Three poems by Monica Navarro

I, Monica Navarro and Ayzza Comacho share a laugh with Genny Lim on SD County Ed TV.

I've been posting at least one poem a day for April, which is National Poetry Month. Some of the more popular posts have been about K-12 poetry, so since it's Thursday, I thought I'd post three by a poet I was blessed to work with K-12.

Here's a poem Monica Navarro wrote in 2nd grade:

Strawberry Diamonds

One rainy afternoon,

my grandpa and I went shopping and saw flowers.

The blossoms opened their mouths to say,

“I am the most eautiful of all,”

but we ignore them and walk on

to the strawberry plants.

They lift their leaves and I see

a worm hiding from the birds.

“I am the ripest,”

“I am the juiciest of all,” and

“Come and get me.”

I pull out my wallet

and we buy flowers and strawberries.

At home Grandpa and I lant them in the sun

where they shine like diamonds.”

 The following year she wrote a poem that had an edgy honesty for a 3rd-grader:

Blinding Yellow

I have yellow hate so strong and bright

it blinds my eyes. I can’t see anything,

but my sister sees me and says, “Monica,

stop pretending you’re blind.”

“I’m not pretending,” I say and then

bump into a wall and it hurts,

a red baseball hitting my head.

My sister laughs and jumps away to tell our mother.

Monica's high school didn't have writing residencies, but she wanted to write for a contest. Over the years she would email me poems, so when David Avalos was creating his installation Mi Corazón Escondido, I knew one of her pieces inspired by history would be perfect:

Kings of Their Cities

He always told me,

"La familia es todo.

Siempre acuerdate de donde eres,"

was most likely his second favorite line.

He was my first educator,

counselor

peer.

I saw the way he came home from work

every afternoon

covered in dust and smelling of the land.

The way his fingers always felt so rough

in my hands

the deep lines in his face

that had been born

from spending so many hours under the sun.

You could hear his old white truck

driving in over the hill to the house

before you could even see it.

I found it inexplicably amusing

how he would sit on the front steps

untie his mud encrusted boots

take off his hat

to fan his face with.

I was his first grandchild

and his querida.

We had an old large circular porch

in the backyard where

we would sit for what seemed like forever

listening to the beat up old radio play rancheras

and the songs of his old barrio in Michoacan.

With me on his right leg, a beer can on his left,

we sat, and he talked,

talked about his old country

where everything was beautiful.

Talked about how he brought our family

over from Mexico.

I could hear the pride in his voice.

He imprinted our family history

into me like a typewriter upon paper.

In summer when it was too hot to talk,

we would sit listening to

everything alive around us,

balancing each other out like scales

During family parties,

the old men would sit

in the shade of the orange trees.

He would hold me on his lap

and I knew he was proud of me.

They talked about the family,

complained about their wives,

and discussed everyone else’s business.

You could tell the men became excited

when they talked about their cities in Mexico.

They way they rearranged themselves in their chairs

and stumbled over their words

as they hurriedly began narrating their memories

as if they were afraid the taste of these stories would soon disappear from their tongues.

In this way I came to imagine

the land

we came from

to be so special

that it could make old men laugh

and remember being young again.

Driving through the fields in the old white truck,

he would explain to me

how the plants grew and what they needed to live.

He was always trying to teach me

about life through metaphors and old stories,

as if how the trees’ needs for sun and water

to produce the oranges and lemons for picking

would somehow teach me

about growing up in my own family

and becoming someone from whom

people could learn,

someone whom people could look up to.

This man was my grandfather;

my abuelo.

With me on his right leg, a beer can on his left,

we would sit listening to

everything alive around us,

balancing each other out like scales

Poetry has a lot of magic. To find it young and keep it across time is a spell worth casting again and again.

David Avalos' with a flush of hidden hearts: front, Carlos Von Son, Monica, Adrian Arancibia; back Avalos and I. 

 

  

Place Poems III: "local-looking"

As I was reading James Dickey's "In the Marble Quarry" to study his sense of "organic form," I was  

surprised to find the phrase "local-looking" lodged into a passage about sculptures emerging from blocks of stone. Of course, one of the most famous sculptures of all time emerged from what was believed to be a flawed block of marble: The David.

Dickey's move from the great sculptor to the poet himself covers the distance from Florence to Georgia, not that all poems need to cover that much distance. But as a field editor for the San Diego Poetry Annual, I am frequently disappointed to read through so many submissions that never look locally. 

