Lost (and Found) in the Rain of Juárez

Yesterday Joe Hayes and I went over to Juárez to walk around and to have dinner. It’s been a long-time ritual for us when he comes visiting from Santa Fe. It was just regular trip to the other side, so it feels odd writing about a three hour journey that has long been a habit of mine. But people keep asking me: Do you go to Juárez anymore? These people have been reading the news, hearing the continuing grisly murders along the border and especially in Juárez. I hadn’t been for a month or so, and everybody in El Paso knows that Juárez is suffering because so few people are crossing over the bridges and spending money in Mexico. People are on this side are scared. I don’t blame them. Last year over 2000 people, most of them involved in some way in the drug trade, were murdered. Among that number have been a few U.S. citizens, some the result of stray gunfire. It’s still going on but it’s not so bad now. El Presidente Felipe Calderón has sent 7,000 federal troops. Their job supposedly is to combat the two narco-traficante cartels who are doing battle to control the Juárez trade route. The Juárez Cartel is headed by Vicente Carrillo-Fuentes (the brother of the infamous and allegedly dead “Lord of the Skies” Amado Carillo Fuentes) which is battling to the death the Sinaloa Cartel and el Chapo Guzmán. If you listen to the gossip on the street you’ll discover that few people believe “the news” that the army or the local police are non-partisan protectors of the people. The street rumor has it that Calderón and the federales are on the side of el Chapo and the Juárez police are on the side of Vicente Carillo-Fuentes and the local cartel.

“Whatever,” as the kids say. It's just sad, sad stuff.

We crossed the Stanton Street Bridge. We were happy to be going to Juárez again. A quiet rain had begun to fall as soon as we topped the bridge. It came and went, sometime heavily, during our walk. It’s a month too early for the monsoons to begin saturating this part of the Chihuahua Desert, so the rain felt delicious and comforting. The desert, even in its cities, has a beautiful smell when it rains. It’s the smell of wet greasewood and sage bushes. Such dreamy cool weather for the end of May when in most years the thermometer is already climbing over 100. Now wonder Joe and I enjoyed walking in the rain and dancing among the puddles in the greasy streets. It was a great unexpected pleasure.

Just on the other side of the bridge we saw a covey of the Mexican army, seven men dressed in desert brown helmets and fatigues, packing automatic rifles and pistols. I wanted to take a photo but I didn’t dare. These seven unsmiling soldiers were dressed up to play Mexican Army but they didn’t inspire any confidence. Mostly 18 and 19 years old kids, they were loitering out of the rain under a big tree like malingering taxi drivers. Except these guys were carrying big guns.

We walked south down Avenida Lerdo—or as we call it, la Avendia de las Novias—where dress shops populate both sides of the street. The shops specialize in quinceañas and weddings, and the big windows are decorated with manikin dreams. The shops were empty of customers. Their incomes depend on the Mexican-Americans coming across and spending money. Nobody was crossing anymore. As far as they were concerned, nobody was getting married, nobody was celebrating a young girl’s 15th birthday. Maybe their world was drying up like an empty seed pod. The clerks peered at us through the drizzle, wondering where the two old gringos were going.

We walked down to Avenida Septiembre de la Diez y Seis and then west to the plaza and the cathedral and the mercados. At least people were wandering in the streets there. Except it didn’t feel like the border. The rain had changed the ambience. That and the absence of gringos and Mexican-Americans, folks with money in their pockets, folks to do business with. It could have been Veracruz or Hermosillo. Any place else further south. But the Mexicans were there at least. Juárez, like New York City, is a street city. It's vitality is out on the streets to watch and feet. A little band of of cristianos were singing corridos to Jesus in the gazebo of the plaza, women and children and men scurried back and forth, buying food for dinner, trying to make a peso somehow, laughing and screaming and chatting and singing. Music blared from loudspeakers. Behind the new mercados is Calle de Paz, a street of unbridaled laissez-faire capitalism. A few years ago Calle de Paz was packed with illegal vendors selling everything from song birds to rattlesnake rattles and herbs to ripped off DVDs (you can buy first run movies for $5) and any kind of dope if you knew who to ask, but after the city built the two new mercados the police ran all the street vendors away at gunpoint. One man, a leader of protesting vendors, was killed. Now, with the recession debilitating the street economies of Juárez, the puestos (stands) are creeping back into the streets. And of course the sad whores are still there. Calle de Paz is the last territory of the old whores, women in their 30s and 40s, fat and worn out, long past the hungry dreams of their late teens and 20s. They stood in the doorways of cheap bars, their eyes empty and lonely, watching the rain come down.

We went to the Villa del Mar for dinner. It’s long been one of my favorites but it’s been a year or so since I was there. A few of the tables had patrons, so that made us happy. At least it was still open. We sat at a booth and a young mesero brought us fresh made chips and two salsas and a bunch of limes. Joe doesn’t drink anymore, I don’t drink much, so we both had agua minerals con limon. I had the Sopa Marinera Grande and Joe had the filete de pescado mojo de ajo. It was very good. We watched the rain fall outside and we talked about all the many times we have crossed back and forth. When the rain slacked up some, we asked for the bill. It was $12.76 (1560 pesos). A little more that 8 pesos for a dollar. Like it was when we were kids. But now I’m 67 and Joe will be 64. Joe laughed. It was his time to pay, but how can it be so cheap? He gave the waiter $20 in ones, the young man smiled a very large smile and we walked back home to the other side.

■■

This morning I woke up at 5am. I had stomach cramps. I had the runs on and off during the day. Oh well. A little memory from our journey. That happens on this side or that side. It happens everywhere. That’s how the Buddha died. He didn’t complain. People have a bad day, they make a mistake. That’s what my friend Art Lewis the famous sax player told me once. I'm still trying to learn.

■■

Here are a couple of poems of mine from my book The Price of Doing Business in Mexico (1998). They are both poems about Juárez and how I feel about that city that’s five minutes from where I write this. Both poems are the same poem differently, but that’s okay. (By the way, I've still not taken the time to figure how to put indents in the blogger, so if you want to see the poems the way they supposed to look on the page, buy the book.) And, oh yeah, the photograph of Lee and me is a favorite of mine, and I’ve used it numerous other places. It was taken in 1977 in Martino’s Restaurant on Avenida Juárez a few blocks from the bridge. Pedro Ruelas Alvarez, a street photographer, took the photograph. We were sitting in the corner booth by the front window. 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 are still there. Martino’s is having a difficult time. If you have a chance, go by and eat there too.

■■


The Gavachos in the Photograph

They’ll tell you when you’re growing up
that water goes under the bridge,
but they don’t tell you about the bridge
that goes over to Avenida Juárez
where Martino’s Restaurant is
two doors down from the Kentucky Club.
The imagination opens those doors,
and there I am,
the big bearded gavacho in the straw hat,
the coral necklace,
drinking Dos XX Oscura
and thinking I will have enough riches in my pocket
to nourish my heart in case of love.
It’s Lee’s 32nd birthday, 1977,
a year before we moved to El Paso.
Isn’t she beautiful?
I am 35.
We sit in the corner booth by the windows
where the tiny Tarahumara children stand forever
with their outstretched hands
reaching into the emptiness of the 20th Century,
and a kaleidoscope of people walk
back and forth
looking for ways to lose themselves
in the dwindling twilight.
Glittering mirrors.
Hard-crusted bolillo rolls.
French onion soup.
Chateaubriand for two fried in butter French-style.
We become stuffed and drunk and happy.
We wander the streets holding hands,
we climb a rickety staircase
to a small $10 room with clean sheets,
we make love like resplendent wild beasts
in search of something Jesus said,
and then we walk back into
the jingle-jangle of Avenida Juárez.

