The End of the World

 

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.

Sabbath the News & Do the JB Manifesto Dirt Boogie Waltz

 

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.

Joe Somoza at El Bar Palacios

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.

Youtubing Lee & Me: Literary El Paso

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.

The Creators of INCANTATIONS

I live a couple of professional lives. I'm a poet and a publisher. It's a peculiar and very interesting dilemma. Lee (she's a novelist and short-story writer) and i got into the publishing life so we could try to make a living at something we loved--putting language on the page. Our company Cinco Puntos Press doesn't publish much poetry. Why? Because very few people buy poetry books. But sometimes we go out on a limb and publish a book that crosses the terrain. In this instance, it's INCANTATIONS: SONGS, SPELLS AND IMAGES BY MAYAN WOMEN. This magical book (I use the term "magical" in the literal sense) was edited and curated by poet Ambar Past. More about Ambar later. But for now I'm pasting below a blognote that appeared on our Cinco Puntos Press blogspot. Because a different crowd of readers come to this blog, I thought it would be good to put this here too. This is one of those times when I get the chance to wear my poet hat and my publisher hat stacked atop one another.

OVER A HUNDRED AND FIFTY PEOPLE COLLABORATED to write, illustrate, and create this book, among them singers, seers, witchwives, washer women, sugar beer brewers, conjurers, native bearers, prayer makers, soothsayers, sorceresses, dyers, diviners, hired mourners, spinners, shepherdesses, babysitters, millers, maids, bookbinders, spellbinders, cornharvesters, great-grandmothers, sharecroppers, necromancers, exorcists, coffee pickers, potters, crazy women, midwives, planters, woodlanders, bonesetters, troublemakers, spiritualists, mothers-in-law, peddlers, gravediggers, fireworks makers, drinkers, hags, beggars, bakers, basket weavers, shamanesses, liars, computers, comagres, sculptresses, muses, and even men. We have made this book “as we make our children,” in the words of Petú Xantis, “with the strength of our flesh and the birds of our heart.”


In the land of Som Chi, the Eloquent Conjurer,
In the land of Som Chi, Spinner of Incantations.

—Ritual de los Bacabes

So Ambar Past begins her essay "Notes on the Creators" in the anthology INCANTATIONS: SONGS, SPELLS AND IMAGES BY MAYAN WOMEN. Below, in this video, Ambar and Maruch Méndes Péres celebrate the book, making offering to the Gods, with candles, poetry and a reading.

[NOTES: Ambar's daughter, the videographer Tila Rodriguez Past filmed, edited and produced this video. It was originally published on the web on Blip TV here. By the way, if you're on facebook reading this, you might not be able to watch the video in the blognote. It will, however, be posted on facebook in videos and on the wall separately.]

Maruch is a shepherdess and poet. This is what she chants to the Gods:

"I AM GIVING YOU YOUR FOOD
I AM FEEDING YOU WITH CANDLES AND POETRY"

The Tzotzil Maya of the Chiapas Highlands say that the Gods need to have poetry in order to survive and so they created humans to make that poetry, that feast. Thus, Maruch and Ambar are celebrating the publication of our U.S. edition of INCANTATIONS. Maruch chants poetry and lights the candles for the altar and later in the video Ambar reads a poem. This magical book--edited and curated by Ambar--was originally created by el Taller Leñateros (Woodlanders Workshop), a self-governing collective of mostly Mayan women. A member of the taller, Maruch was one of the book’s creators.

In her essay "Notes on the Creators,"Ambar tells this story about Maruch--

Shepherdess Maruch Méndes Péres is the author of Songs of the Drunken Woman. Maruch is not much of a drinker, however, and claims she never married because she can’t stand drunks. She lives in Catixtik, Chamula with two little girls she adopted, Xvel and Marta Méndes. Now it seems that Maruch has also adopted Xvel and Marta’s three siblings and also their birth mother, Dominga. All of them have changed their last names to Méndes. The Leñateros were trying to get in touch with Maruch last year to pay her royalties from the sales of the Spanish version of this book, but were told that she had died, and would be buried that very day. All of us from the Workshop piled into a hired van packed full of flowers and we headed off sadly to Maruch’s hamlet. There were hundreds of people in mourning outside of her house, including Maruch herself, who was so overjoyed to witness our arrival at the funeral that she forgot for a moment her sadness over the death of her elder sister—also named Maruch Méndes.