Dickey writes,

     ...the original shape
Michelangelo believed was in every rock upon earth
     is heavily stirring, 

     surprised to be an angel//
***
     but no more surprised than I
to feel sadness fall off as I myself
     were rising from stone 

     held by a thread in midair,
badly cut, local-looking, and totally uninspired,
     not a masterwork 

     or even worth seeing at all
but the spirit of this place just the same,
     felt here as joy.

What if place/setting determines form? I would rather read a hundred more free verse poems about New York/Chicago/Los Angeles than a sestina or sonnet about those places; of course, form most often expresses the narrator's point of view. In an environmental crisis, the disconnect between setting and POV reflects that crisis. I grieve at so many poems in which the setting is a mind isolated from this planet. Too much nowhere produces more nothing.

Please notice that I'm not saying that I don't want to read poems in form. Nor am I saying I don't want to read poems about someone's inner space. I just want to read poems formed or in-formed by the place that has formed and in-formed them. That intersection of self and place can often arouse in me a "spirit" of "joy" as a poem lifts a moment from time's flow and suspends it on the sky of the page.

There is some weight to Dickey's metaphor that poems are sculptures, light ones perhaps twisting regardless of line length, or just as bad, freighted with nowhere-ness so the thread of interest snaps well before I turn the page or get to the final line. In organic form (Dickey disliked the term "free verse"), content in-forms the shape of the poem. 

The thread of interest runs both ways, of course. A poem could be about my hometown, but if it doesn't connect with the spirit of the place in the first stanza, I'll probably stop reading. So it isn't enough to set a poem in SoCal; setting needs to touch--dare I write it?--spirit.

A reasonable objection to this aesthetic would be that it ignores interior settings. I agree. By the laws of geography and astronomy, there will always be more good poems about places removed from SoCal than there will be about SoCal. All the more reason for me to find the rare poem set beneath my feet.

And just to assure you that I look beyond SoCal, here's an introduction to an anthology I co-edited for Writers' Ink in San Diego:  

If titles count, A Year in Ink is about what the writers who tumbled into the extreme southwest corner of the U.S. decided to submit halfway through 2011.  No more, no less. And that’s enough.  

It’s not easy writing in San Diego. I don’t want to name names, but we are the town that proved “New York, New York” wrong: just because you can fake it there doesn’t mean you can fake it anywhere. As poet John Peterson noted, you can tell San Diego isn’t really a part of the rest of the U.S. because of the extra set of immigration check points at the county line on I-5, I-15 & I-8; it gives the impression no one wants to hear what we have to say. A calendar of “Southern California Poetry” managed to name 48 poets without one San Diegueño among them. A careful reading of certain “California” poetry anthologies shows that one of the best career moves a San Diego poet could make would be to relocate to San Francisco and die.  

So what’s a San Diegueño writer to do? Write and publish.  In a previous edition of A Year in Ink, former Union Tribune books editor Arthur Salm wrote, “I confess to being a contrarian [when] it comes to the literal idea of writers as a literal, physical community….But a figurative, literary community? Oh, yes, indeed.” One good confession deserves another: any community that doesn’t manifest some point-at-able aesthetics is not a community but a multitude waiting for a miracle. It’s not just the bound pages but what’s on them that matters. Oh me of little faith. 

So what are the significant poetics of San Diego? In these pages, can a regional accent be heard? Do the form & content of these poems resonate with this time & place? Most of these poems have right margins like the coastline if you’re facing Tijuana. Sorry, neo-formalists. These lines break where image or music need to; it’s a border thing. It’s a form manifest. And it’s neo every day.   

Reading submissions, I did discover a consistent characteristic: most have nothing to do with San Diego during or around 2011. Yet 2011 was an astonishing year in this old city. The ocean that largely defines it changed. A cold current came ashore farther north than it had in the past, bringing with it black jellyfish that drove swimmers from the water. A photograph of a large fin among surfers in Cardiff went viral and raised discussions about sharks frequenting our coast. A band of Kumeyaay Indians put the name of their casino on the old Sports Arena, just off the historic Kumeyaay Trail to Playas (now called “Rosecrans Street”). The Pala Band of Indians continued their battle to purchase back their ancestral homelands in Warner Springs, a volta in the poem of history.
Poetry, however, favors an intimate persona over a public one. The whispering of subtext can’t always be heard in the public voice of “we.”  

