Otto Campbell: La Brigada por la Paz

Painter Otto Campbell, and a group of cholos he recruited from the streets (la Sociedad de la Esquina), of downtown Juárez, Chichuahua, painted this mural La brigada por la Paz. I figure they did the job in 1996. The photograph is by Virgil Hancock and it appears on the cover and in his remarkable collection of photographs, Chihuahua: Pictures from the Edge (University of New Mexico Press, 1996, with a companion essay by Charles Bowden). The reason I'm putting it up on the blog (it's a copyrighted image and I've lost contact with Virgil) is that I was googling Otto Campbell the other day and I found absolutely nothing about the man. No text, no images. He was an important artist and cultural activist in Juárez (he died in 1997) and there should be some trace of him and his work available on the web. My friend the Mexican novelist Willivaldo Delgadillo says of Campbell, "He had a man-size wisdom and was one of those rare human beings who appeared to be reconciled with himself." The mural was painted on the corner of a major intersection in Juárez--Avenida Diez y Seis of Septiembre and Avenida Francisco Villa--which is right across the street from the downtown el Restaurante Villa del Mar, one of my favorite restaurants across the river. I saw the mural only once when poet Joe Somoza and I were over there walking and talking about poetry and eating fish soup. It was not finished yet--it was only in its preliminary black and white stage, and it was truly remarkable, ghostlike. I never got to see the finished mural. Soon after it was completed it was obliterated. Again, Willivaldo: "The local Coca-Cola honcho ordered it removed because he didn't like the fact that the bishop had a $-sign on his hat. The mural was replaced by a small notice on the repainted wall that read: Please Do Not Adverise. Coca Cola."

Willivaldo has told me that a young artist is now doing research on Campbell and that more work may be made available. I hope so. He's one of those mysterious fronterizos that make an important mark on our lives here on the border and then disappears somehow into the white noise. I would have liked to have known him.

The reason I have the image in the first place is that Virgil was kind enough to let Cinco Puntos Press use the photograph for the cover of my book of poems, The Price of Doing Business in Mexico. Virgil, if you're out there, I'll be happy to remove the photograph from the blog if you so wish. But I have a hunch that you, like me, will understand that Otto Campbell should certainly be googlable.

Which reminds me: There's a a small story that tell the reason I was googling Otto Campbell. My son John Byrd wrote an article about the band Radio La Chusma and a Sunday night concert they did at the Chamizal Park down by the river. John titled his piece "Dreaming of a Sunday Evening at the Chamizal" which is an allusion to Diego Rivera's great mural in Mexico City "Dreaming of a Sunday Afternoon in La Alameda." John didn't feel using an image of the Rivera mural was appropriate to his piece, so I suggested Campbell's La Brigada por la Paz. Especially since "chusma" can be translated into something like "street people." And, instead of searching through my own files for Virgil's photograph, I googled Otto Campell and found absolutely nothing.

Keith Wilson, Again

In October last year the poetry community in Las Cruces, under the umbrella of the Sin Fronteras organization (a loosely knit collective of writers in the area) celebrated the life’s work of poet Keith Wilson and his enormous contribution to the area’s poetry scene. I documented a like event held in Placitas in June, but I want to include the equally enjoyable Las Cruces event in this discussion, especially because I wanted to add Joe Somoza’s introduction. Joe’s introduction (this is an abbreviated version, what Joe could put together after a month, but it's the melody line on which he riffed for a longer time) is much different from mine that I posted last month. It speaks more to Keith’s biography and poetics, how the two intertwined and evolved. Joe and Jill were in Chicago and so missed the Placitas event, but they were central to the Sin Fronteras celebration. Readers at the Las Cruces event included Joe Somoza, Denise Chavez, Dick Thomas, Connie Voisine, Grant Price, David Slagle, Tim Cleveland, Roger Saxton, Michael Mandel, Todd Dickson, Wayne Crawford, Kevin McIlvoy, Kevin Wilson, Nancy Hastings, Heloise Wilson and myself.

One brief note: most readers think of Keith as a “Southwest poet,” which sometimes equates, however wrongly, to a number of sentimental concerns. At both readings poet Wayne Crawford reminded us that Keith was one of the foremost anti-war poets of the last 60 years. On both occasions, he gave passionate readings of “The Poem Politic X: A Note for Future Historians” from Keith’s 1972 book Midwatch from Sumac. As Wayne said, he can think of no decade in American history when the poem was not relevant, and today even more so, after five years of this senseless war on-going war in Iraq. I am pasting "The Poem Politic below Joe's introduction, Wayne having been nice enough to forward me his perfectly typed file. Joe’s introduction speaks briefly about the importance of Keith’s Annapolis education and his naval service aboard ship in Korea to the body of his work, but it would be hoped that in the future somebody would write a nice long piece about Keith's contribution to the poetry of yearning for peace.

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A Celebration of Keith Wilson's Poetry
Introduction by Joseph Somoza
October 1, 2007
Branigan Library, Las Cruces, NM

This is a reading to celebrate Keith Wilson’s poetry. As most of you know, Keith has developed aphasia, a condition that makes it very difficult for him to speak, so we will be speaking for him (though, of course, using the words of his own poems).

Todd Dickson came up with the idea, and Michael Mandel brought it to our writers group, Sin Fronteras. We all agreed it was a great idea, and after asking Keith if he approved, we organized this reading. The readers are all friends, fellow writers, and/or former students of Keith’s.

I’ll start things off, but first want to say a few words about Keith’s life to set the context for the poems you will be hearing.

First of all, Keith is a native New Mexican, born in 1927, who grew up in various small rural towns such as Fort Sumner, Deming, and Alamogordo (his father being a road surveyor for the state, they moved around a lot). As a result, he came to be exposed to the various parts and cultures of the state, learning to speak Spanish, for example, and learning about the rituals of the Penitentes and of some of the Native American tribes of the state, not to mention Anglo rancher culture.

Even though Keith always had an interest in writing, his mother wanted him to follow in the footsteps of her great uncle who had been a rear-admiral in the navy, and he wound up attending Annapolis (where he studied Engineering) and serving as a naval officer in the Korean War. But he soon became disenchanted with the military and resigned his commission early in the 50’s. Not knowing what he wanted to do next, he returned to New Mexico for a visit, and as he got closer he realized how much he loved his home state and decided he wanted to write about it—to give voice to the places and people he had grown up around and that had not received sufficient voice up until then.

He had his subject but needed to develop a poetic language that would treat it seriously and in a modern way. Much of the literature of the southwest at that time treated the place in a traditional, stereotypical and sentimental manner. Keith wanted to write modern, convincing poems about New Mexico but didn’t know exactly how to go about it, not knowing much about the contemporary poetry of that time. He enrolled as a graduate student in English at the University of New Mexico but although he learned about the tradition of poetry, this didn’t help him to write a contemporary poem.

In the 1950’s, though, the various experimental post-W.W.2 poetic movements were coming to the fore in this country, and Keith soon began to get wind of the Beats, the Black Mountain School Poets, and others. He was particularly helped in learning about contemporary poetry through the poetry anthology The New American Poetry (1960), edited by Donald Allen, which included Charles Olson’s essay on poetics, “Projective Verse,” as well as a good sampling of poetry by some of the leading experimental American poets of that time. Keith was particularly struck by such writers as Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Spicer and Denise Levertov. Soon after ending his studies, he accepted a teaching job at the University of Arizona and, serving on the board of the new Ruth Stephan Poetry Center, he got to invite some of these same writers to campus and got to know them firsthand.