Here, then, is a couple of Maruch's incantations:

THE DRUNKEN WOMAN’S SONG

Saint Mother,
Godmother, I am drunk.

I caught the drops that fall from your roof
I drank your shadow.

Now I am getting drunk.
Anyway, my Saint Mother,
anyway, my Godmother,

look after me
so I won’t trip over something.

I am drunk; I have drunk,
my Saint Mother, my Godmother,
Saint Maruch, Niña Maruch.

I want all your pretty ones to overwhelm me.
I want to sing,

Virgin Maruch,
Niña Maruch.

I am a drinker of drink.
I drank your wine.

It has gone to my head.
My heart is spinning

I know how to drink.
I know how to drink everything.

—Maruch Méndes Péres

●

TO KAXAIL

I step and walk
on your flowering face,

Holy Mother, Holy Wildwood,
Sacred Earth, Sacred Ground.

Show me the way, Mother,
put me on the right track.

Rise up, Holy Rock!
Rise up, Holy Tree!

Come with me on the way up.
Be with me on the way down.

Sacred Mother,
Holy Breast,

Holy Kaxail,
Sacred Earth,

Holy Ground,
Holy Soil,

Sacred Ahau,
Holy Snake,

Holy Thunderbolt:
Protect me with your shadow.

—Maruch Méndes Péres

INCANTATIONS: Maya Earth Mother Book & el Taller Leñateros

We are the woodlanders who walk in the hills gathering dry branches and deadwood from fallen trees, collecting firewood without chopping down the forest. We come down from the mountains, carrying bundles of wood, of pitchpine and split encino, for the hearths of the Royal City of San Cristobal de Las Casas. We walk through the mist, leading our burros, selling firewood from house to house. We knock on people’s doors, offering pine needles as well, to spread on the floor, moss, flowers of bromeliads and orchids for manger scenes.

—from the website for Taller Leñateros

NOTE: I wrote this piece for the Cinco Puntos Press Blogspot but inadvertently put it up here on my personal blogspot. I went to delete it, but thought, hell, this belongs here as well. INCANTATIONS: Songs, Spells and Images by Mayan Women collected by the remarkable woman and poet Ambar Past is an important contribution to my work as a poet. That's how Lee and I got to be publishers in the first place--she is a novelist and I am a poet. Our first work of writing is the inspiration for our publishing. I'll put more up about Ambar and Incantations in the future. Enjoy.)

In 2002 Lee and I were lucky enough to visit San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas. San Cristobal is one of the spiritual capitals of the original people, los indigenas, the Tzotzil Maya and those who came before, the People the color of our Mother Earth. This is where in 1994 the Zapatistas came out of the hills and forests and made war against the Mexican government. Their war was in defense of their ancient homeland, their culture, their language, their vision. Ever since we published La Historia de las colores / The Story of Colors by Subcomandante Marcos and illustrated by Domitila Dominguez we have wanted to make this trip. It was a wonderful, haunting journey. Like a pilgrimage almost. So much of that old city on the southern edge of Mexico made us feel like we had found some sort of home. We were happy simply walking around the streets and visiting the outlying Mayan communities of San Juan Chamula and Zinacatan, listening to Tzotzil and Spanish rub up against one another not quite at ease, sitting in ancient churches and the plazas and feeling the cool highland breezes. Finally we were there, hesitant and awkward at first, but soon we felt at peace and happy.

