Remembering John Oliver Simon

This morning I’m missing John Oliver Simon. To me he was a poet, translator, maestro of poetry & administration. Always a compañero. His love of Latin American poetry was a expression of his humanity, a humanity that one continent could not hold. Whether it was teaching poetry, working with cool experience through administrative tumult or joyously presenting his own poems, he was a mensch. I cannot let him go yet, so I look to his poems.

After meeting John Oliver at a California Poets In The Schools (CPITS) retreat in Marin, I invited John Oliver to San Diego County for a couple of readings & workshops at CSU San Marcos and Casa Familiar Community Center in San Ysidro. I’d been working with bilingual students in Escondido and Pauma, so I’d been tagged along with a half-dozen other poet-teachers to conduct workshops in San Ysidro where Spanish has been the language longer than English. Oddly, the director of the poetry project never appeared at the community center, so I suggested we bring John Oliver to give us an in-service. He’d directed The California Heritage Poetry Curriculum and was bilingual.

After the workshop, we walked across the border to El Patio Tijuanense on Calle Plaza Santa Cecilia. I’d been there before with poets who called a table near the religious shrine “the poets’ table.” A couple of poets invited us to sit down, and after some conversation about mutual acquaintances, the talk turned to Gonzalo Rojas. Red Dragonfly Press had recently released John Oliver’s translations of the Chilean poet. Here are a couple of stanzas from one of John Oliver’s translations of Rojas’ “What Do You Love When You Love?”:

What do you love when you love, my God: the terrible light of life
or the light of death? What do you seek or find, what
is this: love? Who is it? Woman, with her depth, her roses, volcanoes,
or this red sun, which is my furious blood
when I enter into her up to the final roots? 

Or is it all a great game, my God, and there is no woman
nor man but one body only: yours,
split up in stars of beauty in fleeting particles
of visible eternity? 

I´m dying in this, oh God, in this war
of coming and going among women in the streets, of not being able to love
three hundred of them at a time, because I am always condemned to one,
to this one, to this only one whom you gave me in the old paradise. 

And Rojas’ original: ¿Que Se Ama Cuando se Ama?

¿Qué se ama cuando se ama, mi Dios: la luz terrible de la vida
o la luz de la muerte? ¿Qué se busca, qué se halla, qué
es eso: amor? ¿Quién es? ¿La mujer con su hondura, sus rosas, sus volcanes,
o este sol colorado que es mi sangre furiosa
cuando entro en ella hasta las últimas raíces? 

¿O todo es un gran juego, Dios mío, y no hay mujer
ni hay hombre sino un solo cuerpo: eso tuyo,
repartido en estrellas de hermosura, en partículas fugaces
de eternidad visible? 

Me muero en esto, oh Dios, en esta guerra
de ir y venir entre ellas por las calles, de no poder amar
trescientas a la vez, porque estoy condenado siempre a una,
a esa una, a esa única que me diste en el viejo paraíso.

Latin American poetry was John Oliver’s poetry. The poets at El Patio Tijuanense thought of John Oliver as a Latin American poet. So it seemed fitting to me that he published some of his poetry in Spanish without translation. Here is a Neruda-esque poem of questions by John Oliver:

¿Por qué esconden
como los delfines
adentro Del Mar
en la boca de una niña?

¿Por qué no nos muestres
tus preciosos chicles
para que todo el mundo
se muera de belleza? 

¿Ya masticadas
van a salir de la tierra
como piedras blancas? 

¿O dime por qué
no los traques de una vez
para sembrar los campos
con flores calor de boca?

Here is my translation although, apologies to Maestro Simon, but I want non-Spanish speakers to imagine a poet-teacher encouraging a student to write a poem as if chewing gum:

Why hide them
in a girl’s mouth
like dolphins
in the ocean? 

Why don’t you show us
your precious chewing gum
so the whole world
can die from the beauty? 

After chewing
will they be left on earth
like white rocks? 

Tell me why
you don’t chew them all at once
to sow the fields
with flowers hot from your mouth?

Later John Oliver and I were asked to write essays about our experiences in San Ysidro for an anthology. My essay had included a story about the City of San Diego taking a fire engine from San Ysidro after annexing it. That story was the first thing Casa Familiar director Andrea Skorepa told me before I started the after-school poetry workshop. As a poet, I took it as a cautionary tale about taking and giving.

The anthology’s editor, however,  wanted something more suited for writing an upcoming grant, and I sensed he felt the story somehow reflected negatively on San Diego. The editor insisted on cuts, but I thought Skorepa’s story had been my introduction to Casa Familiar. It felt as if I was being asked to write a grant instead of an account of the after-school workshop.

Later John Oliver told me he had been asked to cut his essay, too, which had included a meditation on the long lines—poets must talk about lines—crossing the border and the significance of the religious shrine in the bar and to add boiler-plate prose designed for future grants.

I must’ve had a look on my face because, John Oliver shrugged and said we have to be arts administrators sometimes even though poetry is more important because that’s what gets us a seat at the table.

In El Patio Tijuanense, I’d told a story about my futile attempt to hunt ducks in Quitupan, Mexico. John Oliver tried to cheer me up and on, “Brando, para el pato salvaje, volando a la velocidad de la poesía” (for the wild duck [a nickname for French Canadians without visas] fly at the speed of poetry). It was good advice, some words I should thank John Oliver for everyday.