Now he had a subject matter and was developing a writing style that was clipped, vivid, unsentimental, and modern. Thus began his writing career. In 1965, he was offered a teaching job at New Mexico State University and, soon after, his first book of poems, Sketches for a New Mexico Hill Town, was published. Many more books would follow.

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The Poem Politic X: A Note for Future Historians
(from Midwatch, pages 55-57, Sumac Press, © 1972 by Keith Wilson)

When writing of us, state
as your first premise
THEY VALUED WAR MORE THAN ANYTHING
You will never understand us
otherwise, say that we

cherished war

over peace and comfort
over feeding the poor
over our own health
over love, even the act of it
over religion, all of them, except
perhaps certain forms of Buddhism

that we never failed to pass bills of war
through our legislatures, using the pressures
of imminent invasion or disaster (potential)
abroad as absolution for not spending moneys
on projects which might make us happy or even
save us from clear and evident crises at home

Write of us that we spent millions educating
the best of our youth and then slaughtered them
capturing some hill or swamp of no value and
bragged for several months about how well they died
following orders that were admittedly stupid, ill-conceived

Explain how the military virtues, best practiced
by robots, are most valued by us. You will never come
to understand us unless you realize, from the first,
that we love killing and kill our own youth, our own great
men FIRST. Enemies can be forgiven, their broken bodies
mourned over, but our own are rarely spoken of except
in political speeches when we “honor” the dead and encourage
the living young to follow their example and be gloriously
dead also

NOTE: Almost all religious training, in all our countries,
dedicates itself to preparing the people for war.
Catholic chaplains rage against “peaceniks,” forgetting
Christ's title in the Church is Prince of Peace;
Baptists shout of the ungodly and the necessity of
ritual holy wars while preaching of the Ten Commandments
each Sunday; Mohammedans, Shintoists look forward
to days of bloody retribution while Jews march
across the sands of Palestine deserts, Rabbis
urging them on....

THEY VALUE WAR MORE THAN ANYTHING

Will expose our children, our homes to murder and
devastation on the chance that we can murder or devastate
FIRST and thus gain honor. No scientist is respected whose
inventions help mankind, for its own sake, but only when
those discoveries help to destroy, or to heal people,
that they may help destroy other men and living things

Be aware that
Destiny has caught us up, our choices made
subtly over the ages have spun a web about us:
It is unlikely we will escape, having geared
everything in our societies toward war and combat.
It is probably too late for us to survive
in anything like our present form.

THEY VALUED WAR MORE THAN ANYTHING

If you build us monuments let them all
say that, as warning, as a poison label
on a bottle, that you may not ever
repeat our follies, feel our grief.

Larry Goodell reads "A DANCE AGAIN for Lee Connor and the Danzantes"

A DANCE AGAIN
for Lee Connor and the Danzantes

We danced we did
we danced the did did dance
the dance we did dance in the did
we did the dance indeed we did
the did & done & dead with dance
the dance done in, we did it in
we did it in the dance we did
the did did dance and done we did
the dance again & did the whole thing in
we did it in we did the dance
and did it in we danced it dead
until it twisted
danced and did it back again
we danced it in and did it in
and brot it back to dance again
we brot it in and danced a sin until it sings
we danced it in and out again
and did we dance? did we dance?
did we dance it in again?
until it sings? until it sung?
until the song sang again
we danced a din and danced a sing
song again we did a dance
and danced we did
we did a dance a dance we did
again we did a dance again
again we didn’t dance again
we stopped and didn’t dance the dance
was done we did it dance and all
the ball was over dance & hall
we did a dance once and for all
we did a did and done dance and did
the dance we did again.
And did we dance again
and did we dance again.

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I videoed Larry Goodell reading “And Dance Again” at his and Lenore’s (photographer and painter) home in Placitas, New Mexico, cupped in the Sandia Mountains above Albuquerque. It was the morning after the tribute for Keith Wilson. I was tired, but Larry still had that flaco-man exuberance that he should bottle and sell. I did two videos, the first of a recent poem which I will post at a later date. For that one he put on an exotic yellow Hawaiian shirt. When I asked him to do a performance of “And Dance Again” he changed into the equally exotic red Hawaiian shirt. He had to do the poem a couple of times before he was satisfied with the performance. He was discombobulated at first because he wants to look at his audience when he reads, but the dance poem--with all of its repetition and rhyme--demands full attention to the page.

I asked him to read the dance poem for a number of reasons. I had seen him perform it in the 1980s at the Kimo Theatre in downtown Albuquerque with Lee Connor dancing along gracefully beside him. It was a wonderful collaborative performance, something which took both of them a long time to rehearse, especially considering the entire performance was probably 2 or 3 minutes long at the most. Lee Connor had told Larry that he had to read the poem exactly as rehearsed—the rhythms and beats, the length of the lines, the intonation of the words. Nothing could deviate because the way the dance was choreographed depended precisely on Larry’s reading. If Larry’s reading deviated from the rehearsal even the tiniest bit, then it fractured the dance. But also I asked Larry to let me record the piece because we were staying in the home and studio that Lee Connor and his partner Lorn MacDougal had built for themselves in the 1980s. They were both very well known dancers in Manhattan but had tentatively moved to New Mexico for peace and space. They only lived there a few years. In September 1987 Lee Connor died in that house of AIDS. Poet and painter JB Bryan, who owns the house now, says you can feel Lee Connor’s presence in the house. I agree. And in the downstairs bedroom there’s a broadside of Larry’s poem and a photograph Lee Connor dancing. It’s an image of ecstasy.

The great thing about Larry (I’ve known him since the mid-1960s) is that he’s always been Larry and over all these years he’s evolved into Larry-squared. His poetics is a mixture of wild-eyed 1960s-New Mexico gringo shamanism, improvisational rhyming and punning, political and cultural cynicism and ribald wit. Larry is a cornerstone of what Ron Silliman likes to call “the New Western poetics.” Larry certainly does his own thing and he’s all about “local,” the very present, and he dismisses the academy and writing programs like flu bugs. If he could, he’d invent a vaccination against the disease. He believes in the goodness of the earth, he’s a misanthrope, especially when it comes to the American experience, and as a gardener he’ll sit on his back porch with Lenore and commiserate about the weather and the locusts and the rain or the lack of rain and the rich people moving into his “fervent valley” driving up the goddamn prices of everything from tomatoes to the blessed land. He loves to perform his poetry (that's how he thinks as he writes: as performance) but ironically does not perform that much. Used to be back in the day he’d spend days creating elaborate costumes of wings and masks and dildos and robes. He’s put those aside now for the most part but he’s still a fun and remarkable performer. He and Lenore have become expert gardeners and householders and raisers of chickens. Every year they host a Summer Solstice Party so today they will be celebrating the longest day of the year, welcoming the turning of the year their in the village of Placitas.

Lee Byrd (excuse me but too many “Lee’s” in this blog, so I need to differentiate) and I and our good friends Jane and Steve Sprague went to one of Summer Solstice parties in Placitas back in the 70s. Or maybe it was Larry’s birthday party. I can’t remember. What I do remember is when finally the night came, Larry dressed himself up in a wild shaman costume and he stood outside in the darkness and whirred a bullroarer around his head. He had built some kind of maze of stone and he was dancing. Dancing and chanting and invoking the goddess. We were all drunk probably. Or stoned. Or some kind of combination. At least Steve and I. Like always, the stars in Placitas were extravagant and the night was making animal sound and insect sound and wind sound. Surely the goddess had to listen to Larry. I certainly listened. And when we said goodbye Larry kissed me full on the lips. He was the first man ever to kiss me on the lips. He gave the same favor to Steve and Jane and Lee. It was some kind of initiation I guess. It was okay.

