. We slept sort of fitful. John was worried about more rain, I heard some sort of animal sniffing around outside, but the night passed and the morning was partly cloudy, the earth happy with a layer of thick dew, a bunch of elk over the next rise talking to each other about the day's activities, all of them looking forward to the mating season, oblivious to the fact that hunting season was upon them. Or were they? Oatmeal and coffee. Delicious. A nice dump in the woods (see photo below). We bushwhacked for several hours looking for those elk. We didn't find them but we had an incredible walk. No sign of human beasts. We had lunch around noon and packed up and started back down the trail. A wondrous rhythm walking downhill full of prayers and beautiful things to see. It started to hail and rain of course, but that was cool. We were ready with raincoats and besides we were going back to the car. On the way home we stopped at the Frontier and re-membered Albuquerque and I took John to the house on Rincon Avenue where he was born and we drove home listening to a mystery on the radio and lost in our own thoughts about the next day.
Love to you,
Bobby

A wet fire is still a good fire

The almost extinct white-legged byrd
doing his business in the woods

Self-portrait falling down

Camp from Las Vacas Creek

Elk head. Note that the trophy antlers
have been sawed off along with the brain pan.
But at least the hunter took home the meat.

Breaking camp

Heading home

Self portrait 3/4 mile from the trailhead #51

Johnny Byrd in front of the house
on Rincon Avenue where he was born in 1973.
(Just west of 48th Street, west of the Rio Grande,
several blocks from Central Avenue & under the mesa).
Lee reminded me that we'd let Susie run around
in the field without her diapers on.
That's how we potty-trained her.
I guess it worked.
Sort of.