Claudia Castro Luna

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Among my busy calendar of Poetry Zoom events this week, I was able to attend Tracing the Maps, a poetry reading hosted by Seattle’s Hugo House, featuring Carolyne Wright, Claudia Castro Luna, Cindy Williams Gutiérrez, and Raúl Sánchez. (It is not available as a recording, but it should be.)

I had heard three of the poets in person, over the years, but I am ashamed to admit that I had never heard our Washington Poet Laureate, Claudia Castro Luna, read her work. And I was, frankly, blown away. The woman has such presence and poise, and remarkable, memorable poems full of striking and eye-opening images.

I recently bought a copy of her 2016 chapbook from Floating Bridge Press: this city, a collection of 19 prose poems and an introduction, “Invitation.” If you aren’t yet familiar with her work, here’s a sample to introduce you:

Aerial Equivalent

Each night evening lights, like birthday cake candles, draw out their
last breath. Curtains close over windows in hill homes and in seedy
motel rooms where families too live week to week. From thousands of
hushed, slumbering bodies the unspoken loosens up, levitates. Wishes,
anxieties, and aversions reach the heavens. They fly over the east, over
the west, by way of the north, circling hills and downtown. A formless
psychic soup occupies the aerial equivalent of the city below. Slowly an
invisible city coalesces, imperfect but peaceful, unlike its terrestrial
twin. By daybreak the buoyant city crumbles. Its detritus unadorned
and lodged in unsuspecting throats.

–Claudia Castro-Luna, from this city (Floating Bridge Press, 2016)

You can read more about Claudia at her website, https://www.castroluna.com/ (see link above) or at poets.org.

On Poetry

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I lifted this from a friend’s blog, The Poetry Department…aka The Boynton Blog  For some reason, I especially needed to hear it today. Funny how the universe can respond.

 

“I prefer the absurdity of writing poems/
to the absurdity of not writing poems.”
Wisława Szymborska
(July 2, 1923 – February 1, 2012)

. . . . .
photo: Piotr Guzik
quote from “Possibilities”

 

 

In Troubled Times

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I can thank Robert Reich for introducing me to this poet, Clint Smith. I’m just beginning to explore his work, but in this poem, he reminds me of Naomi Shihab Nye in the way he looks at both sides of a controversy and asks us to rise to a new level of empathy, to reconsider the way we think about other people’s catastrophes. He challenges me to think differently about reading the news.

Meanwhile, 20 of my Emily Dickinson poems have found a home at Ravenna Press of Edmonds, Washington, and I’m pleased as punch about this delightful little book, which combines my poems with those of Port Townsend poet Jayne Marek, and images from artist George J. Farrah.

I keep thinking, these days, of Neil Gaiman‘s admonition — in difficult times, he tells us — “make good art.”

Lucille Clifton (1936-2010)

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I met Lucille Clifton the first time, I think, in 1991 when she came to the University of Washington to read for our Watermark series. Her larger-than-life personality and her brash honesty about being black, about being female, swept me away. I was in the MFA program and I thought I had something to say. But I was too young, too sheltered, too inexperienced to have written the poems she had written: “homage to my hips,” or “lumpectomy eve,” or “in the meantime” (“the Lord of loaves and fishes / frowns as the children of / Haiti Somalia Bosnia Rwanda Everyhere / float onto the boats of their bellies / and die”). There seemed no subject that was so controversial she wouldn’t take a crack at it, and I was in awe of her.

At the reception after the reading, another young poet started telling Clifton all about herself. I knew it was nerves, but it was still a little stunning to see her binge-talk through the entire conversation. When she walked away, Clifton said, laughing, “Does she ever listen? How does she ever learn anything?”

As a member of the Watermark committee I was gifted with the opportunity to drive her to the airport the next morning. She said, “Oh, drop me at the curb,” but I refused. Over breakfast, I told her a little about the “verse-writing” class that had recently been assigned to me. My professor and long-time mentor, Colleen McElroy, had advised that I teach them “one thing,” a thing that she would not divulge. I asked Lucille Clifton what she emphasized in her classes, and she began expounding. Listening and learning–not just from teachers, from everything–was the general theme. “And never stop,” she said.

I remembered that she had been a visiting poet at some university in the deep south, and when I asked her what she listened to and learned there, she said, “Oh, they thought they’d teach me something, but they learned something else.”

Lucille Clifton had six children. That, she admitted, had taught her plenty. She asked me if I had children, and when I said no, she was quick to say, “It’s not for everyone,” leading me to break down and share my infertility woes, and my tentative decision to adopt. “Well, do it then,” she said. “If it’s your path, it’s your path.”

Friday evening, conservative David Brooks said on the PBS news hour, that he can imagine a leader who will help our nation unite around a conversation about race. It strikes me that in that conversation, white people might spend most of their time listening. Maybe some learning will happen.

fox

…The foxes are hungry, who could blame them for what they do?… –“Foxes in Winter,” Mary Oliver

who
can blame her for hunkering
into the doorwells at night,
the only blaze in the dark
the brush of her hopeful tail,
the only starlight
her little bared teeth?

and when she is not satisfied
who can blame her for refusing to leave,
for raising the one paw up and barking,
Master of the Hunt, why am i
not feeding, not being fed?