So this is sort of a Happy Summer Solstice card for Lenore and Larry.

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The Sandoval Signpost did a nice piece about Larry and Lenore with several of Lenore’s photographs and a photograph of them together in their garden. But a better place to see both of their work is at The Santa Fe Poetry Broadside—for Larry’s poems and for Lenore’s photographs. Don’t miss Lenore’s wonderful portrait of Larry as shadow. Also, you can buy two of Larry’s books--Firecracker Soup at Cinco Puntos Press and Here on Earth from La Alameda Press. Below is a photograph of Larry, replete with rat tails and ears and goggle-eyed glasses and moustache, performing “White Rat Generation” from Firecracker Soup.


■■■

Thinking about Placitas and the poetry of what Ron Silliman calls "the New Western poetics," I realize I need to write something about that too. Hopefully soon. One thing to the next. It's fun for me. Stay tuned.

Tribute to Keith Wilson

Last Sunday the Duende Poetry Series in Placitas, NM, hosted a tribute for the poet Keith Wilson. Keith, now 80 years old, is frail and in poor health, following a series of strokes. He understands what others are saying but is not capable of making simple sentences or even words without enormous struggle. It's a terrible sickness for a poet. And to make matters worse, the day before the event he had to begin using a walker. The hosts were kind enough to ask me to introduce the event. I was honored. Below is my tribute to Keith that I wrote for the occasion. In an aferword following, I'll say more about the event, the Duende Poetry Series and its organizers.


A TRIBUTE TO KEITH WILSON
Duende Poetry Series
Placitas, New Mexico
Sunday, June 15, 2008


Welcome, as Jerome Rothenberg would say, to the Paradise of Poets. Welcome, as Gertrude Stein might say, to the continuous now of poetry. We are here today to honor poet Keith Wilson, and by our presence, the radiant beast of poetry survives. We nourish her by making our poems, we nourish her by reading the poems of others, by hearing aloud the poems of others, by buying books of poems and by sharing these poems and talking about these poems and the poetics that we discover in these poems.

It’s a peculiar idea, thinking of poetry as a creature of biology, an ethereal animal made of words and ideas and rhythms of language and culture. An animal that was birthed in the chants and drumbeats of our collective pre-history and which continues to breathe the air of our contemporary wanderings through, and experiments with, our language. I began learning about this idea when I was school at the University of Arizona in Tucson, 1963 to 1965. Keith and Heloise Wilson were kind enough to invite me into their home and there I discovered a household of poetry. It was a unique place. The idea of poetry and art as community and as a continuous thread of understanding seeped into my mind and heart. In Tucson that community of poetry was centered in the Wilson household. I met Bob Creeley, Gary Snyder, Robert Sward, Barney Childs, Paul Malanga, Drummond Hadley, Diana Hadley, George Bowering and so many others. We talked about poetry, especially about the poetry that rooted itself in Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Charles Olson--the New American Poetry as anthologized by Donald Allen. Keith was a role model. He always had at his side his notebook where he was working on his poems. I listened to Keith’s early work in manuscript and saw him rejoice when Gino Sky and Drew Wagnon, editors of the mimeographed little magazine Wild Dog, decided to publish a poem, his first publication. I remember Keith being enthralled with Jack Spicer’s work. He borrowed books and typed them up, duplicating the format of the book and creating his own librito, doing a mockup of the cover. The practice he told me was to feel the words and to learn how and why Spicer broke his lines the way he did. He typed other poems and books he admired. He was obsessed with his writing, and his obsession was contagious. He was, like for so many of us, a role model of what a poet is. It was a wonderful time, and I learned so much, being in that community which so much created by the presence of Keith and Heloise. In the 70s, when Jerome Rothenberg began to publish his anthologies and theorizing about the life of poetry, I knew immediately what he was talking about. It made perfect sense.

That was over 40 years ago now. So much has happened. Keith and Heloise, with their children--Kathy, Kristin, Kevin and Kerrin (aka Turtle)--moved their household and their menagerie of dogs and cats and yes friends to Las Cruces. Keith became an important teacher of poetry at New Mexico State and his presence there attracted other poets. Las Cruces became an outpost of the New American poetics, and Keith’s poetry became a cornerstone of contemporary New Mexico and southwestern poetry. Indeed, the poetry of our nation. We have all benefited in our own ways from the work he has done, the way his life of poems evolved and fed the beast. And during all of that time the Wilson household has continued to be a center of poetry. Many hours I have sat around that dining table on Locust and talked and laughed and argued and hooted about people and ideas and poems and family and about sorrow. The core of those hours and days was always poems. For me I cannot separate Keith and his poems from that kitchen table; I cannot separate Keith and his poems from the community of poetry that he and Heloise have fostered in their lives. I would not be standing here without the presence of Keith and Heloise in my life. This is the Paradise of Poets. The continuous now of poetry survives. Like Keith we write ours poems in the flow of this unending history. We write in the margins of our culture, we are ignored, but that is okay somehow. Our work somehow survives in the language, in the way the culture experiences the world. And we are doing what we love to do.


■ ■ ■


The Tribute to Keith was a wonderful event emceed by the poet Larry Goodell. This event followed one held earlier in the year in Las Cruces and hosted by the Sin Fronteras Reading Series. Both were emotionally exhausting, but quite different, probably because the Duende event was held in the nice open air ramada of the Anazazi Winery in Placitas. People mostly came from Albuquerque, Las Cruces, Santa Fe, El Paso and Tucson. Heloise Wilson, Keith’s wife of all these years, read a series of poems that Keith had dedicated to their children (Kristin, Kevin and Kerrin were present, along with three grandchildren). She was followed by a great group of poets and friends and family, all telling stories and reading their favorite Keith Wilson poems—poets Leo Romero, E.A. Tony Mares, David Johnson, Karen McKinnon, Wayne Crawford, Dick Thomas, Gary Brower, Larry Goodell, JB Bryan, son Kevin Wilson and daughter Kristin Wilson, ecologist Peter Warshall and others I may have (forgive me) forgotten. After it was over Keith seemed stunned and in a strange but exhausted ecstasy. Readers and listeners, once done, felt likewise. Friends were crying openly and hugging each other. The community of poets and poetry and art can sometimes be so wonderful. Luckily, Larry and Lenore hosted a huge potluck dinner. Their house was crowded with people and kids. The dogs wagged their tails, the fish swam in the pond, the chickens stayed in their coop, the sun was shining bright, the food was delicious and too much, likewise the wine and the beer. My gosh.

The Duende Poetry Series is old school 1960s stuff organized by survivors of those times—Larry and Lenore Goodell, JB and Cirrelda Bryan, Gary Brower and others who throw in their support from time to time. With a grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation, they have hosted a variety of events, including a memorial reading for Bob Creeley (he had lived in Placitas back in the day when he was teaching at UNM), Acoma poet Simon Ortiz reading with his two daughters Rainy and Sara Marie, a performance by the great old time folk fusion Bayou Seco band (aka Jeannie McLearie and Ken Keppler plus all their assorted friends along with a cornucopia of instruments), and others.