That was twenty-one years ago now.
Nothing has really changed except us.
Pedro Ruelas Alvarez,
the street photographer who took this picture
is dead now.
Like my mother is dead.
My sister Patsy.
My brother Bill.
Like Lee’s mother and father.

“Water under the bridge, ¿verdad?”

Another gavacho couple is sitting in that booth tonight.
They are looking out the window
at the Indian children with the large black eyes,
and they are afraid
of what they see in that confusion.
Give them a quarter, mister,
give them a dollar,
give them back the secret places
in the mountains where their spirit thrives.
That’s what I always want to do,
to give away something to make myself whole,
but it seems so impossible,
even to give something to myself.
At least I feel like I am at home now,
here in El Paso,
walking back and forth across the bridge,
and I’m hoping to find enough riches in my pocket
to cure some of the ache in my heart.
This is my prayer—
May God grant us all love
and a little bit of peace on Avenida Juárez.
Amen.

■■

How to Eat Stuffed Fish in Juárez

Jesus died for the sins of us all.
So I walked across the bridge to Mexico
with my friend Rus the basketball coach,
and we ate fish at the Villa del Mar
which seemed like
the natural thing to do.
It was Lent in a Catholic country.
The waiter was a pro, thank God.
Two Bohemias apiece,
chips and fresh pico de gallo,
bolillos (on the soft side)
a good and simple caldo,
the pescado was rellenado
con tiny shrimp and crabmeat—

the bill was 16 bucks and we added a four dollar tip,
becoming heroes because we had money in our pockets.
Outside the afternoon had become night.
The glass doors opened,
and like always
there was the river
of dark fleshy people
who walked up and down
like they knew where they were going.
Hallowed be their names.
Hallowed be all of our names.
We went and said Hello to Benito Juárez,
stern el Presidente Indigeno
gloriously astride a marble and bronze pedestal
in the exact center of a plaza
that carried his name like secret ammunition.
Pancho Villa and Emilio Zapata
were somewhere in the shadows of the flimsy trees,
happy to be the guardians of a pair of lovers
who were snuggled up on a green park bench.
The man had his hand inside the woman’s white blouse.
We turned back into the clutter of human beings,
the clanging traffic,
and a little Tarahumara brother and sister who found us
like lost pieces of a puzzle, blessed us
with their sad hunger, their black watery eyes
blinking with the memory of

the Sierra Madre,
hunger,
narcotraficantes,
dead babies,
lost Gods.

All that we had to give was money.
50¢ for each of them.
Enough so that they fled back to their mother,
a tiny woman who sat on the curb with another baby
wrapped in a rebozo that was becoming the color of night.

It would have been nice
to have had my wife along beside me,
friend and lover, a woman
to touch my hand crossing the confused streets.
But Rus was okay—
he listened to the disturbances in my sentences
like a friend is supposed to do,
at least until he ran into a British travel-writer-novelist-acquaintance
who towed along a wife and a blonde couple from Baltimore,
all of them younger than me, all of them
delighted with who they were and who
they were going to be.
I should have told them about my brother Bill,
59-years-old,
whose heart burst open one morning
two months before
after he had bagged his limit one last time
of beautiful mallard ducks
from the cold Mississippi sky.
The Holy Trinity—

God the Holy Blood,
God the Holy Dead,
God the Holy Food.

I didn’t because
this was Mexico and Mississippi is Mississippi
and my brother was dead now
forever.
So there we all were
five gavachos on the other side
with nothing to talk about
except ourselves.
We avoided the subject for the most part.
At least we didn’t talk about basketball.
Thank you, Jesus.
I bought a bottle of Tequila and went home.

Zen Priest BRAD WARNER in El Paso

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Poetry, Life and Barf—the Poetics of Eileen Myles

April 30th Eileen Myles was in town, and she gave a reading at the Percolator Coffee House on Stanton Street downtown El Paso. I read with her. It was a great event. To promote the reading I wrote the essay below about her poetics, riffing off her own essay "Everyday Barf" that concluded her recent book of poems SORRY, TREE (Wave Books, 2007). If you don't know Eileen's work work, you should. She wears many hats--poet, novelist, librettist, and former Presidential candidate. The New Mexico State Writing Program in Las Cruces sponsored her visit to the area, and The Dishonest Mailman Series (The UTEP Writing Program) hosted El Paso event. Thanks again to Connie Voisine (poet, NMSU) and Rosa Alcala (poet, UTEP) for their collaboration to make all this possible.

Life, Poetry and Barf--the Poetics of Eileen Myles

I bought a refrigerator the other day, the first refrigerator I have ever bought in my life and the man in the store, Gringer’s on First Avenue, asked me what I do and I said I’m a poet. Let’s hear one he said. I balked, maybe feeling a little cheesy, you know like I should entertain him while I’m buying a refrigerator, like those cab drivers or waiters who flirt with women while they work, so that you’re reminded that you’re never really a customer, you’re always just a women, or a poet. I recited one--not well--I kind of stuttered. It was short. He looked at me blankly. Do you want to hear it again, I asked. No. I think that one went over my head he said, and turned his attention to the next customer.

Her poems wander. They like to wander because her mind wanders. Her poems pay attention to her mind wandering. She gets up in the morning and goes outside. Just like the rest of us. Our bodies are working. We know because we are breathing the air. What kind of news is this? In one essay presumably about poetics but probably more about life Eileen insinuates that every day is like barf because it just happens. Like barf happens. We are not in control when we barf. That includes you, dear reader. You just sit back and suffer and watch or you enjoy and watch or you just don’t pay attention. Eileen pays attention. And she writes poems. She wants her poetics to reflect how her day happens. She wants her poetics to reflect how she pays attention. It’s a subversive message. How a day in her life, like every day in her life, can be like barf. She gets distracted. A poem can follow along. That’s its job, that’s the poet’s job. She is an open door. It shuts and closes. She is outside, she goes back inside. She is awake, she goes to sleep. She is a function of the universe. She breathes, she eats, she shits, she makes love, she writes poems, she gets happy, she gets sad, she lives in New York City, sometimes she lives elsewhere. We are all a piece of the universe. We are all a piece of the same cloth. It’s empty, it’s not empty. Yes, yes, I know she is a lesbian. Let me tell you--she was a lesbian before everybody else was a lesbian. Do you know what I mean? In 1992 she came to El Paso. She was running for President of the United States. She thought it was important that a lesbian poet who looked and talked like a Kennedy should run for President of the United States. It was the thing to do. It was the moment to do it. It just happened. Part of her platform was to celebrate her dog Rosie, a pit bull. Very un-PC, even in 1992. Rosie is dead now, but she was a wonderful happy dog, and Eileen loved her dearly. Eileen believed that a lesbian poet in the White House required a well-adjusted and contented pit bull. The world would be set straight. In a poetics sort of way. But I digress. Like Eileen digresses. So she and Debbie Nathan went across the river and walked down to the concrete ditch that people still call the Rio Grande. They carried with them a bucket of red paint and big brushes and they wrote in big red letters: WRITE IN MYLES FOR PRESIDENT. She was running against Bill Clinton, the first George Bush and Ross Perot. It was not even close.