On the morning of our last day in San Cristobal a friend told us that we needed without fail to visit el Taller Leñateros (“the Woodlanders Workshop), a paper-making collective owned and operated by Tzotzil women. So we followed directions and turned down a narrow cobble-stoned street and knocked on a door. A man opened the door for us. He didn’t speak English, and his Spanish was as bad as mine. He motioned us to come inside. We found ourselves in a quiet, magically real room filled with paper art--hand-made papers, cards, large images, small images, books, all made with indigenous hands and perspective. Their remarkable story of the Leñateros is best followed on their website and facebook pages, but here I want to speak of their mother Maya earth book, the creation of their minds and hearts and hands.

We were enthralled by all that we saw and so happy to be there. Then AMBAR PAST burst into the room full of energy and joy. Yes, she knew about Cinco Puntos Press; yes, she knew this person and that person; and yes, she especially knew about The Story of Colors. She was so happy to meet us. And she wanted to show us the jewel that the Taller had produced--INCANTATIONS. The book she showed us was truly a work of art. The original is such a wonderful book, such an important book. The thick cover is hand-sculpted--the brown face of a woman, the brown face of a mother-god, the brown face of Mother Earth. And inside on thick papers were stunning poems from the Tzotzil women. Chants and prophecy and incantations and curses--words to keep the spirit alive, words to keep evil at bay, words to ward off sickness and death, words to protect children and the sacred corn, words to protect women from drunken crazy men, words of love and love-making. Magic words. Sacred words. Ancient words. And dovetailed within the book are images from these women that speak to the same place in the heart.

Over the years of living and working with the Tzotzil women, Ambar had collected these poems, transcribing them first into Tzotzil which by then she had learned. Next she translated them into Spanish and finally into English. And she contributed two important essays--one that tells the history of the book and the other that discusses the poetics of the poets and their Tzotzil culture. The New York Times, recognizing the importance of Incantations as a work of language and as a work of art, published an extensive piece on the original Incantations and Ambar. The Taller was selling the books for $200 U.S. Still is, in fact. And they are available through Garcia Street Books in Santa Fe and probably elsewhere. (Again, please visit the website and facebook pages for Taller Leñateros for more information about the women, their goals and the various paper art they are selling.)

I am a poet, and since the 1960s I have been a rabid fan of the pioneering work of Jerome Rothenberg in developing his understanding of ethno-poetics (in particular, his anthologies Shaking the Pumkin, Technicians of the Sacred and America a Prophecy). Reading the poems and Ambar’s essay, I knew immediately the importance of the book, and I yearned for Cinco Puntos to be able of produce a trade edition of the collection. Lee was as excited about the project as I was. We wanted a book that would retain a taste of the original but would make the work accessible to poets and scholars and students and readers. It would require compromises to the original book, but Lee and Ambar worked together over several years to bring about a book that we are all proud of.

Ambar Past is a remarkable woman. She grew up, ironically enough for us, in our hometown of El Paso and even went to the same high school as our three kids. But in 1968, when she graduated from high school, she left El Paso, never to return. First she went to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. It was time for the Summer of Love. But she wasn’t happy there either. She went to Mexico and eventually she found her home-place in the highlands of San Cristobal. She lived among the Tzotzil and studied their ways and their language and their medicines. It was not easy, but she has survived and has been honored by the Tzotzil. She became a naturalized Mexican citizen and has become an important Mexican poet. We, like the Tzotzil, are honored to have Ambar as a friend.

Keith Wilson: 1927-2009

Joe and Jill Somoza just called to tell us that our close friend poet Keith Wilson has died. Keith had been in a hospice in Las Cruces for almost two weeks. He passed quietly with Heloise, his daughters Kathy and Kerin and his son Kevin at his side. Keith’s been suffering from aphasia for a number of years and he had lost his ability to speak and to be a poet, so it was time for him to catch the boat to the other side. He will be missed. I will miss him.

Keith, as a friend and a mentor, was a very important influence in my life as a poet and as a householder. I first met him and Heloise in Tucson in 1963 where he was a lecturer. Through him and Barney Childs I became involved in the Ruth Stephan Poetry Center, along with my friend Paul Malanga, and was able to hang around poets and poetry. The Wilson household was always full of talking poetry and laughing. Creeley, Snyder, Duncan, Jerome Rothenberg, John Newlove and so many others were always coming through. It was a special time back then. I’ve always felt privileged to know poets and to be part of the special community of those who make poems. Keith was an entry way for me into this special world.