■ ■ ■


A note about this tribute I wrote for Keith: So much of what I do (especially my poetry and tasks at hand like this tribute) seems to me like luck (good, bad or indifferent) mixed with improvisation. Or vice versa. JB and Larry had asked me a month or so ago to do something to introduce Keith and so I've been thinking about it. I had been thinking about Jerome Rothenberg's anthologies, his sense of the ongoing body of poetry as a living being. I've always loved his work, especially his and George Quasha's anthology, America, A Prophecy, the first and probably only anthology I read from beginning to end like one reads a novel, so I had been looking for my beatup copy of the book to re-read the introduction. (I first met Rothenberg at Keith and Heloise's house after a wonderful reading at NMSU in Las Cruces--his reading of the poem "All the world needs is a 5-cent cigar" was an important event for me, helped me look differently about the way I go about poetry.) Then on the Ron Silliman blog I saw the link to the discussion of Jerry's poem "A Paradise of Poets"--hosted by Al Filreis and featuring poets Randall Couch, Bob Holman and Jessica Lowenthal--at the Poetry Foundation website. Then soon afterward Jerry sent out an email announcing his new blog, so I simply riffed off that stuff. That's how poetry works, I think. At least for me. That's what Rothenberg has been saying all of these years.

In the next week or so I'll have more about Keith and his work. Hopefully, Joe Somoza will allow me to publish his introduction to the first tribute for Keith held in Las Cruces. His was more biographical, especially in discussing how Keith developed a poetics fit to the occasion of his own voice. I also have a couple of nice videos of Larry reading poems. Stay tuned.

Stop Talking

(Note: If you’re not interested in Zen Buddhism and its practice in America, then you might as well skip over this entry. I got the title for this post at the Book Soup Bookstore on Sunset Blvd. I was buying a book for my journey home, and a little stack of elegant cards were right next to the cash register. “Stop Talking,” one said simply and plainly. Yeah, I thought, that’s what I want to say.)

This last weekend Johnny Byrd and I were in Los Angeles for the big Book Expo. Saturday Johnny let me have the morning off. I drove to Santa Monica to sit with Brad Warner and his sangha. I love Brad’s books--Hard Core Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up. They’ve both been important to my own practice, and I look forward to his third which he says should be out by Xmas. Brad in his writing and his dharma talks speaks in an young iconoclastic punked-up American lingo that’s refreshing. He received transmission from Gudo Wafu Nishijima, and like his teacher he’s a Dogen scholar. (A nice portrait of Dogen below. I snatched it from wikipedia, but I couldn't find any information about it.) Brad's writing is wise and he writes a fun read. His sangha meets at 627 Hill Street, a few blocks from the beach, in a small green house that they rent from the church next door. It’s rich with zabutons and zafus and empty of furniture and ready for non-action. I was rushing because I didn’t want to be late. Not to worry. Brad’s Sangha is the most laid back of the laid back. I should have expected that, no? Brad and his folks (mostly musicians, it seemed) talked about music and making music while we waited for the last few members to straggle in barefoot for Saturday morning zazen. The gist of the conversation was music, hip and witty and iconoclastic. As the time passed, the chatter got old and I got antsy. I didn’t know or much care what they were talking about. I had come to sit and to listen to a dharma talk.

My limited experience has showed me that Zen meditation groups are all different one from the other. Zensters are always talking about “American Zen”--what is it? Maybe American Zen is about diversity. Like Pentecostal churches. Whoever starts a Sangha, defines a Sangha. Time and our history will certainly show us who we are, so perhaps documenting our experiences is a good thing. Like Hansel and Gretel, leaving a trail to come home by.

The nicest thing about the Hill Street Group was I was easily the oldest person there. By 15 years at least (I’m 66). I read somewhere that, in analyzing age demographics of Zen in America, the average practitioner is getting old. So many of us are the children of the 50s and 60s, the generation of reading too much Kerouac and Gary Snyder and D.T. Suzuki and Allen Watts and lusting after enlightenment like it was another drug to be gulped down. But not on Hill Street. The Zensters that morning were mostly in their 20s and 30s, four men in their 40s (including Brad), and Grace a nice take-charge woman maybe a little bit older. A very young sangha it seemed. But I had expected the youngish nature of the sangha. Brad, who is is in his early 40s, is an ex-punk rocker and that experience and Japanese horror movies (that’s how he earned his living in Japan) are the metaphors and language through which he writes his books. Hip and cool. Good for a paragraph or so in Malcolm Gladwell’s next book. Total count was 13 or 14 people including me. Four were women, Grace and three others. That was the Sangha’s demographics--young, 30% women, 85% white, mostly hip and middle-class, electronic-punk-&/or-alternative-rock musically inclined. And, except for the women (thank God for women in a zendo), they talked a lot.

Grace seemed happiest to see me, the old fart with the goofy hat walking through the front door. Maybe it was because I am older, but I think really it was because she is just a very nice person. Zen does that to you somehow. It's not a promise or anything. It just happens. I guess other disciplines can make the same statement. Grace was in charge of the altar--a small wooden table with a tiny Buddha, a bowl with sand for the incense sticks and a beautiful lush pale-purplish orchid. The service was bare-bone too. After the stragglers had all wandered in and the musicspeak evaporated, Brad gave a short introduction of sitting for me and another man who had never sat with them before--a bow to your zafu, a bow to the sangha and then meditation. A 30 minute sit staring at the wall, a 10-minute kinhin (walking meditation) and a 30 minute sit. No sutra sheets, no Heart Sutra in English or Japanese, no Three Treasures, no chanting at all. Brad simply bowed to the altar, lit the incense and rang the smallish and frugal bell--bong, bong, bong.

The meditation was great. My small piece of the wall was off-white plaster and decorated with a window. At least a corner of a window. White enamel. A white curtain that fluttered in the little bit of ocean breeze. Outside green shiny leaves of some kind of lush California bush. Nice smells. Car sounds. Every once in a while some chatter from down on the big street. I very much appreciated sitting in that room with those people. It was good and strong. And then I got lost in the sitting. Sweet. I liked the 30 minute sits. At our small El Paso sangha and at the Las Cruces Zen Center the meditation period is somewhere between 20 and 25 minutes. When I’m in charge I worry that longer periods will be too much. People won’t want to come back. But of course very few ever do anyway. I shouldn’t worry. Zen is like that. If you don’t want to sit and be silent, you shouldn’t be coming anyway.

When we were done, Brad, Grace and another man who was wearing a black t-shirt with the ironic statement “Tu Eres un Pendejo /You are a good friend” (not a good t-shirt to wear in El Paso), went off to get us tea and crackers. While we waited, the chatter started up again. Punk music. Electronic music. Alternative music. Hip and cool spiced with a bit of cynicism. Very attached to their non-attachment. Too much. I was startled. Then a bit disgruntled. I enjoy so much the quiet time after sitting. I stretch and look around and feel the room and try to remember what the hell I’m doing sitting on a zafu in the first place. But it seemed that a few of the young men in the the Hill Street Sangha came for the talk and the sitting was a preparation for the talking. I read a book once--SIT DOWN AND SHUT-UP! Who wrote that book? Oh, yeah, Brad did.

Brad, tell them to sit down and shut up.

The tea and cookies were served with little or no ceremony. No bowing, no formalities--take a cracker and hold your cup out for the hot tea. And after a few sips Brad started to talk. He welcomed me and the other newcomer. The conversation wandered to this and that before settling on the question of what Brad was to do about teaching elsewhere. One guy in the corner stretched out on the floor. More tea was poured. Seems another punk guru Noah Levine, the author of Dharma Punx, had asked Brad to speak at his zendo on a regular base. Seems he gets tons of people. Brad not so many. Like today, only 13, counting the migrating old fart. We all commiserated that people won’t go out of their way to be Buddhists. The priest needs to be on the doorstep: otherwise, The Eight-fold Noble Path and all the enlightenment candy can wait. Being a loudmouth myself, I tossed in a couple of pennies about my growing up. Brad talks about this question on his own blog in a post called Spiritual Schwag. To be honest, I didn’t care what Brad was deciding. I only get to L.A. once or twice a year. So it's his business. I live in El Paso. I listened for a while but my work was calling. I said thank you, bowed and slipped out the front door. The ocean coolness felt so good on my skin, and the greenery is so beautiful. I missed El Paso, the few people I sit with.