See a poem is a tiny institution. I just write lots and lots of them, and it gives me a way to be in the world. It’s actually a very worldly job, there really isn’t a wrong place to be, a poet kind of goes with anything, any kind of decor, indoor, out. Presidents like to have poets next to them, we’re sort of like a speaking wreath, the kind of poet you pick tells the kind of president you are, the hell of dating or marrying a poet is that certainly we will write about you, so if you don’t want to be seen, don’t date a poet, anyone should know that. Because really a poet has nothing better to do than look at you. A poet’s best friend is her dog, because instantly the dog will take the poet on walks, the poet is like the earth’s shadow. The sun moves and the poet writes something down.

So when Eileen ran for President, I didn’t vote for her. I did feel guilty about not voting for her. I even wrote a poem about it ("November 18, 1992" which is in The Price of Doing Business in Mexico). Debbie voted for her, which surprised me, because I didn't think Debbie was a voter (either I heard something wrongly or my internal stereotyping system was wacko). I’m sure Eileen voted for herself. She’s solid and real that way. She’s a very substantial person. My growing up poet friend Harvey Goldner would have voted for her except I don’t think the Eileen Myles for President campaign knocked on many doors in Seattle. Like Rosie the dog, Harvey is dead now. He voted for Bill Clinton in 1992. He liked him because Bill was from the south like us. Harvey laughed when he thought about Bill’s white chubby thighs chugging down Pennsylvania Avenue in search of manhood or a MacDonald’s. Whatever came first. Back then Harvey was driving a cab and working some in the psych ward of the public hospital. He was busy becoming a legendary underground and unknown street poet. Ten years before that he turned himself into a detox unit and dried out. He had been an alcoholic since probably both of us were 15 together in 1957 listening to James Brown and Bobby Blue Bland and Jimmy Reed in Memphis, Tennessee. I told this to Eileen once. She said 1982 was the year she went on the wagon. She too had been an alcoholic. 1982 must have been a good year for poets, she said. Harvey told me about his terrible DTs that he suffered through. He was curled up in a corner of his room. He was afraid. The door was locked. It was really a cell. Every time he looked up and peered into the darkness he saw way out in the distance a giant wheel of light coming toward him. It was pure light, it was pure energy, it was terrifying. It chewed up everything--men, women, babies, high school basketball players, lovers, houses, automobiles, trees, mountains, even the sun. It mangled them up and swallowed them whole. It horrified him. He wanted to get drunk and forget all about the wheel of light. But Harvey knew it was over, his drinking, because he had been privileged to see the wheel of light churning toward him. He had been blessed. I thought about this story when I decided to write this piece about Eileen’s poetics. She doesn’t let us forget the wheel of light rumbling down the road toward us. Her poetics are subversive that way. I know I said that already but I don’t want you to forget. She does this in an off-hand fashion, a conversational way. You’re being had. Especially if you think you’re cool. Take me for instance. I think I’m cool. I read Eileen’s poem and her prose all the time and at first they taste like candy I’m enjoying them so much. I want to call up my friends. And then she pushes me into different places I’ve never been before, places I don’t want to be, thinking about things I’ve never thought about before. Places where maybe I don’t belong. She’s a woman, she’s a lesbian, I’m a man, I have a family, grandkids even. How can I understand? I am uncomfortable. Unsure of myself. But there I am listening and watching. It’s like she’s talking to me. That’s okay, she says. Sit there and watch and listen. You’ll be happy you did. And then she’ll say something offhand like that little story about buying the refrigerator. It seems so inconsequential, so silly even, but thinking about it I realize the story is very serious, very real and substantial, like she is, like her poetics (how could it be otherwise) and I understand perfectly. Like...like...

...like this:

Once my girlfriend moved to Paris, like 1986, and I took her to the airport. Then I got on the train and went home. It was a big deal but I wasn’t upset. I walked into the bathroom and began shitting and puking at once. I felt like a worm. Like there was no difference between me—and anything. It was just this force flowing through me. Loss. I must be feeling bad I thought, sitting on the can leaning into the sink.

▲▲▲

The excerpts in this piece are from a commencement address that Eileen gave at Hamshire College, 1998, which you can find on her website here. Billy Sullivan did the portrait of Eileen. You can learn more about Eileen and her work and listen to her read poems at her two websites at www.eileenmyles.com and www.eileenmyles.net

By the way, I wrote this essay and posted it quickly (4/27) to make sure something was up here and Facebook and Newspaper Tree to promote the reading, and so since the reading I found out that I had gotten a number of things wrong. I heard from Debbie Nathan (see comments). I had wrongly assumed that she hadn't voted in the 1992 presidential election, so I've edited the piece here a bit (5/15/09). But doing this reminds me of back in the day, 1992, when Debbie and Morton Naess and their kids Sophy and Willie in the Sunset Heights neighborhood overlooking the Rio Grande and Juarez. Debbie was an important part of the intellectual and political landscape of the city and a good friend. The first non-fiction book that Cinco Puntos Press published was hers--Women and Other Aliens, which is now out of print. It was an important book, and it opened doors for us in so many ways. Someday soon I will write about all of that on our Cinco Puntos Press Blog. But for now I simply want to say that we miss Debbie--her writing, her intellect and especially her friendship--here in El Paso. She and Morton now live in New York City and you can follow her writing on her blog DEBBIE NATHAN: Sex pol, borders, Mexico, Yiddish, my camera. It's good stuff.

May Day! May Day! Poet Eileen Myles in El Paso and Las Cruces

May Day! May Day! Poet Eileen Myles will be in El Paso and Las Cruces next week. She will be reading with me on Thursday, night April 30, 7pm, at the Percolator downtown. and in Las Cruces the next night at 730 pm. I'm honored to reading with Eileen. She's truly one of the most interesting ("savviest" is a word I read) poets writing. I get all her books. And I read them too. The El Paso event is hosted by the Dishonest Mailman Series of the UTEP Writing Department, and the Las Cruces event is hosted by the NMSU writing program. It's so nice that the two writing departments are collaborating these days. It means good things for the writing community along the border. Kudos to Connie Voisine (NMSU) and Rosa Alcala (UTEP) for greasing the wheels so this can happen.




EL PASO: Thursday, April 30th, 7pm
The Percolator Cafe, Stanton Street downtown

LAS CRUCES: Friday, May 1, 730pm
Corbett Center, NMSU, Las Cruces, NM
2pm a talk about writing in the NMSU English Bldg
For more information, call Connie Voisine, (575) 646-2027

Connie Voisine Book of Poems a Finalist for LA Times Book Award

Congratulations to poet and good friend Connie Voisine. Her book book of poems Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream (University of Chicago Press) has been chosen as a finalist for the very prestigious Los Angeles Times Book Award. Connie lives 40 miles up the road from us in Las Cruces, NM, and teaches in the Creative Writing Department at NMSU.