In poetry saying something while making it sound interesting is risky business. In a poem like “jazz is e.e. cummings,” if the poet can run a line of euphonic imagery in one direction, pivot without losing flow and avoid running in the ruts of the literal, it will be fine. We like our music imbued with more than sound. Poems like “Silent Movie,” “How the World Sounds” and “Why I Married Him” all have that music & luminous imagery that draws me.     

In a sense, “Why I Married Him” is a solid representative of  San Diego poems: first, it has nothing to do with San Diego; second, it’s about leaving someplace (in this case, Milwaukee); and third, the poem ended up here. Most importantly for me it eschews the obvious and finds awe: 

I lived without music then, cut off
from the Rain Prelude and nocturnes
of fog, but the bridge! It buzzed –
no, not like a giant bumblebee,
but only as a metal bridge can sing, 
from the maws of Bethlehem Steel.

“Familia Anclada” (anchor family) is another poem about leaving or at least needing to leave. It’s a poem that doesn’t offer an answer but raises the right questions.
She cannot cross the desert 
with her babies,
The able kids are throwing gang signs
in the alleys littered in crime scenes

In “What I Know,” Red-necked Phalaropes stop over at Mono Lake on their way here. The birders walk in “single file” on the path through the rare environment: “each soft step/we take in this tender landscape/says we wish to be nowhere else.”
So does each poem in this anthology. At least for 2011.

This anthology represents a community, a point of culmination from many directions. One morning in The Ink Spot, Kelli Wescott, Tammy Greenwood and I sat around that big table upstairs while the fierce sun lit the poems & prose.  Kelli kept track as Tammy and I introduced pieces to each other, like planning a dinner party:  “Seat this chapter beside this poem because they have a lot in common to converse about.”

So cook last year and cancel the calendar. This place of pages is rocking, and it looks as if we’re going to party for the rest of the night. 

Those were some poems from that year and place. No "London" by Blake. No 'Innisfree' by Yeats. No Langston speaking of the Euphrates or muddy Mississippi. My interest in setting might sound like a real estate agent's mantra--"location, location, location." Yes, the central location will ultimately be in the mind; nevertheless, the roots of endangered plants give a voice its distinct resonance if they connect. 

Remembering James Luna

This morning I am missing my neighbor James Luna. We worked together at Palomar College, but we weren't just colleagues and So Cal guys; I loved his work and went to his installations whenever I could.  He showed California in it's complicated beauty. This image from the Chris Eyre movie Bringing It All Back Home shows James on an exercise bike while Marlon Brando in The Wild One rides along behind. James was a great installation artist and a "sacred clown."

I could go on about why I love Eyre's movie about James' work, especially this shot, and James would expect me not to be quiet this morning. When an installation artist like James passes, the loss is too great to talk about immediately because it was James' use of his body and voice within his art space that can never be replaced, but later we will try as he did in making his Chapel for Pablo Tac. To feel that loss, I think James would say that home was more important than art, so at La Jolla there's a great piece missing this morning.

I want everyone "down the hill" to have a sense of what we've all lost. I wrote the article below for The Union Tribune around 1995. It's not up to date because over the years James gave much more. Just a month ago after dinner  he shared a movie he made using The Beach Boys' "In My Room."

James Luna told us, "we got it all...so tap it down." We will do so.

When James Luna says, "I'm a California dude," he doesn't mean that he surfs. He means that he knows who he is. And who he is an installation/performance artist who uses traditional Native American art forms as well as surf music and video.

Ironically, much of Southern California does not know about Luna though he is nationally respected performance and multimedia artist. Luna may have performed and had his work in some the most prestigious museums in the United States--including The Whitney Museum of Art in New York and the Smithsonian Institute's Museum of Natural History--but he has yet to present a performance piece in San Diego County where he is a member the Luiseño Indians at the La Jolla Reservation in North County (He has, however, exhibited installations at Centro Cultural de la Raza, and his "Artifact Piece" from the Museum of Man later gained international attention at The New Museum of Art's Decade Show in New York).

On August 21, The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in La Jolla will present Luna in a lecture/performance that brings local audiences as close to a Luna performance as they have ever been. Whether the evening at MCA conclude as Luna's performance did at the Scottsdale Center for the Arts--with the audience either standing on their feet or falling in worship at Luna's--is yet to be seen.

"Let's get this out front: theater is not what I am, though there are any number of similarities," Luna says. "Installation is very broad and that's one of its strengths. I approach it as I approach a painting. I don't think about acting. I am not a trained actor. But that's not to say that I don't script or monologue. I do, but it comes out of the art."