So, was my trip to the Hill Street Sangha worth it? Very much so. The sitting was great. It’s hard to sit anywhere for an hour on a business trip. And I got to think about my own practice. I can do without the robes and Japanese names (mine is Hen shin) and much of the ritual. I like the silence, the sitting and being silent with others. It's very special. And I very much missed the chanting that we do in our small sangha (the Heart Sutra, the Three Refuges, the Four Great Vows). The repetition of those words is a meditation. Yes, many times I am asleep to their meaning, but other times, unexpectedly, they can reverberate deep inside me. Maybe I’m a Zen prude, but I don’t think I’m a Zen prude. Maybe being raised up in Memphis on Little Richard and James Brown made me different from these guys being raised up on punk rock in California or Cleveland. I don’t know. But I do take seriously the silence of a zendo. It’s certainly more important than taking off your shoes and socks and bowing back and forth like a bird on a wire.

I enjoy all of it. The laid back dharma, the formal dharma. It’s a good exercise. But if you want to talk, fine. Go outside and talk. Just let me sit down. I promise you--I’ll shut up.

▲

My friend JB Bryan’s poem “PRACTICE” is appropriate here. His publishing company, La Alameda Press, did a wonderful broadside of the poem which hangs over my desk, thanks to my wife and Luis Villegas, the fine arts handyman who is our friend.

PRACTICE

a body such as this body
tosses back its antlers &
spins them like a propeller

skull finally work
iris, planet, sun
I won’t spend a dime

Great Faith
Great Doubt
Great Effort

O the universe has a wit
easily tasted in green leaves
boiled with water

what’s the bloodstream?
but a river of huge loves &
thunderous flowers of combustion!

be sure to practice everyday

Bo Diddley done had a farm

Johnny Byrd and I were in Los Angeles over the weekend for the Book Expo of America (aka BEA). I’ll write about that craziness later. Per usual, we didn’t try to get a hotel room until late, but I pricelined.com a decent rate at the West Hollywood Hyatt Hotel. It’s smackdab in the middle of Sunset Strip. Aka Sodom and Gomorrah, as Johnny said. It’s a decent place, the noise factor is not bad and the price wss right. Besides, they put us on the 11th floor with a window overlooking Sunset and downtown L.A.--a very good place to think about America.

Down the street is Mel’s Drive-In Restaurant, a retro-50s place where every morning Johnny and I ate our breakfast. Mel’s has good food and a wonderful jukebox. Every morning I got swamped with memories of the music of my Memphis growing up. I even wrote the prose poem (not to worry, it’s still in draft) that I’m pasting below. Friday morning, our first morning for the BEA, the jukebox played Bo Diddley’s “I’m a Man,” along with some James Brown and Gene Chandler’s “The Duke of Earl.” Four mornings I listened to that kind of music while I sopped my toast and potatoes in the gooey yellows of my over-easy eggs. Listening to those old songs made me start remembering how that music changed my growing up. So by Monday morning I was ready for the news--Bo Diddley had bought his ticket to the other side.



I saw Bo Diddley perform twice in Memphis, once at the legendary Clear Pool Inn and later, in 1957 or 58, at the Armory on Central Avenue. Both times I was with my friend Jimmy Walker. We had our ritual, just like Bo Diddley. We started off slow and listened and drank whatever booze we had at hand and by 11pm when the band was really getting hot, Bo Diddley banging away at his bizarre square guitar and singing about Bo Diddley having a farm or being a man, we would be pretty well soused and dancing and sweaty. We climbed on the stage and danced with him and his band. Others followed us up. Even a few girls, which was strange for back then. The band was cool with it, they wanted the crowds to go nuts. And we did. We danced until Bo Diddley sent us home with the peculiar anthem of our adolescence:

Oh, when the saints…
Oh, when the saints…

Oh, when the saints go marching in
Oh, when the saints go marching in
Lord, how I want to be in that number
When the saints go marching in

▲

Baby, want you drive my car?
Baby, I’m gonna be a star…

Monday morning, June 2 2008, and I was at Mel’s Diner on the Sunset Strip for breakfast. Two eggs over easy, toast and potatoes, coffee, 1950s retro. The jukebox played Earth Angel, Earth Angel, will you be mine? It was a summertime backyard Friday night party. A box with a big stack of 45 rpm records was dangling at the end of a long extension cord. A pretty girl in a white shirt and pink shorts sat next to it, guarding the music from her parents. I was dancing with Julie somebody. We were 14 years old together. I had at least two JAX beers in my belly. Jimmy and I had stashed some more in the front yard bushes. Julie was pressing up against my body, her thighs leaning into mine. Surely she knew. The parents were watching. They didn’t like the music, and they didn’t like us kids dancing like this. They worried that we had broken the code. We were going places they didn’t want us to go. The huge Memphis trees were black holes in that darkness. The lightning bugs, the lightning bugs—the chemicals had not eradicated them yet. And the stars and surely some kind of moon. I was sweating and happy. We were all white kids but Bo Diddley and Little Richard and James Brown were preaching the gospel. Why would I want to go to Korea? Why would I want to go to Vietnam? Now it was the Beatles on the jukebox. That’s another story. My coffee was done, the bill was $6.45 and my plane was leaving for El Paso at 2pm.

My darling dear, I will love you until the end of time.

▲
--in memory of Bo Diddley who died yesterday

Art Lewis, Sax Player en la frontera

This morning on El Paso’s online magazine newspapertree.com, I read Richard Baron’s profile of our local (I use the word “local” in the WCW sense, not the pejorative sense that it too often means in the El Paso parlance) saxophone great Art Lewis. Art is a very wise man, a wonderful showman on the sax, and a gritty blues singer, even as old man like me still sexy belting out “Baby, I’m gonna rock you, oh, I’m going to rock you all night long.” Actually, a few years ago Art moved back to his hometown Houston a few years ago to care for his mother and to take care of some of his own health issues. He was a fixture in the music scene here, and he still once a year returns for the "Art Lewis Birthday Jam” organized at random times by his good friend Hector Montes. He’ll be in town this weekend, tonight at the Camino Real for the Jam proper and Sunday night at Kiki’s up on Piedras Street, one of his old venues.

[Note: Richard Baron is a photographer and essayist, with an emphasis on documenting arts and culture. He now lives in Albuquerque. The photo of Art is of course Richard's.]

Please read Richard’s profile of Art. It’s important reading if you’re interested in the soul of El Paso. Indeed, if you’re interested in the fronterizo spirit. And while you’re at it, read the entire selection of Richard’s profiles that are collected on Newspaper Tree. Richard’s idea was to capture the foundation of the El Paso arts and culture scene by profiling a number of its citizens, folks who may not receive a lot of publicity but whose presence really reflects the integrity of the fronterizo imagination. These profiles are important stuff, I promise you. I especially recommend the profile of Ed Patrycus.

