Vandals, Monuments & Iambic Pentameter

A large owl, wings spread, drifted slowly over my car as I drove into Lyons from Highway 36. The grasses along 36 are so blanched in color now it is often difficult to discern deer that pop up suddenly from the low ditches. The owl took me by surprise too. Its wings were brown and white, talons ready to snap something. I thought of all the things the appearance of an owl can mean to different groups of people: death, power, prophet of doom, protector, symbol of Lilith.

But life has been rather serendipitous lately. I was just up in Estes Park the other day getting William Sitting Bull to sign an artist's contract that will allow Winds of Change to use one of his paintings on the cover of the winter 2009 issue. The woman he lives with, Bonnie, is a sculptor. During the course of conversation, it turned out she knows Father Bob Burger who I have been to Haiti with. His good friend, Virginia, is Bonnie's mom. I have been in bible studies with Virginia and we are friends. Father Burger, Virginia and Bonnie and many other good folk are trying hard to restore the Sitting Bull monument which is in South Dakota. William is Sitting Bull's great-great grandson. You can read about him here: http://www.starroutestudio.com/billy_bio.shtml

I have never been to this particular monument, but after looking through the powerpoint presentation that the group uses to appeal for funds, I was shocked at visage of the statue. Apparently, vandals love to shoot at it and throw things at it. It has been so damaged that it is painful to view. When you read about Sitting Bull's life and death, then look at the face of the monument, you just feel sad. I found a lovely article in the NY Times about the effort to restore the monument: http://select.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/us/28thisland.html

I just finished reading the wonderful verse-novel by David Mason, "Ludlow." It was recently awarded the Colorado Book Award. Painstakingly written in octaves and much iambic pentameter or variations thereof, you feel rocked and lolled in such lines like:

Three decades passing like a dust bowl cloud
a long train wailing through the arid night

Yet the horrors of the massacre (under John D. Rockefeller's watch by the CO Nat'l Guard) of women, children, and their men who worked the mines, is not written gently. Mason, a professor at Colorado College and lover of all things Greek, will amaze the reader who did not know how many Greek people were in Colorado during the early part of the 20th century, or for that matter, how diverse this ghost town in Las Animas was. Welsh, Irish, Greek, Italian, Mexican—all these nationalities lived together in tight quarters, and often died together in inevitable mining accidents. Between 1884-1912, more than 1,700 miners died. Which brings me back to monuments.

The Ludlow monument was erected in 1918. It remained untouched I believe until 2003 when it was inexplicably damaged and a new one had to be erected. Why in 2003? Why was it touched at all? Why are any monuments touched that mostly commemorate people who were beaten down? These monuments are simple and humble. They are not on the scale of a Lincoln or Washington. Maybe that is why people feel they can riddle them with bullets or pummel them with rocks and bottles. The closer things are to the heart, the more vulnerable they become. This is only my summation. I could be totally wrong. Or, maybe David Mason had many reasons why he added a Shakespearean line to one of his stanzas. His fictional character, Luisa, is in jail. Here, Mason chooses to insert a very nihilistic line. Surely, Luisa would not have known of Shakespeare or of Richard II who mused:

"I have been studying how I might compare
this prison where I live unto the world."

But if I'm not careful, I might find myself whispering this line as I wander through the grassy lands of the Standing Rock Reservation looking for Sitting Bull's visage, or search for the wind-swept ghost town of Ludlow in the Sangre de Cristos.

Copper Nickel

On October 17, with my parents, husband, son, his girlfriend, other friends and fellow poets in tow, I read my two poems just recently published in CU-Denver's journal Copper Nickel at the release party at the Denver Press Club. I was dressed in poetic black. I did well. No visible shaking, I read slowly. It helped that I spoke to Pushcart Prize winner Eliot Wilson, who a week before had heard me read at Cannon Mines. In assessing my readings skills he had stated bluntly: "You read like you're at an auction." He advised me the night of the Copper Nickel reading: "Look at me when you read and if you see me raise my hand, it will tell you that you need to slow down." He did not raise his hand once, and came up to me afterwards and said, "It was perfect."

Another delightful take on the reading comes from fellow blogger, Jeff Bahr in his archives. Look for Copper Nickel: http://www.whimsyspeaks.com/2008/10/copper_nickel.html

My dad clapped the loudest though I don't think he had the slightest notion of what I was referring to in my poems. But my parents were troopers. They sat through a near-pornographic fiction piece that kicked off the reading and several other poems that chafed their Republican, neo-con sensibilities. To be fair to them, I attended the Anglican break-away church service up in Estes with them on Sunday morning and nodded off during the long "thees and thous" of the archaic service, but was touched that they loved so much having me there. Oh parents.