She's a wonderful colleague and citizen in our world of letters in piece of the desert along the border. She's full of curiosity about language and poetry and diverse poetics. Her poetry, of course, is remarkable. But for me as a poet her friendship has been invaluable. She's always there to listen to my distracted riffs of whatever oddball idea I have about poetics. She lets me wander. When I was putting together White Panties, Dead Friends & Other Bits and Pieces of Love I was unsure of a number of the poems. I hadn't yet read them many of them aloud to an audience. I asked her to look at the manuscript. Instead, she invited me to join her on Friday afternoons when she and two other poets--Sheila Black and Carmen Geminez-Rosello Smith--got together and shared and critically discussed their work. It was a great time for me. I'm not a workshopper, I've didn't do Creative Writing School, so I was a bit nervous. Especially the old man poet among three women poets. But they, especially Connie, welcomed me and helped greatly to improve the book. I wouldn't have had that experience without Connie's presence, so I thank her and wish her good luck on Friday night. That's when the winners are announced with lots of pomp and ceremony. My fingers are crossed. Good luck, Connie.

(By the way, son John Byrd will be in LA for the book fair representing Cinco Puntos Press. He's in booth #347 in the lawn on top of the staircase this time. Primo real estate we hope. Go by and visit with him. He'll be delighted to see you.)

Below is a poem is cut and pasted off the University of Chicago Press website. Being technically inept, I can't figure out how to put in all the line indents via blogger. Forgive me, Connie. To see the poem properly scattered across the screen, go here.

The Bird is Her Reason

There are some bodies that emerge
into desire as a god
rises from the sea, emotion and
memory hang like dripping clothes—this
want is like
entering that heated red

on the mouth of a Delacroix lion,
stalwart, always that red
which makes
my teeth ache and my skin feel
a hand that has never touched me,
the tree groaning outside becomes
a man who knocks on my bedroom window,
edge of red on gold fur,
the horse, the wild
flip of its head, the rake of claws
across its back, the unfocussed,
swallowed eye.

Edward Hopper & the Nighthawks visit El Paso

Cesar Ivan sent me this image of Edward Hopper's THE NIGHTHAWKS after I mentioned in my last post that his photo of his cutouts in the window of the Bridge Center for Contemporary Arts reminded me of Hopper's work. I wasn't thinking in particular about NIGHTHAWKS, but, my gosh, this painting and Cesar's photograph of the cutouts in the posting below sure reverberate against each other, huh? Art (visual art, music, poetry--the whole ball of wax) does peculiar things to the psyche and to memory. It lives there like a virus, a good virus, and feeds and protects the imagination and understanding.

By the way, when I first posted the March 9 blog I originally used another photograph of Art Lewis. I was in a rush to get out of town and I wanted to get the thing up before I left. I used the first photograph I found on my PC, a wonderfully dignified image of Art Lewis by Richard Baron. You can see that photograph here along with a profile of Art. The photo now used is by Cesar, and it's taken in front of the Cincinnati Bar. I think this is the photograph that Cesar used to create the cutout of Art. It's also right near the alley where Art played to the homeless man documented in the essay “Sort of Lost Sad Empty Useless Old Man EP Blues.” And besides, the photograph gives off the aura of Art Lewis that I was trying to describe.

Sort of Lost Sad Empty Useless Old Man El Paso Blues

I love this photograph and have wanted an excuse to put it on this blog. My excuse is I re-discovered this piece of mine that I am pasting below--“Sort of Lost Sad Empty Useless Old Man EP Blues” that originally appeared five years ago at newspapertree.com. The photograph and the cutouts in the window are by my friend Cesar Ivan. The display window decorated the now-dead Bridge Center of Contemporary Arts on San Antonio Avenue in downtown El Paso. My essay, with all its dreamy imaginary wanderings, is a eulogy for the Bridge. May it rest in Peace. It was a vibrant although very fragile organization, like so many non-profit arts organizations, and it died a slow and tortured death. Cesar Ivan must have taken the photograph in 2001, perhaps just before 9/11/01. His cutouts are meant to give form to the El Paso arts scene back then. David Romo, who was at that time the director of the Bridge, hired Cesar to do the work and probably collaborated with him in the design. For me, because I was involved with the Bridge Center for much of its history (and honored to be included in the window), it’s an eerie and sad photograph, creating a surreal kind of sadness that you get when you look at an Edward Hopper painting for too long. Things are lost in the constant flux—institutions, people, ideas—but the ghosts hang around and make you remember.

Gloria Osuna Perez is the beautiful woman in the window on the right, her hair gone from radiation treatments in her battle against ovarian cancer. Long an important artist in El Paso and the Southwest, she died in 1999. Gloria was known especially for her soulful portraits of Chicanas and Mexicanas who were important to her personal history. She concocted a special palate of colors to create the signature cinnamon skin tones that radiate warmth and sensuality and beauty. Cinco Puntos had contracted with her to illustrate Joe Hayes’s book Little Gold Star / Estrellita de Oro, and she had completed five of the paintings when her cancer recurred. As she lay dying, she collaborated with her daughter Lucia Angela Perez to complete the work. Because she died in 1999, a few years before the internet became omnipresent in our consciousness, very little of her work is available on the internet. Hopefully, in the next few months we can collect some images and post them on our Cinco Puntos blogspot. In the meantime, I’m posting this lovely photograph of Gloria and Lucia.

The two chess players are, of course, Teresa Urrea, aka la Santa de Caborca, squared off against Pancho Villa. Both wandered the streets of downtown El Paso in the very early 1900s when El Paso was the political and intellectual center of the Mexican Revolution. If you want to know more about Teresita and Pancho Villa in El Paso, read David Romo’s The Ringside Seat to the Revolution. For a great biographical novel about la Teresita read Hummingbird’s Daughter by our good friend Luis Urrea (a blood descendent of the Caborca Urreas). The novel follows her magical life from her birth until her entry into El Paso. Luis is working on the sequel that will complete her life story. I guess Pancho Villa is still playing la Teresita chess somewhere in our communal psyche. I’m hoping she wins.

The sax player is the legendary Art Lewis, long a fixture in the El Paso culture scene. A truly wonderful musician and a very wise man. My notebooks are filled with things he’s said to me or friends. He stars in the piece below. And of course the dude reading book of poems is me. My friend Steve Yellen bought the cutout in an fund-raising auction a few years back and it now haunts the Yellen home where the food and wine are very good.

By the way, I wrote this essay while I was working on my book of poems White Panties, Dead Friends & Other Bits and Pieces of Love, so many of the ideas and themes here you will find in the poems and vice versa. I’ve edited it just a little bit. Re-reading the piece after these five years, I'm so glad George Bush is no longer president. His was a most dangerous presidency. Maggie Herrera, by the way, has disappeared into the dream which is Los Angeles. She's fine, I hear. So is Art Lewis. He comes back to El Paso for his famous birthday parties where the musicians all line up to jam with him. He blows his heart out and leaves us in peace.

Sort of Lost Sad Empty Useless Old Man EP Blues
April 2003

It’s been a very sad and sorrowful year, and I got the blues bad. Very bad. Sort of lost sad empty useless old man El Paso blues. A friend, the godfather of my children, is up in Albuquerque dying a slow death inside a coma. Like Ishmael in Moby Dick, the ship has sunk, Ahab that bastard is dead and Ishmael is riding his handmade coffin on the wide green sea. But, unlike Ishmael, my friend cannot tell his story; nor can he let go and simply sink deep into the ocean. He lies in the hospital bed, breathing and sweating and gasping for breath, and his wife and the rest of us rub his body and wonder if he’s inside.