Art moved to El Paso in the late 50s or early 60s—I was never sure when. But I do know that Art Lewis quotations litter my journals for the last ten or so years. He is an important part of my El Paso imagination, the way I’ve come to love this peculiar place that seems so much in the eye of the storm these days. In fact, after the 9/11 al-Qaeda attacks the U.S., I wrote a long poem trying to understand bin Laden and that whole chaos. Art Lewis served as a guide for me, a Virgil of sorts, playing his magical sax. Here’s a section from that poem, “The Soul of Osama bin Laden,” that’s in my book White Panties, Dead Friends and Other Bits & Pieces of Love:

Art Lewis walked in. Tall, lanky and very black. He was wearing a black suit and a black shirt and shiny black shoes and a very nice black porkpie hat. Art is growing old, but nobody ever asks him how old. Maybe that’s because he is a wise man. His wisdom is rooted in music. Every day of his life Art Lewis steps into the river of his life and prays into his jazz saxophone. His sacred horn blows away the stifling air of fundamentalism. Right and wrong, innocence and guilt are notes in the same piece of music. Improvisation as a devout way of life. It’s his spiritual practice.

Maggie brought Art Lewis a cup of green tea. Art, she said with a smile on her freckled face, you smell like marijuana, you better be careful. Art laughed, and gold glistened inside his mouth.

Art was wearing a long necklace of wide silver links and turquoise scattered here and there like stars. A cheap necklace really—not real silver, not real turquoise—but it was handsome hanging around Art’s black neck. Art, I asked, where did you get that handsome necklace? Oh, he said, a wino in the alley outside the Cincinnati Street Bar gave it to me. The guy was an Indian from some place called Acoma. He wanted me to play him some blues. So I played him some alley blues, and he gave me the necklace.

Paul Blackburn

Ron Silliman’s May 15 blog celebrates the work of Paul Blackburn and makes the following announcement: “The Paul Blackburn page at the Electronic Poetry Center has gone live. Jack Krick’s months of effort have finally born fruit. I’m here to tell you it’s a major event.” (Note: R.B. Kitaj did the portrait of Paul.)

I agree and I wholeheartedly recommend that you visit both Ron’s blog and the EPC page. Good stuff there. Paul’s work has too long been ignored. I was so happy to read the news that I wrote the following two comments and posted them on the Silliman blogspot.

▪

Oh, this makes me so happy to read this. Tears in my eyes even. Paul, more than anybody else (well, along with the composer Barney Childs) was my mentor, the way he spoke and lived his poetry. I met him in 1964 at the Aspen Writers Workshop. Robert Vas Dias was the director but Toby Olson was the man responsible most for bringing Paul. Paul took to my work and understood my hesitancy and nervousness and befriended me (Toby too for that matter). Simply accepted me and stayed close to me. I was honored but too young to realize I was honored. In 1967 he was on some sort of government-funded journey through the south visiting African American colleges, and he stayed with Lee and me at our house in Memphis when he was reading and leading workshops at Lemoyne-Owen College. After several days in Memphis, Lee and I drove him to Nashville and visited Fisk University with him. I remember him talking about poetry and since we had beans and hot dogs for dinner, every once in a while, leaning over and raising one cheek or the other (away from the person he was talking to) to fart. Not missing a beat in the conversation. He spoke about visiting Pound in Venice and he read poems and played tapes of live readings from New York City. I remember especially Joel Oppenheimer’s “Sirventes on a sad occurrence.” It was a remarkable reading of a great and important poem. I raved about the reading. Paul smiled and said there were only three people in the audience, him and two others. But also Ray Bremser was on those tapes, Ed Sanders, Diane DiPrima, others. I was dumbfounded and delighted, a pure poetry high. During that visit Paul wrote a poem for Lee, something like “A Short Riotous Poem for Lee Merrill Byrd” that’s in the Collected. He wrote that poem sitting at our table. Beautiful spring flowers sat in front of him. Paul was writing in his thick journal. He asked Lee, “What kind of flowers are these?” Lee said, “The 39-cent kind.” And that’s the line in the poem. It was a lesson in poetics I never forgot. The improvisation, the being there, the careful listening and paying close attention to what is in front of you and letting the poem happen. [See note at end.] That week he received his first two copies The Cities. He gave us one and dedicated it to us with his fat pen. That book is one of my treasures. Somewhere I have tapes Paul used to send to us, him reading his poems. I copied them for Edie Jarolim, but I need to find them to send to the Electronic Poetry Center. Over the years, Paul kept up with us and in Colorado he visited us, along with Joan and their baby Carlos. He never forgot his friendship. He introduced me to the bigger world of poetry. I miss him greatly in my heart. Thanks greatly for reminding me. And many thanks to Jack Krick and the Electronic Poetry Center. I also will speak up for a paperback of the Collected.

▪

10-27-08--Whoops!

1. In my first printing of this entry, I was so excited to write something down I got my dates all wrong, and so I've made corrections. Four years later we were living in South Fork, CO. I knew he was sick. We had written back and forth and he had told us about the cancer in his throat, but then Toby called and told me Paul was dying and if I wanted to talk to say goodbye I better do it quick. Now 30-something years later I'm very unsure what happened. Part of me remembers me calling him and weeping and telling him goodbye. Another part of me remembers me never never making the call. I don't know. I was 29. Thinking about Paul brought up all sorts of stuff in my head.

2. Turns out that the poem “A Short Riotous Poem for Lee Merrill Byrd” doesn't have that line "the 39-cent kind." Well, I guess that could be embarrassing, but still it's a wonderful story. And I think that line is in some poem of Paul's. I need to go do some researching. Oh well.

JB Bryan

For no other reason except it’s spring and my yellow columbines are still sprouting in the backyard (actually, I started this 2 weeks ago and it's time to deadhead the columbines, poor things, the viscious hot summer coming) and the spring winds are leaving me and El Paso alone, I want to celebrate my friend Jeff Bryan, aka JB. This picture of him is in front of his adobe teahouse that he built mostly by himself. It’s sits outside his studio in Placitas, NM. Below is a picture of JB as he guides me through a tea ceremony inside the teahouse. A wonderful occasion. JB told me the history of the tea ceremony (the hero--venerable what's-his-name--at the end of a story falls on his sword, doing the honorable thing because he has offended the Emperor), he explained all of his implements that he bought here and there and he of course he made me a delicious cup of tea.

Not a lot of people away from Albuquerque know about JB. He seems to like it that way. He basks in his peculiar contented curmudgeonly goofy randomly-carnivorous Buddhist exile, extolling the blessings of the local arts and local groceries, the native flora and fauna, sometimes conked out on a good glass of wine, while happy to be saving us all. He’s a fine poet and fine abstract Zen painter; and he, with his wife the artist Cirrelda Bryan, operate their small mostly-poetry publishing company La Alameda Press. That’s with their left foot. You can't make a living publishing poetry books, for God's sake. So with their remaining appendages and time, JB and Cirrelda cobble together their living almost magically. JB is a delightful book designer. His books--whether for La Alameda Press, Tres Chicas Press or our Cinco Puntos Press--all have a definite feel and presence, their own JB personality, like Black Sparrow books did back in the day when Barbara Martin was slinging type alongside her hubby John. Most of this is done from their funky adobe house in the NW of the Albuquerque, just off Alameda Avenue, hence the name of the press. The place is immersed in art and books (there's always delightful small books of poems next to the toilet) and animals and computers and projects of every sort and their wonderful daughter the percussionist Cirrelda Beth, aka CB.