Many of Luna's monologues emerge from the objects he creates. As multimedia art, Luna's verbal expression cannot be separated from his visuals. He uses anything he can to get his point across. In his performance piece The Shameman, Luna portrays an enterprising shaman who sells objects that combine such disparate materials as condoms and a tennis racket, a cellular phone and a buffalo horn.

Many artists lecture on their work, but few move back and forth between two-dimensional and performance work as Luna does. Consequently, Luna's lectures are unusual. "James' lecture is unlike anything we've done," says MCA education curator Seonid MacArthur. "His use of sound, movement and music in his performance pieces will be new for us...he's not so much about ritual as he is about combining his heritage and sense of ritual with humor."

Luna's lectures did not always include performance. "I do this a lot and found that showing slides or video of a performance didn't do it," Luna says. At MCA, his lecture will include excerpts from Artifact Piece, Places for People to Meet and The Shameman.

"I am not a trained actor," Luna emphasizes. "I am a visual artist when I do a performance piece, which comes from a different place than where actors come from," Luna said. "And I am not just about Indian issues . . . that should be clear in Shameman because there were other issues in that piece. I'm a therapist, used car salesman and an evangelist."

Luna is a California dude of this century, if not the next: "I use pop imagery because I like it. It makes a nice soup, a blend. . . . Political art gets caught up in being the victim and loses sight of the whole person."

Humor is a good portion of Luna's recipe. "I've had people come to see me thinking I'm going to do a nice tom-tom dance. And as I unload, they realize this isn't what they came to hear," Luna says. "But they have every right to leave--or to laugh."

The laughter at his performance of Shameman at the Scottsdale Center for the Arts was loud and long, coming from an audience primarily made up of Indians. Those who came to see him dance to a tom-tom instead saw him fancydance to Right Said Fred's "I'm Too Sexy."

Luna asked the audience to hold hands: "It's not easy to hold hands. That's the feel of humanity," he told the crowd." Touch that white person. Come on you rich Arizona Indian."

In The Shameman, Luna's sense of humor cuts deeply in two directions: first against "shamans" who sell spirituality and secondly whites who buy it as a commodity. America may not be a happier place since European contact complicated land, language and religion. But at least America is a funnier place with white people here.

In "Notes on My Art Work #674," Luna writes, "I am not a healer but can be considered a clown." And clowning has its own healing power; as Luna says humor is "the first step in recovery."

"That's an Indianism, to be able to laugh at ourselves," Luna said, discussing the sharp satire in Shameman. "We are really more alike than we are different." It's the humor in Luna's work that lets the audience get close enough to feel where the painful wounds are between us. 

Place Poems, II: "Dreaming America" and "Boca de Tijuana"

"What is the literature of Southern California today?" moderator Shadab Hashmi Zeest asked at a recent panel discussion at The Carlsbad Library. 

For me, the roots of literature in this area go back to the stories embedded in the bird songs of indigenous people. You won't find any bird songs in Erle Stanley Gardner's or Raymond Chandler's books. They got the weather into their writing. But if literature is a text that a culture finds significant, then the diversity of SoCal's migratory ebb and flow--especially where birds, animals, fish & plants are included--makes Zeest's question difficult and worth trying to answer. But diversity is difficult enough just in the context of people, so let's start there.

When I was a boy, my grandfather took me to Mission Valley to see the late San Diego Chargers play the then-Cleveland Browns. The crowd was cheering the Browns loudly, and when I asked my grandfather why that was, he just shook his head and said, "There's no such thing as a home field advantage in San Diego." 

Because he attended the same elementary school as my cousins

and because one of his childhood homes 

was on the the street I drive to work, 

Juan Felipe Herrera has always been my poet-elder.

The same holds true of literature. At a bi-national poetry conference in Tijuana, just months before Juan Felipe Herrera was appointed poet laureate of The United States, the audience asked a California State University (CSU) professor about the poetry of Juan Felipe. 

"I don't know who that is," the professor said.

The literary crowd seemed to fidget as one in their seats.

"He's California's poet laureate," someone from the Tijuana home-audience said. 

"I don't care about things like that," the professor said. 

Maybe there is no home-team literature in So Cal.

Another professor from The States leaned over to me and whispered, "I am not impressed."

It was a sober moment. Of course that CSU professor would later bemoan why attendance at his east-coast dominated reading series was poor and why more students avoided majoring in his program. Meanwhile, the vice-president that same CSU invited Juan Felipe to a standing-room-only reading in the college concert hall. The home team, apparently, had become so rare at home, it's an exotic example of "multiculturalism."