Then George Bush’s war came along and sucked buckets of hope out of my heart. Like a martinet with a tin badge, George strutted out naked onto the stage everyday thinking he was wearing a brand new wardrobe. He had to do his strutting. So every evening I get down on my knees like Marlon Brando in the Godfather and I whisper into my grandchildren’s ears that the President is really wearing nothing. He is wearing no clothes at all. I tell them to ignore the flag he has draped around his nakedness, I tell them to be careful of the heavy Bible that the President carries like a loaded gun, and I tell them that one day they will come to understand that he is not wearing any clothes. He is naked. He is a fool. But he is extremely well-armed and should be considered very dangerous.

This is the stuff that lies at the heart of my lost sad empty useless old man El Paso blues.

Used to be when I got to feeling depressed like this I could go hang out at the Café at the Bridge Center for Contemporary Arts and watch the people walking back and forth outside the door. The Mexicans and the abuelitos and the penguins and the high-heeled ladies and the Mennonites and the niños. Inside I’d always find weird and interesting people from all over the world. I could read books and look at the art on the walls.

And the best part was that red-headed Maggie Herrera would console me. She’d smile her wonderful freckle-face smile and say, Hi, Mr. Byrd, the silver post punched into her lower lip bobbing up and down like a cork. She never called me Bobby. She’d fix me a double café breve. She’d give me a big glass of water with ice.

Maggie always wore her jeans so lowdown that I could watch her bellybutton riding the magic of her thin and beautiful body. Her bellybutton was a cave that opened up into the beginning and into the end. When I was in college, the allegory of Plato’s cave bored and confused me with its shadows and darkness and absence of meaning, but the cave of Maggie’s belly button has real meaning about the sacred world in which we live. A few minutes of drinking my coffee and contemplating the metaphysical implications of Maggie’s bellybutton always refreshed me. I would be ready to return to the world. But the Bridge Café is closed. So I got no place to drain myself of these old man El Paso blues.

Art Lewis said a white man can’t know the blues like a black man knows the blues. I don’t know if Art is right or wrong, but I wish I could talk to Art and tell him about these goddamn blues I got right now. Art is a wise man and he would know how to give me some relief. But Art took his sax and went back to Houston. He’s sick. He got diabetes and a double-hernia, the hernia from blowing on that horn without a mike all these years. Besides, Art’s momma is fragile and old. Rumor says she has Alzheimer’s. So Art needs to be taking care of his mother, but I bet he wishes he could blow his horn because he’s got some real bad troubling blues.

Once over a year ago, a few months after 9/11 and I was feeling just like I am right now, I walked over to the Bridge Café to drink coffee and to talk to Maggie. But Maggie was busy with paperwork and she was sad because her boyfriend had left her. Every one of us had some kind of lousy blues back then after 9/11. Remember? Maggie quickly concocted me my double-shot café breve, gave me a glass of water with no ice and told me straight out that she didn’t have time to talk. She told me to go downstairs in the basement. Art Lewis was preaching to an assembly about the gospel of music. I went downstairs. Art was sermonizing and playing at the same time. He tooted his horn and said, “Bobby, sit down. Take a load off.” He had poured his lanky black body into a black suit and a black shirt and shiny black shoes and a very nice black porkpie hat. The man was black. Always black. Maybe he was 60, maybe 70. I didn’t care.

Every day Art Lewis stepped into the river of his life and prayed into his saxophone. He prayed jazz. Improvisation was his devout way of life. His sacred horn was always blowing away the stifling air of fundamentalism. As far as Art was concerned, right and wrong, innocence and guilt--they were all notes in the same piece of music. Playing the sax was Art Lewis’ religious practice, and he had become a wise teacherman by following the path the saxophone had shown him.

“Music,” he announced, “holds many of the answers to the riddles about life and death.”

“Why doesn’t it hold all the answers?” I asked.

Art got that big wide smile on his face and said, “Because we don’t know all the questions.” He played a riff and added. “Besides, there aint no answers in the boogie-woogie. No answers anywhere in the be-bop. The jingle-jangle is so empty of answers you’d go hungry if you got lost inside. The only answer we got is just us doing what we are doing. Like the dogs and the fishes. Like the homeless blowing down San Antonio Street like afternoon trash. That’s why I play my horn. I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing.”

Art was wearing a long necklace of wide golden links. A cheap necklace really, not real gold, 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. He wanted me to play him some blues. So I played him some wino alley blues. He liked those wino alley blues. Said those blue made him feel sad and happy at the same time. Said he didn’t have any money, so he gave me this golden necklace. It’s fake gold, you understand. But it sure makes me feel good.”

Art smiled again. He didn’t have many teeth.

That night I had this strange dream.

National Public Radio announced that Osama Bin Laden’s soul, tainted and crippled by fundamentalism, had escaped her master’s body. The soul of Osama Bin Laden had witnessed airplanes disappearing into glass buildings. And dead souls floating off toward the moon. In despair she had fled the body of Osama Bin Laden. Art Lewis was in the alley next to the Cincinnati Club playing saxophone to the wino, and the soul of Osama Bin Laden appeared like a moth attracted to a candle’s flame. She hid behind garbage cans and listened to Art play his horn. She realized that she had never known such generosity and compassion. She began to weep while Art played the many riffs from his golden horn.

And she fell asleep.

In her sleep, the soul of Osama Bin Laden dreamed. Like I was dreaming the soul of Bin Laden. A dream within a dream. And in her dream the soul of Bin Laden was giving birth to a child. When she opened her legs, she found a dead baby boy. Art Lewis sighed and with his horn he collected up the grief and blood and afterbirth like a priest who is preparing to give the holy sacrament. While Art Lewis blew this sorrow into his horn, the soul of Osama Bin Laden and the wino buried the dead baby in a dumpster behind Geo Geske’s. The lid clanged shut. The alleyway smelled like urine.

Art Lewis was weeping, the big tears dripping down his black face. He continued to blow on his horn about the sorrows in his heart. He said his piece was called “The Soul of Osama Bin Laden and her Dead Baby’s Blues,” a song so sad it made the wino weep too. The wino’s name was John, and John wandered away looking for some sort of God. He left behind the golden necklace as a gift for Art.

The necklace was stolen merchandise. Art didn’t care. He put it around his neck and played to the dark alleyway.

And the soul of Osama Bin Laden disappeared forever.

That was the end of my dream, and for what it’s worth, the Bridge Center and Art Lewis made that dream possible. Now the Bridge has locked up its doors, I haven’t seen Maggie Herrera in a couple of months, and I feel this deep emptiness in my imagination. George Bush, meanwhile, continues to strut around on the stage in his imaginary suit of clothes--the American flag draped around his nakedness, the Bible dangling from his manly hand like a smoking AK-47. My lost sad empty useless old man El Paso blues just won’t go away.

But this I have learned--Art Lewis has put his saxophone next to his bed in Houston where it generates a warm glow inside his room. His mother is with him. She is ancient. She has found memory to be of no further use. A hopeless tool. She does not know Art’s name but she knows that he resided in her belly. And that was a long time ago. Now she is waiting to unlock the door that opens into the void. She wants to step outside. Art watches her from his bed, learning some more about the questions that have no answers, and he meditates upon the meaning of music without any sound. “It’s a perfect music, exquisitely improvised,” he mumbles to anyone who will listen. “It’s a high pitched sound that resides inside the holiness of our brains. We all first heard that music inside our mother’s belly. Down in that magnificent slime where I first saw my father’s face. This is a strange secret.”