For the last several years, every time I talk to JB he is quitting the publishing business. Why shouldn’t he? It’s a pain in the ass. But JB doesn’t seem to listen to himself because La Alameda Press keeps putting out its quirky list of books, most of them poetry books which are doomed to financial failure. Among the recent is an important edition of Home Among the Swinging Stars: The Collected Poems of Jaime de Angulo, edited by the world-wandering German poet Stefan Hyner, poetry that was elemental to the poetics of Snyder, Kerouac and Blackburn. La Alameda also did Joanne Kyger’s AGAIN: Poems 1989-2000 (Jeff also designed Kyger's collected About Now for the National Poetry Foundation) and my particular favorites Lisa Gill’s Red as a Lotus: Letters to a Dead Trappist and Joe Somoza’s Cityzen which I’ve talked about before. Jeff also is a collaborator and active participant in the city’s poetry scene, and he’s a fellow Zenster. He and his cohorts make up the Three Stones Sitting Group and every Wednesday night they sit staring at the wall at the Friends Center near downtown Albuquerque.

Below the photo of JB and me enjoying our tea, I'd like to paste his long rambling ranting manifesto "Aesthetics" about the meaning of living the life and being a poet and a painter and all that other good stuff, but it's too long and it's scattered all over the page. Just too much work for a distracted blogger. Hopefully, he'll put the damn thing in a broadside and try to sell it although in the end he'll give away like he always does. But instead I'll paste in a poem that I cherry-picked from the Santa Fe Poetry Broadside. Oh, I love his poetry. Enjoy JB in his many hats. Buy his books and support La Alameda Press. Small press ventures like his are so rare these days, so vital.

Thirsty for Greywater

1.

I have a broom, my wife has a broom,
our daughter has a broom--
that's because we're slobs.
I have a dishrag, my wife wields the shovel,
our daughter--a measuring cup,
that's because we're busy.

Squash in the compost,
tossed-out seeds start a wild spread.
Old boards stacked in careful piles,
needlenose tin snips and baling wire
turn broken sticks into trellis and gate.
Sump-pump sends septic water onto
ornamental wetlands experiment.
Washing machine hose
snakes alongside the house,
lathers iris, feeds the yarrow.
I catch dishspill in tub and pail,
toss beneath the red plum.
Inside every drip, our black ink
slides deliberately below the surface.

2.

My version of utopia?
Laze about the backyard in my rumpled Stetson,
loud Kahanamoku Hawaiian shirt,
peruse epazoté, tend volunteer salvia--
ignore every skewed expectation.
I wave at a robin with my left hand,
then measure a board with a length of my saw.
Upright like the hollyhocks,
I shuffle around humming
a Thelonious Monk tune--
can't quite get how the intervals work,
can't get rid of it though.
The last section of drainpipe is a serpent's tail.
Screwdriver blade is creative thought.
Someone invented boiled linseed oil
to keep paint viscous and painters live by it.
I've ended up in this part of town on purpose.
What's broken is at least paid for.
Please O water table
float high to every root
and guide my reckless, ignorant trespass!

3.

Solid as a beast,
a loop of grapestalk wraps upon itself,
tendril upon tendril upon light,
leaves so thick as to make a fence.
Full tilt kale & lettuce & spinach,
A crow tip top the old catalpa tree,
and one talking back that talk!
Five tons of bee buzz
in the space above the raspberry jelly!
My wife's laundry takes care of the locust tree
& two miscanthus along the road.
If I think about society for too long
I begin to itch all over.
I'm a prisoner of envy.
I wish I'd invented the manila folder!
We should write what we notice
& to whatever notices us back.
I put down the clippers.
As light fades to disappear,
skin turns the color of eggplant.
Last night, a long shout of stars
flooded the Mother Ditch.

Border Books

Last month I blogged Bad Business on the Border about the US/Mexico border, El Paso and Juarez in particular. This is an appendix to that piece because I'm thinking readers from elsewhere might want to know more about this place. I’m a poet, so my understanding comes through story and metaphor and mythos, not by statistics and theory. That said, if you’re interested in reading well-written books about El Paso, the drug trade along the border and the Mexican Diaspora, I would recommend the following:

Sam Quinones' two collections of essays about the migration of Mexicans to the U.S., True Tales from Another Mexico and Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream. Sam doesn’t talk about the Mexican diaspora as “immigration,” which infers a political situation with a governmental solution, but as “migration,” which is an anthropologic term inferring organic movement for specific reasons (e.g. climate change, famine, disease, poverty, etcetera). This may seem like a minor point, but it’s not. It allows for a much more in depth understanding of what we are witnessing. Next, Sam doesn’t write about statistics, he writes about people. And he uses these people’s stories to understand certain geographies and circumstances and cultures. His two pieces on Juárez are brilliant. His piece in True Tales, although written in 1999, still is the most insightful piece about the murdered women. He shows how the vacuum of law enforcement and city services has created an environment of violence that allows such tragedy to occur. And in Delfino’s Dream his piece documenting the black velvet painting craze that put Juárez on the map should become a definite part of our history.

Next is Charles Bowden’s Down by the River: Drugs, Murder, Money and Family. Chuck has a love/hate relationship with El Paso and Juárez. He loves it for its down-home realism and grainy streetwise truth, but he hates to see how the drug industry and the U.S. militarization are tearing at the fabric of relationship of these two cities and their two-million people. Further, the inattention that U.S. media, in particular, the El Paso Times, gives to the on-going terrible dilemmas in our sister city infuriates him. The 1995 unresolved murder of Lionel Bruno Jordan (the brother of DEA bigwig Phil Jordan) in the Bassett Center parking lot struck a match in Bowden’s imagination. He spent years coming to El Paso and Juárez to write this book. Bowden's prose gives us a revelation of the drug world that is the underside of our culture here on the border, but it also reveals much of our culture here, our cross-border relationships, that is being destroyed by the militarization, plus the narco and immigrante wars. Chuck’s book Juarez, A Laboratory of the Future, along with an article in Harper’s, first brought national attention to the terrible tragedy of young women being murdered in Juárez. The book also made famous a loose collective of photographers (aka “street shooters”) who were documenting the violence in their city. The collective splintered as organic arts communities do, but one photographer in particular, Julian Cardona, continues to document the ordeals of living just south of the border.

Our own Cinco Puntos Press has also published a number of books that are relevant to these issues:

Gary Cartwright’s Dirty Dealing describes in page-turning prose the history of El Paso’s Chagra family and the almost romantic beginnings of the drug trade along the border. This book remains a best seller in El Paso after all these years. And the anthology of essay Puro Border: Dispatches, Snapshots and Grafitti from the U.S./Mexico Border. The anthology has essays by Debbie Nathan, Charles Bowden, Sam Quinones (his piece about the murdered women), David Romo, Louie Gilot, Cecilia Balli and many others. In the interest of full disclosure: these last two books were published by Cinco Puntos Press, which is our family’s publishing company. Indeed, my son John and I, along with Tijuana novelist Luis Humberto Crostwaite, edited Puro Border.

These are all good and interesting books, very relevant to what's going on today. A man works for us from time to time, Gabriel. An American citizen, he lives in Juarez with his Mexican wife and two sons (one born on this side) for a web of stupid bureaucratic reasons. He crosses over to work on this side. This morning he was telling me about the 2000 federal troops that Calderon has sent to Juarez to curb the narco violence. He says the troops bring their own form of violence. According to Gabriel, the troops are going into homes for searches and when they leave they take with them money and jewelry and televisions. Meanwhile, the violence and murders continue, although not to the extent that it was before the troops came.

The Human Brain: So Who Are We?

Mike LaTorra, aka Gozen, is a Zen priest and abbott at the Las Cruces Zen Center where I used to sit most Sundays. Recently he sent out on the LCZC's list service the text and video link to Jill Bolte Taylor's lecture which is on the TED website. At the link, you can read and copy the text of her talk, but I highly recommend that you watch the 18 minute video. It's a most remarkable lecture--scientific very interesting, witty and wise.