Raymond Chandler's cameo in Double Indemnity.

So Cal is the kind of place east-coasters come to get tenure on their way to a job at a liberal arts college in The Midwest. I've heard it called the "scorched earth career path," work like hell in overcrowded classrooms on the way to better job in Iowa, Ohio or some other state with only four letters. Since there's no home field advantage, So Cal lit has a strange rep. Raymond Chandler, for example, was an out-of-towner. Perhaps the most famous California novel written by a Californio is about emigrating here: The Grapes of Wrath.

Roberto Costillo receiving  the Felino Prize.

But there is more to contemporary local literature. Roberto Costillo's friendship with the late Robert Jones has been and enduring story of literary love crossing the border. On the commemoration of Jones' birthday, Costillo sent a poem to el norte to be at a reading in Jones' old neighborhood near University and 30th in San Diego. On the centennial of LoVerne Brown's birthday, the late Steve Kowit--himself a San Diego treasure--gave a lovely overview of her work for the Ocean Beach Historical Society. But what seems to characterize the best-known California poets is that they were from elsewhere. 

Steve Kowit, whose many poems
remain San Diego treasures.

The current poet-laureate, Dana Gioa is the exception. He often introduces himself as being from Hawthorne, home of the Beach Boys, setting for several Quentin Tarrentino movies. And he does have a poem about a Beach Boys song; it might not be Southern California today, but his roots are undeniable. 

For my MFA thesis, I credited storyteller Rocinda Nolasquez as an inspiration. Nolasquez was the oldest living survivor of the removal of the Cupeño tribe from Warner's Springs. While working as a research assistant on the documentary So My Grandchildren Will Know, I had a chance to hear Nolasquez talk. Her stories were an incredible work of survival. She set the standard.

Although Nolasquez didn't write literary theory, I think she would have agreed with N. Scott Momady's "Man Made of Words" in which he said, 

Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind on the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures that are there and all the faintest motions in the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk. (164-5)

Although Momaday wrote most famously about the Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico, his tribe, The Kiowa, traced its origins to what is now Kansas. Once while in Greensberg, I went into the Kiowa County Library to look for Momaday's Pulitzer Prize-winning House Made of Dawn. That branch of the Kiowa County Library had no copies of the most famous novel by a Kiowa. When a tornado destroyed the library along with most of the town a few years later, it was more evidence for the aesthetic of the survival and the oral tradition... in other words, living to tell.




So, here are a couple of place poems I've lived to tell.


Dreaming American

Trying not to be the white ring around the sun,
I circle slowly like a raven over Mt. Soledad
where you sing down the sky.

The man thinks a disguise of beads and weavings,
but I think otherwise, and being like a raven,
I want to call out but have the voice of adobe bricks stacking.

On this morning after a winter storm,

let your eyes follow my turn away from the Pacific,
you'll see the Cuyamcas rise higher than I can fly.

You have a voice that would make a man fall from the sky,
so I try to be a raven to follow your sound
east to Tempe or Albuquerque,
into the desert where you will work your life
like an olla, the mouth pouring
the precious water from the cool, quiet dark
and into the dry light. I would be the man
who waits with the patience of a boulder in
the gold desert light for water to bring
out the flecks of mica in my skin.

One world slams into the other so hard.
I can hear the rumbling from the quarry
and under the river’s surface. In the Next World,
I want your voice to crease this desert where we know
who we are, and a black freeway
hisses east to west, and we love nevertheless.

La Boca de Tijuana  

for Francisco Bustos y Michael Cheno Wickert
Cuando la boca del Rio runs into the ocean,
when it rises onto the delta
and you hear its united tributaries undercut the sets of waves,
when this Tijuana River meets this Pacific Ocean,
its mouth says "I know both sides of the border."

Antes de la lectura en el faro,
caminé a la boca donde las palomas y la migra estan de pie
y caminé a la boca del rio que cruza la frontera,
antes de la línea it made the same music but sang different words.
It said “Gravity is my God and ‘here we are, here we go’ and
we couldn't stop if we wanted to."

There are no roads to la boca.
So I walked and listened before returning to the monument
where I said whatever words with whatever music I carried back,
boca a boca.


Works Cited
Momaday, N. Scott.  "Man Made of Words," The Remembered Earth, ed. Geary Hobson.  University of New Mexico Press, Alberquerque, 1979.