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

Airports & Horses: Jimenez & Hauser

Every time I drive to the El Paso airport I am startled by John Hauser's don Juan Oñate rearing up on an oversized Spanish mustang—“the world’s largest equestrian statue.” Hauser was into exact realism, so driving almost under the hooves of the thing, it’s impossible to ignore the mustang’s gargantuan package hanging like a wet dream gone terribly bad. What is that thing doing there? That’s a good question too. Public art, especially a piece of this enormity and expense, speaks about a city’s cultural vibes. El Paso has endured a 10-year-plus name-calling debate about this bronzed humongous conqueror. For a number of years the thing couldn’t find a home--nobody wanted it downtown, nobody wanted it on the river, nobody wanted it at City Hall--so the airport became the home of last resort. The debate teams had the usual suspects. On one side have been the conservatives (a buttoned-down assortment of Republicans, traditional Catholics, old-school and well-heeled Mexican-Americans, etcetera) and the other side is populated by the progressive community (a more vociferous hodgepodge that includes artists and intellectuals, the left side of Democratic Party, political activists, old-school Chicano activists, etcetera). This political and divisive history of Hauser’s statue has been documented in a number of places, including a long piece in the New York Times that as usual denigrates El Paso and a POV PBS documentary, The Last Conquistador. More important to the history of arts funding in El Paso and a critique of Hauser as an artist are Richard Baron’s articles, one of which is archived here at newspapertree.com (others are buried in archived pre-online fishwraps like The Bridge Review and Stanton Street).

And of course by now you can guess which side I’m on.

Sometimes when I see the Hauser I get angry. But when I’m lucky I laugh. El Paso got suckered again. Tom Diamond wiggled his finger and wagged his tongue and John Hauser patted the ricos on the back and smoothed their tail feathers and sweet green money slimed into their coffers by the millions. Why not? Oñate was a good Catholic boy, even if in 1599 he earned the nickname of “the Butcher at Acoma” for ordering the masacre at the pueblo, killing 800, enslaving 500 women and children, and cutting off the right foot of every remaining able-bodied man in the pueblo. Not to worry. He boasted pure Spanish blood.

Not like that Benito Juárez indio guy.

Not like that meztizo vato Pancho Villa.

I grew up in Memphis where huge statues of Confederate generals on horseback (Jefferson Davis, Nathan Bedford Forrest and others) dominated a number of public parks. Those pieces of public art left a bitter taste in my mouth. I didn’t have to be told what the underlying message of those statues of men on horseback meant—those guys were heroes because they fought to preserve slavery. So from the beginning I didn’t like the politics of the Oñate thing and I didn’t like how its funding was rammed through city council back in the 90s. Now that it’s done I don’t like it as a piece of art and I certainly don’t like the symbolism of having this huge statue of the Butcher at Acoma becoming part of our cultural landscape. I have a friend, poet Simon Ortiz of the Acoma Pueblo, who talks about how the dark shadow of Oñate and his butchery still reverberates through the oral history of his people’s language and stories.

In Denver a few weeks ago with Lee on business, I made sure I saw that city’s public art at their airport: the Blue Mustang by paseño Luis Jimenez (1940-2006) that has finally been installed. It had consumed much of the last years of Luis’ life and, with a final bit of irony, as he was working to finish the project the almost-finished head toppled over and killed him. As I approached the airport, I saw it from a half a mile away. Before the airport itself comes into view, the mustang rears up grandly on its hind legs out in the prairie, its mysterious red-orange eyes glowing in the cloudy dusk.

Luis grew up in El Paso in the 1940s and 50s. As a young man he left El Paso burdened with that rage that so many young Chicanos of his generation—especially the artists, the writers, the intellectuals—grew up with in their hearts and minds. El Paso is a Mexican city, a Mexican-American city, but the übercultur of his growing up was Anglo-American topped with a boring salsa of conservative Mexicano. The political structure, the banks, the big businesses—all were in the hands of the Anglo-Americans and a handful of rico Mexican-Americans. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the public school systems in the 40s and 50s. Spanish was not allowed. And kids in high school didn’t hear the Mexican history of El Paso, especially the stories of El Paso as the political and intellectual center for the early stages of the Mexican Revolution, they didn’t take field trips down to Monument Marker #1 to see where Francisco Madero crossed over the river to launch the historic revolution, and they didn’t learn about Pancho Villa living over in Sunset Heights, waiting for his return to Mexico. Instead, they learned about the Anglo-American history of the city and the state of Texas (the gun fighters, the Texas Rangers, the Alamo, etcetera). Artists and writers like Luis, Arturo Islas, John Rechy, Antonio Burciaga, Ricardo Sanchez and others realized early on that they had been deprived of their heritage and they learned to express their anger and resentment through their work.

Sometime in the early 80s I heard Luis speak at UTEP as a guest of the art department. Lee and I had moved to El Paso in 1978, but I knew Luis’ work from traveling from our home in Albuquerque to Santa Fe to see his cutouts, drawings and prints at the now defunct Hills Gallery. It was the first time since leaving El Paso (he was then over 40 and had received national acclaim) that he had been asked to speak in El Paso. His speech was hesitant at first, uncomfortable to be in El Paso, but, feeling the good reception of the standing-room only crowd, he warmed to the task as he showed slides of his work. Somewhere in the middle of the speech he started talking about his anger, and he spoke about how in the first part of the century the city government had outlawed the use of adobe as a building materials for homes. Adobe, of course, is the indigenous building material of the American Southwest. It’s a cheap material (you can make it yourself with the dirt in your backyard if you have the right dirt), and the result is buildings that, if properly maintained, can last forever. Indeed, the ambience of cultural boomtowns Taos and Santa Fe is rooted in adobe buildings. But the local power-brokers here made their anti-adobe law, and of course one of those helping to make the law was the local brick-maker. The story of bricks and adobe in El Paso was symbolic to Luis of his hometown, much like the stories of his and Hauser’s sculptures have become to me.

To take a picture of the Blue Mustang, I had to park the car illegally on the muddy shoulder of the road and run across the half-frozen ground to get close enough for a decent photo. I was happy to do it. Luis’ Blue Mustang is an incredibly potent piece of work, married perfectly into the landscape of the prairies to the east and the Rocky Mountains to the west. It represents the power of the Western mythos in our national psyche. Horses, of course, were introduced on this continent by the Spanish, but it wasn’t long before they became the symbol of the indigenous horse cultures of the prairie Indians. By staying away from historical particulars, the Blue Mustang synthesizes many disparate parts of our history to give us a symbol of the American West.

So I get back home and go to the El Paso airport. There is don Juan Oñate riding through the parking lot on his over-sized Spanish mustang. Even in its enormous presence it seems inconsequential. I can’t help it—I remember myself five-years-old playing with toys and realize this thing is like a blow-up of those little pot metal Indians and cowboys I used to play with. The Indians were on one side, the cowboys on the other. The cowboys were always rearing up and shooting their guns, the Indians were slinking down behind their little horses, they were running away. That hokey scene. Except that hokey scene speaks about one people’s conquering and domination of another people. It’s a complicated history that should contemplated and discussed, especially in classrooms, but it’s certainly not a history that should be romanticized with a monstrous and well-hung macho statue.

Oh well. Hauser’s Oñate has become a fact of life for us here in El Paso. It’s not going to come down. Still, I have a secret wish.