Last year poets in Las Cruces and Placitas/Albuquerque organized celebrations of Keith and his poetry. He was present at each event and enjoyed them immensely. You can read about each of those occasions on previous blog entries here and here where I've included introductions by Joe Somoza (Las Cruces) and me (Placitas) and poems. The picture above I took in December 2005. Keith was still writing, although I suppose the aphasia was probably creeping into his world.

This fall Clark City Press will be publishing his collected poems (1965-2001), Shaman of the Desert. 1100 pages in all, it will include 23 of his books, uncollected poems and his autobiography that he wrote in 1992 for the Gale Publishing Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series.

In my other postings you'll see other poems, but here is one of my favorite Keith Wilson poems, a poem I heard a long time ago back in the day. May Keith rest in peace.

The Gift
--for my daughter Kathleen

This is a song
about the gift of patience

of opening

the need to walk alone
ever, deeper, into

This is a poem
against light

a recommendation
to darkness

Bring a candle
the room is warm

This is a song

Elizabeth Alexander's Inaugaration Poem: The Poetics of Declamation

I was very much impressed with Obama's speech--its style and eloquence and toughness and inclusiveness--(George Bush should have climbed under his chair during the new president's litanies of difficulties the country and world faces) but I'll let the talking heads do their thing. I do want to congratulate Elizabeth Alexander for her poem "Praise Song for the Day." It was the 4th occasion for a poem to be written for, and recited at, the inaugaration of a president. I didn't look forward to it at all. Sixteen years ago I had gritted my teeth when I heard Maya Angelou's poem (I like Maya Angelou, I just didn't like her poem), and I don't even remember Miller Williams' poem. All I remember about the Frost poem is that he didn't read the poem he wrote which, by all acounts, was a blessing. Angelou had overworked her poem, made it too sentimental, too (for lack of a better word) "poetic." It was praised at the time, I thought, because it filled the common and sentimental notion of what poetry is supposed to do. Elizabeth Alexander's poem was plain-spoken and local and ordinary (if I might use that word in a good sense), and as such, it fit in with the inclusive mood of the day and of Obama's speech (so much different from when Bush was inaugarated, sans even the hint of poetry). The poem felt very democratic, rooted in everyday experiences, and it made me feel good and it allowed me to feel American. And I like the understated way she read her poem. I was delighted and happy. Besides, how daunting a task to read a recently composed poem to millions of people and a humongous television audience, especially after such a speech from the new president celebrated for his eloquence. I thought she did very well. Bravo.

(Please note that I write this without reading the poem on the page. Somebody did send us a copy a person had written out quickly, listening to it over and over again, without appropriate line breaks, etcetera. I didn't pay any attention to that because I wanted to write something from having only heard the poem. I wanted my response to be to the spoken text.)

The poetics of public poetry is a different animal from our usual sense of poetry in this country. Public poetry, especially "declamation" (or, in Spanish, declamción) is a much more common form of poetic expression in Latin America. I remember a friend, who was in Nicaragua during the revolution, telling me that at dinners all sorts of people would stand up and declaim their feelings for the revolution, their land and country. Walt Whitman (Song of Myself) and Allen Ginsberg (Howl) were both wonderfully comfortable declaiming to us all, but of course neither of them would be allowed near a presidential podium. El chuco poet Ricardo Sanchez was also known for his declamatory poems, especially his improvisation riffs. Angelou tried, but fell short, but it certainly didn't hurt her in the marketplace. Meanwhile, Lee told me that teachers on a Young Adult literature listserv that she monitors were already sniping at Alexander's poem because of its plain-spokeness. They wanted something more "poetic." I'll be interested in reading what others say about Alexander's poem during the weeks that come. Ron Silliman's blog certainly will be jumping. I recommend all students of poetry to pay some attention to his blog, especially the comments, to follow the discussion.