I've attached a few more pics of my nephews who are growing like Missouri flowers in spring. I must see them soon!

Dorianne's Paring

"Late have I loved you, O Beauty, so ancient and so new, late have I loved you!"
-St. Augustine


On October 11, I was lucky to take a workshop with Dorianne Laux. I would urge you to read my fellow blogger's take on it: http://bethpartin.com/:
"We sat surrounding Dorianne Laux, up a twisty stair in a room at the top of the Tivoli. She was warm. We were worried, for our poems would be workshopped in the next three hours, and no one yet knew how it would happen. I answered the call to adventure weeks before, in the form of an email notice. And when I stood at the bus stop in the rain, my guide stopped for me and took me with her. But when we reached the city, I wanted to navigate alone. After fortifying myself with a large, mango-magical salad, I made my way to the dark brick tower that was the Tivoli and climbed. Serially, we took her tests: a memory, recited as if from within it, no matter how long ago. A poem about an object that mystified us. And then she grappled with us.

"We hadn’t expected roughness with a smile. We’d expected poems on paper handed back marked up. But she held our poems in one fist—later, as we would discover, hardly marked at all—and told us where they wanted to go and how we were holding them back. More spit and vinegar, please. As if they were our children and we’d raised them to say nothing at all if they couldn’t say something nice."

In my own words, suffice it to say I was riveted to my seat even as she took a sharp knife to my poem I had written about my brothers and barked in her lovely (yes, I said lovely), cigarette-hoarse voice, "We don't give a shit about your brother's head being slammed against tile. We want you to show us how to love your brothers like you do." No one in any workshop has ever said it in this way. To make others love my brothers. And then she topped everything off with the brutal beauty of coming down to earth: "Whenever you write a poem, ask yourself, 'What the fuck am I trying to say?'"

Density & Desert

Having just returned from the land of Disney and density, I appreciate so much more the weekend of Oct. 26 in Moab. Though floating on my back in the Marriott's pool at 6:30 a.m., in Anaheim, everything still dark, the water turquoise and yellow, the sky mottled and releasing cool drops of rain on my face was very nice, and the warm water excellent for relieving the angst of dystonia, I could not think of a single poem. Even walking down the long stretches of Huntington Beach, bending to examine orange seashells, watching the sky turn to fiesta pink, the pelicans black shadows against such a sky, forming geometric shapes that descended periodically with brutal speed down into the water, I could still not think poetically. Recognize that I am writing this somewhat poetically only in retrospect!

I know there are a million poems. Sitting through panel discussions on genetics and genomics and the recent technological advances in DNA sequencing is breathtaking and I tried to file away poems in my brain even as some other part of my brain formed journalistic articles to include in the next issue of Winds of Change.

But I kept drifting back to the canyons and arches and red rock and yellow grasses and lizards and purple daisy. And yes, so easy, you might think. How very Mary Oliver. But it was the silence I loved the most. My husband and I found canyons up Hurrah Pass where we could hike for miles and not see another person. We walked a long way back into Hunter's Canyon and only saw one other person as we emerged from it. We were suddenly frightened because there were only arroyos and long grasses and evening coming quick and a thin river to follow. We thought of the flash floods of spring and saw how the trees and boulders had been swept like little pieces of flint into the center of a once tumultuous river. But the openness is so soothing.

In Anaheim, I told my husband I was on sensory overload. One morning on my way to breakfast, I passed the Marriott's gardens. I heard music. I looked down into the garden and there was a rock and it was singing to me. No, not the way a lizard sings to you in the desert if you are prone to peyote, but a fake rock, which I had taken to be real, with tiny holes in it so that I realized it was a speaker. In the hotel lobby there was piped in musak; on the way to the pool there was more musak; on the elevator there was musak; in the hotel restaurants there was still more musak. I thought of Oliver Sach's book "Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain." No wonder some musicians end up with epilepsy every time they hear music. No one can explain it. Much like PD, it is a complete neurological conundrum. But I still wonder at the way in which my brain rejects music and noise. Even classical music. I'd rather listen to complete silence in a canyon and discern the rustle of lizard feet than listen to a singing rock in a garden.