I wish we could cut off Oñate’s right foot. Not in the dead of night. No, I want to have a huge ceremony and invite the Governor of Acoma to El Paso. I want to invite Simon Ortiz to write and read a poem for the occasion. A poem that will honor the dead of Acoma, a poem that will honor the history of the pueblo peoples, a poem that will honor the land we live on, a poem that will honor our common future. After Simon has read his poem and we all have tears in our eyes, I want the mayor of El Paso to give the Governor of Acoma a large blowtorch and I want him to cut off the statue’s right foot. I want it to fall thud to the ground amid cheers and sadness and prayers. Then I want a powwow to begin. Maybe we can call it “Cutting Off the Butcher’s Foot Powwow.” Or maybe we can call it the “Asking for Forgiveness Powwow.” We’ll figure out something. The important thing is that we invite all the Fancy Dancers, the Traditional Dancers, the Grass Dancers, the drummers and the singers—the drums will pound and the songs will wail at the moon and the beating of feet will pound into the desert night. Vendors will be selling snow cones and churros and elotes, tacos and hamburgers and sodas and Oñate piñatas. No booze, no dope. Those are the rules. That’s because all of the Kachinas and the holy clowns will be there, watching us. Our Lady of Guadalupe too. She’ll be wearing cowboy boots and a big smile. We’ll invite Jesus and Buddha and Mohammed. They'll be hanging out in the shadows, mumbling about the uselessness of words. At midnight, holding hands and dancing around the circle, the big drums still pounding, we will melt the Spaniard’s foot. The molten bronze will seep steaming into a cauldron.

Hauser, like Sisyphus doing his existential but very sacred chore of pushing the rock up the hill, will recast and re-attach the foot so that the next year we can re-enact the ceremony. He will be well-paid and he will have a studio to work on other projects. The festival will become a huge annual fair. El Paso will become known as the City of Forgiveness. The federal government will tear down its ugly fence, the drug war will become history and peace will be declared in Juárez.

I wish.

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.

At the Death House Door

"No man should die alone without a friend."
--Pastor Carroll Picket
Death House Chaplain (retired)
Walls Unit, Huntsville
State of Texas



(Note: If you happen to read this on my FACEBOOK page, you will not see the embedded video trailer. I compose my blogs for BLOGGER and the FACEBOOK page accepts the feed, but deletes the video. Why, I don't know.)

Wednesday night, at the urging of film-maker Caesar Alejandro, Lee and I went to see the documentary At the Death House Door. It's a remarkable documentary that focuses on the spiritual journey of Pastor Carroll Pickett, the chaplain (retired) at the Walls Unit in Huntsville, TX. Mr. Pickett had chosen prison ministry as his life's work, but he did not expect to be the presiding chaplain when the State of Texas began once again executing death row inmates in 1982. He presided over 95 deaths, and since his retirement he has become an advocate for abolishing the death penalty. It's a powerful movie. I can only hope that the movie will be viewed by the Supreme Court Justices and all persons in power, including our incoming president, who have the opportunity to change national policy. I would also hope that this movie, and movies like it, become a part of the on-going national and educational dialogue about capital punishment.

NOTE: NON-PROFITS can arrange to view a computer download of the film here.

Below is the ad-copy from the producer:

At the Death House Door is a personal and intimate look at the death penalty in the State of Texas through the eyes of Pastor Carroll Pickett, who served 15 years as the death house chaplain to the infamous "Walls" prison unit in Huntsville. During Pickett's remarkable career journey, he presided over 95 executions, including the world’s first lethal injection. After each execution, Pickett recorded an audiotape account of his trip to the death chamber.

The film also focuses on the story of Carlos De Luna, a convict Pickett counseled and whose execution troubled Pickett more than any other. He firmly believed De Luna was innocent, and the film tracks the investigative efforts of a team of Chicago Tribune reporters who have turned up evidence that strongly suggests he was.

The film was presented by the Binational Independent Film Festival, 2009, here in the sister cities of El Paso and Juárez. Ceasar Alejandro is the Executive Director and the driving force of the festival, and as such, he demands that the films are all independently produced, that Mexico and the US are well represented, that all fils are shown on both sides of the border, and that actors and directors who come as invited guests speak in both cities. Director John Sayles, truly a hero of the independent film-making, is on the board, is a fan of our fronterizo ambiente, and as a featured speaker last year made his presentation in English on this side and Spanish on the other. Very cool, huh?

The presence of BIFF in our community is exciting and emblematic of our intellectual and artistic communities. The Rorschach response to El Paso and Juárez these days is drug wars and the incessant killings, all of which are true and need to be understood, but at the same time there's an incredibly vibrant intellectual and cultural life here that is reflected most readily in the arts. The Binational Independent Film Festival is an important element of what's going on here on the border half-way between the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico.

Jack Spicer at the Elysium Hotel

What are you thinking now?

I’m thinking it’s 2009 and suddenly Jack Spicer is famous. I’m thinking (remembering) Creeley said (maybe it was 1963) in one of his enthralling non-stop riffs that Jack Spicer wanted to be the greatest unknown poet in America. Now he’s the Jack of Irony but I’m thinking it’s good that Jack (even if he is famous) is still transmitting poems to us from his own cozy little corner room on the second floor in the Elysium Hotel. He's quit drinking. The booze was a bad dream. He’s happy with the Martians and the spirits. Maybe Harvey Milk will come by and they can watch the movie together. They will like all the pretty boys dancing around, they will like the touching and kissing on the big American screen, but they will like the last part the best, the part where Dan White puts the gun to the back of Sean Penn’s head. Tosca is playing sadness in their hearts. Poor Dan White. The lawyers said he ate too many Twinkies. He went off to the Bardo Jail and when he came home he committed suicide. Jack and Harvey will weep big salty angel tears for poor Dan White. Jack will want to write a book of love poems for Dan White but he can't find his pencil. It got lost somehow in the translation.

My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer has received all sorts of attention, being regularly named in 2008 Top-10 lists and with reviews in The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times (both, it seems, more curious in his life as a poet than his actual poetry). Ron Silliman, as always, is kind enough to list enough reviews to keep you busy for a while, and in his own commentary says, “So, yes, this is one of the most important volumes published in the past 50 years. It is hands down the best book published in 2008. And it is one of the most powerful collections of poetry you will ever read. Need I say more?”

I agree. And my copy hasn’t even arrived yet.

I know this because Jack is a hero of mine. I first ran into his work all the way back in the time of my growing up in poetry in 1960s. I first read his work in Donald Allen’s New American Poetry Anthology and soon afterward I was lucky enough to have access to the incredible poetry library at the Ruth Stephan Poetry Center at the University of Arizona (before the invasion of MFA-ism). At that time it was a one-room library stocked with all the little books that you couldn’t get anywhere else outside of San Francisco or New York City. In 1963, poet Drummond Hadley journeyed off to the Vancouver Poetry Conference and came back with tapes of all the readings and panel discussions that happened there. With my friend Paul Malanga, I spent hours listening to Spicer, Whalen, Creeley, Snyder, Olson and all the rest reading poems and talking about how to make a poem. They talked about typewriters and pencils and types of paper and projective verse and breathing and language and magic and history and anthropology and Williams and Pound. It was a paradise of words and language.