Rice, by Joan Logghe

Joan Logghe said that men and women inhabit each other like undergarments. "He wears me and I wear him."
—Rice, page 72

I’ve been going through my 2007 journal, collecting bits and pieces of scribbling that might be a poem, and I found this note re: Joan Logghe’s Rice (Tres Chicas, 2004). The book is a collection of 74 regular-looking and untitled sonnets broken into 8 and 6 stanzas. JB Bryan sent me the book as a gift (he with Renée Gregorio designed it) several years ago. It's truly a handsome book, but I’m not a fan of sonnets, Joan is a student of Robert Bly and that whole root of the poetry tree doesn’t turn me on, so it must have sat around my house for a year before I even bothered to thumb through it. When I did I immediately enjoyed random poems and then over the next week or so read the book from cover to cover. This is not a usual habit of mine. I have poetry books that I’m reading scattered all around my house and office. But I loved Rice. It documents a rough patch in her long marriage. Her husband of many years (they have three grown children together) is attracted to another woman, they are on the fulcrum of their lives, the rest of which, as we all know, is downhill making its way toward the sea. So, in part, the sonnets read like a narrative, but they also carry with them of histories of old friends (Jim Sagel dies in one of the poems) in the post-Hippie life of northern New Mexico, ruminations on geology and poetics and food and poems and her Jewish heritage and Buddhist practice and all the stuff that goes into a life of making poems and a family and dinner and a history of one’s own. The poems ring in concert with many of my own feeling about living a life out here. Lee Byrd, who doesn’t read a lot of poetry, grabbed the book when I was done and likewise read it from cover to cover. We both heartily recommend it.

Below I will add the sonnet which is on page 54. Probably not the best in the book (whatever that means, and for who), but it discusses her writing of sonnets and she populates the poem with her dead men friends. One of them was a friend of mine, the late artist and sculptor and poet Bill Gersh. Hell, I probably only spent 8 hours with Bill during the time I knew him, but he was one of those guys, if he knew you, spilled his life into yours with enormous pleasure. In the early 1990s I had a DH Lawrence Fellowship and so was blessed with spending the summer at the DH Lawrence Ranch at the base of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains just north of Taos. Bill invited my son John (he must have been 14 at the time) and I over for dinner in the adobe home he had built himself. The poet Renée Gregorio was there. And, with delicious food and good wine in our bellies, Bill told us the almost epic journey on how he rode his Harley from California to Taos, a beautiful blonde woman wrapping her thighs around him and hugging him close. When he got to Taos, the Harley went kaput, the woman left him, Max Feinstein and the tribe were building New Buffalo and Gersh knew he was home among the longhairs and the Indians and the rural Hispanics and the mountains. The story was beautifully told, funny and sad and righteous, a true insight into the life of an artist in the 1960s. Bill pulled no punches in the telling, and I was delighted Johnny Byrd got to hear the story. 14 years old is a good time to hear such stories. Bill died in 1994 at the age of 51. He was a year younger than me.

By the way, you don’t need to know all these peculiar histories and endnotes to thoroughly enjoy Rice. And Tres Chicas is a collaborative effort of Joan, Renée and Miriam Sagan. The painting above is Gersh's "The Trailblazer" which I found on the artnet website.

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Gersh gave me permission to write any kind
of sonnet I want, “Just write a fuckin’ sonnet.”
And Grolnick says in a riff from death, “Go, chick,
go.” And Robert says you’ll never meditate, stop
kidding yourself. And Rick inquires after my health.
Just write a sonnet, forget abba abba cd cd cd.
They all assemble in these fourteen lines,
give me thumbs up. Go ahead, the dead said.

My living love lost his job, cut off all his hair,
drank love in a beer. Wanted to trade romance
in for a new model. Rode off, over there.
I flipped. I did the Change of Life dance, sang
“Growing Old in America” blues. I cried myself down
ten pounds. Weight returns, but the dead cheer me on.