Ms. Taylor, a neuroanatomist at Harvard, experienced a stroke on the left side of her brain, and because of her expertise she was able to witness the separation of her right and left brain lobes and to understand precisely how they each see the world. The talk is eight-plus years after the stroke, the time it took for her to fully recover. She became, in her words, in those few hours before help arrived like a new born baby in a woman's body. She had no language, no skills, no baggage of her 37 years on the planet. Yet, it was euphoria, a leap into what she called nirvana. And she realized during the experience that was soon to be dead. Luckily for us, this last transition didn't happen. She awoke finally in a hospital, startled to be alive. Her talk brings up incredible questions for me as a citizen of all the different communities where I hang my hat, for my work as a poet and writer and for my practice as a Zen Buddhist, those nagging spiritual or religious (I hate both those words, so much baggage) interests I carry around in my heart.



She says toward the end of her talk--

So who are we? We are the life force power of the universe, with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds. And we have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world. Right here right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere where we are -- I am -- the life force power of the universe, and the life force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form. At one with all that is. Or I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere. where I become a single individual, a solid, separate from the flow, separate from you. I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, intellectual, neuroanatomist. These are the “we” inside of me.

Coincidentally, Lee and I on a roadtrip back and forth to Dallas were listening to an audible telling of War and Peace (those 1300 miles weren't nearly enough for that huge book). Tolstoi describes Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who when almost fatally wounded on the battlefield having an almost identical experience as the one Ms. Taylor describes. And we've all read similar statements from mystics and practitioners of various spiritual disciplines and religions. Hell, I'll cut off the language machine in my head and go eat dinner now.

Thank you, Jill Bolte Taylor.
And Peace.

Blondie's on Calle Muerto

Blondie's is a bar on the corner of Myrtle and Cotton on the edge of downtown El Paso, about seven or eight blocks from where Cinco Puntos has it's offices. Blondie's is an old-fashioned Mexican bar. Probably best, if you're a gavacho, to go in Blondie's with a Chicano friend. Or at least know how to speak Spanish. The sign is hand-painted, and it possesses that essence of fronterizo aesthetics, what Chicanos call "rasquache," where too much is never enough. In the Cinco Puntos anthology Puro Border we did a whole section on rasquache. But I don't want to get into a long riff about rasquache right now. I just wanted to put this picture on the blog. I love this picture.
And to add a note about Myrtle Avenue. It's known by los viejos in the neighborhood as Calle Muerto. Death Street. Jesus, I thought, what a gruesome name. I asked a friend of mine, Why is Myrtle called Calle Muerto? He laughed at me. "Because we couldn't say 'Myrtle,' that's why."

Hotei and my brother Bill

Saturday I woke up with vertigo and during that ordeal I remembered this photo. There, among my books, is my Zenster altar, and peeking out between the little statue of Hotei (aka, “the Laughing Buddha’) and the Three Stones is my big brother Bill. He died in 1996. A candle is burning.

Vertigo is a horrible experience. Lee has gone through this several times, I’ve done it once, so I was lucky to have some memory and a guide. Still, spinning around, unable to catch hold and unsure, you realize how fragile you are. How mortal. My body became queasy, I sweated and my skin, Lee said, was clammy and cold. The doctors say that vertigo is a malfunction of the inner ear, that bony mechanism that looks like a snail and somehow keeps us in balance. I don’t know what caused it. Perhaps a drug that I’m taking for my prostate. Or Friday afternoon I went to the chiropractor because my neck is stiff. Maybe something in the guy’s rather rough adjustment jiggled the tiny apparatus. All I know is first when I woke up there was a strange sensation in my head, like my brain was being bathed in electricity, and then the world began spinning. I started sweating, and I got clammy and cold. I wanted to lie down, but lying down made everything worse. I wanted to throw up. My only bit of relief was to sit hunched over on the edge of my bed and wait. After a while I had enough energy to go get the paper and read it. Davidson had beat Wisconsin, Stephan Curry, who looks like he might be 15, had scored 30. I decided to go outside to my office to meditate. I walked slowly. The spring air was so beautiful, the yellow columbines are blooming, the trees are leafing. I was happy to see these things. I lit my candle and turned to go sit and I got dizzy again. So dizzy that I curled up on the tile floor. The cold felt good, but the lying down made me nauseous. A few minutes and I found enough strength to get up go back inside. I stumbled into the bedroom and sat down on the bed, sitting straight enough I hoped to allow me to exorcise the vertigo out of my body. No such luck. I called Lee and she brought me water. She also brought a garbage can. Lucky she did because I started vomiting. I didn’t quit until my belly was cleaned out. Uggh. All through this ordeal I thought about dying. Maybe this wasn’t dying, but it could be like dying. I also remembered the photograph and thought about writing this piece. That’s how I am a poet, I guess. A couple of hours later I could move around. By the end of the day I felt strong enough to work some in the yard. Lee and I took a short walk. It was beautiful walking and talking and holding her hand.

Every morning I chant and meditate. This is my ritual. My habit. It takes about 30 minutes. When the bell sounds and my meditation period is over, I look to my left and I see my altar and outside the window is where we live. If the desert wind is blowing, like it is now, a wind chime will be ringing. The story about Hotei is that he carries a big sack on his back and gives out little gifts of food and sweets, especially to kids. Sort of a Santa Claus. The Zen Flesh Zen Bones collection says that once upon a time a Zen master came along and asked Hotei how is the Buddha realized? Hotei dropped his sack of goodies and sat in his meditation posture. He said not a word. This is what he’s doing on my altar. Then the master asked him, “Well, how do you actualize Zen?” And Hotei picked up his sack, bowed to his questioner and went on down the road. Again without a word. The stones are stacked on the altar instead of a statue of the Buddha. I picked up this idea from the Three Stones Zen Group in Albuquerque, of which my poet and painter friend J.B. Bryan is a member. The stones represent the three treasures—the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. And then there is my big brother Bill. I miss him very much. He was the oldest of our troubled single parent family. We loved each other ferociously and sometimes with terrible anger. We never found a way to talk. Bill, through the guidance of my grandfather, became a renowned hunter and fisherman. His neck was very red from sitting in boats and staring at the water. In college he earned the nickname “Swamp Fox.” He was also an alcoholic. But he knew and understood things about the woods and growing up and living and dying that are important pieces of my childhood. Bill must be 12 or 13 in the photo, at the cusp of his manhood. So every morning I look past the altar every morning and see the house where Lee and I have lived for the last 30 years. Also, though this photo doesn’t show them, three other photographs decorate my altar—my big sister Peggy, my little sister Patsy who is dead too, and me. They are formal photographs. My mother had them made as remembrances for us all. If Bill was 13, then I was 8. The year was 1950. Harry Truman was president. Next month I will be 66.

So when I finally felt strong enough that evening, I went outside and sat on my stack of pillows staring at the wall. Then, like I do every morning, I closed my services with The Five Remembrances. According to Thich Nhat Hahn in The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, the Buddha had his young disciples repeat these remembrances when they were practicing kinhin, their walking meditation. This is Thich Nhat Hahn’s translation.

The Five Remembrances

I am of the nature to grow old.
There is no way to escape growing old.

I am of the nature to be ill.
There is no way to escape being ill.

I am of the nature to die.
There is no way to escape death.

All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change.
There is no way to escape being separated from them.

My actions are my only true belongings.
I cannot escape the consequences of my actions.
My actions are the ground on which I stand.