Best to listen to Spicer himself to see how I could be so enthralled by his ideas about poems as well as the poems themselves. Here, from an “Admonition” to Robin Blaser (I’m typing from Donald Allen’s introduction to One Night Stand and Other Poems). By the way, his derisive comment about converting emotion into poetry, as if it was a monetary exchange, is pretty close to the early comments (if I remember correctly) of the Language Poets about their frustration with their contemporaries. The explosion of Creative Writing Schools since he wrote the Admonition bears witness to his peculiar wisdom—

The trick naturally is what Duncan learned years ago and tried to teach us—not to search for the perfect poem but to let your way of writing of the moment go along its own paths, explore and retreat but never be fully realized (confined) within the boundaries of one poem. This is where we were wrong and he was right, but he complicated things for us by saying that there is no such thing as good or bad poetry. There is—but not in relation to the single poem. There is really no single poem.

This is why all my stuff from the past (except the Elegies and Troilus [a play]) looks foul to me. The poems belong nowhere. There are one night stands filled (the best of them) with their own emotions, but pointing now, as meaningless as sex in a Turkish bath. It was not my anger or my frustration that got in the way of my poetry but the fact that I viewed each anger and each frustration as unique—something to be converted into poetry as one would exchange foreign money. I learned this from the English Department (and from the English Department of the spirit—that great quagmire that lurks at the bottom of all of us) and it ruined ten years of my poetry. Look at those other poems. Admire them if you like. They are beautiful but dumb.

Poems should echo and reecho against each other. They should create resonances. They can't live alone anymore than we can.

So don’t send the box of old poetry to Don Allen. Burn it or rather open it with Don and cry over the possible books that were buried in it—the Songs Against Apollo, the Gallery of Gorgeous Gods, the Drinking Songs—all incomplete, all abortive because I thought, like all abortionists, that what is not perfect had no real right to live.

Things fit together. We knew that--it is the principle of magic. Two inconsequential things can combine together to become a consequence. This is true of poems too. A poem is never by itself alone.

What are you thinking now?

I am thinking that Spicer was our Lorca. Except nobody put him up against a wall and shot him. Booze killed him. Or he killed himself with booze. It's a disease of our clan. I've wondered myself how easy it would be to walk into that same elevator. But for me, a young poet in the 1960s, Jack Spicer was the great drunken faggot romantic poet who spoke about the mystery of poetry as an occult but very precise science while he listened to baseball games and considered the adventures of language as entangled in such mythos as the outlaw life of Billy the Kid. His poetry was exotic food for me wanting so much to be a poet but lost and bored with the regular academic fare. One night in Vancouver, must have been 1966, I got drunk with my friend the Canadian poet John Newlove. John, like me, was a huge fan of Spicer’s work and his vision of what it meant to be a poet. Unlike me, he had first-hand knowledge of the poet. He had heard Spicer give the “Vancouver Lectures” the year before and had made friends with him. Spicer had meant to move to Vancouver, but before he could he collapsed and slipped into a coma riding the elevator in his apartment building. Learning that Spicer was dying, John had traveled to California to say goodbye. That night in Vancouver, John and I read aloud “Psychoanalysis: An Elegy.” We might have been in a bus, we might have been in a pub. I don’t remember. I just remember the poem. I still read that poem sometimes to open my readings. I wonder if this is one of the poems that Spicer wanted to destroy.

PSYCHOANALYSIS: AN ELEGY

What are you thinking about?

I am thinking of an early summer.
I am thinking of wet hills in the rain
Pouring water. Shedding it
Down empty acres of oak and manzanita
Down to the old green brush tangled in the sun,
Greasewood, sage, and spring mustard.
Or the hot wind coming down from Santa Ana
Driving the hills crazy,
A fast wind with a bit of dust in it
Bruising everything and making the seed sweet.
Or down in the city where the peach trees
Are awkward as young horses,
And there are kites caught on the wires
Up above the street lamps,
And the storm drains are all choked with dead branches.

What are you thinking?

I think that I would like to write a poem that is slow as a summer
As slow getting started
As 4th of July somewhere around the middle of the second stanza
After a lot of unusual rain.
California seems long in the summer.
I would like to write a poem as long as California
And as slow as a summer.
Do you get me, Doctor? It would have to be as slow
As the very tip of summer.
As slow as the summer seems
On a hot day drinking beer outside Riverside
Or standing in the middle of a white-hot road
Between Bakersfield and Hell
Waiting for Santa Claus.

What are you thinking now?

I’m thinking she is very much like California.
When she is still her dress is like a roadmap. Highways
Traveling up and down her skin
Long empty highways
With the moon chasing jackrabbits across them
On hot summer nights.
I am thinking that her body could be California
And I a rich Eastern tourist
Lost somewhere between Hell and Texas
Looking at a map of a long, wet, dancing California
That I have never seen.
Send me some penny picture-postcards, lady,
send them.
One of each breast photographed looking
Like curious national monuments,
One of your body sweeping like a three-lane highway
Twenty-seven miles from a night’s lodging
In the world’s oldest hotel.

What are you thinking?

I am thinking of how many times this poem
Will be repeated. How many summers
Will torture California
Until the damned maps burn
Until the mad cartographer
Falls to the ground and possesses
The sweet thick earth from which he has been hiding.

What are you thinking now?

I am thinking a poem could go on forever.

Luis Villegas: Let Us Now Praise Famous Artists

“In hindsight, it’s good that I was never successful selling my art. I’d be tied down to a lot of stuff that I don’t care about. Now, I rely on all the information I’ve ever gathered, and whether it’s mine or not, I make at least a little bit of art everyday, and making art is being an artist. My art is made in the spirit of adventure and discovery, and my life is lived in that same spirit. My art and my life are the same.”--Luis Villegas from an article Profile: Luis Villegas by Richard Baron.

El Paso artist Luis Villegas is truly a remarkable man and a good friend. He earns his living as a “fine arts handyman”—his own description of his professional status. For the last eight years or so, Luis has been doing a number of jobs for Lee and me, from painting the inside and outside of the storefront of Cinco Puntos Press to painting a mural on the floor of our front porch. So when the old elm tree in our backyard died, we knew we didn’t want to rip the tree out of the yard. Nope, we wanted Luis to make something special of that tree. And his creation is incredible--two large fishes (a gar and a catfish) that will be hanging on the front porch and in the house and the tree itself, a cornucopia of fishes diving into the heart of our earth. He calls that piece “Fish Swimming Downtree.” Luis, I believe, is a wonderful example of a strong tradition of American art, men and women who work art-making into their working life. They may not become famous or rich but by the insistence on the making of art as an honored and essential profession--indeed, as a celebration of themselves and their vision--they leave an indelible mark on the psyche in the locale of their work.



On November 9th Lee and I had a party to celebrate and honor Luis and his work (our home and our office are truly molded by his imagination and work) and hopefully to get him more creative work like the sculptures and the murals. Below are pictures from the party and also photos of Luis working on a number of other projects at Cinco Puntos and at our home. Some of the photos I have lifted, with her permission, from the blog of Carolyn Drapes. She’s a wonderful photographer. Please visit her blog for more photos of the party at her Flickr site plus other images that reflect the quirky ambiente of the city of El Paso. And of course read Richard Baron’s profile of Luis as well as other profiles of the artistic folks that roam the streets here.

Other photos below are of two of the "float alone" fishes, the garfish with grandson Eddie hung from the front porch and the catfish that swims in our bedroom (our granddaughter, via a contest at the party, named them Garfunkle and Simon) and Luis with his two primos, Henry and Joe.

When asked what one word best describes that life, he matter-of-factly replies, "Oh, I’m still a musician. Everything is music."--from the Baron profile of Luis