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When the editors of THIS Literary Magazine decided to develop as our first themed issue the idea of "Other," I knew immediately that John Oliver Simon and his work would be a perfect fit and contacted him to ask if he would be amenable to an interview that highlighted some of his work in the field of translation and as a supporter, developer, and instructor of poetry in the schools. John was gracious in his agreement to participate and to share some of his poetry with us, and the following interview is the outcome of weeks of conversation via our first connection over a decade ago, the Internet. (JP Reese)

JP Reese: John, you're known not only for your own poetry, but for supporting the work and translating the poetry of Latin American poets. Why and when did you become enamored of Hispanic poetry and what prompted you to make your first visit to Latin America?  Did you go alone?  Did you already have contacts there, or did you make friends with poets who were previously strangers to you?
 

John Oliver Simon: I fell in love with Spanish around 1980. I was drafting an alt.hist novel set in a contemporary California in a time stream in which Cortés took an arrow in the eye on the Noche Triste, June 30, 1520. Man in the High Castle meets Aztec. I found out the hard way that I’m no novelist. I can’t move a character across the room. So I went to Mexico City for the first time to do research for my novel.

The first book of Latin American poetry that came to my hand was an anthology of poets born since 1940 entitled La novísima poesía latinoamericana, which I bought for 140 pesos (about a buck) in the mercado of Oaxaca among the vendedoras of watermelons and lizards.

My first translations from the Spanish were from La novísima, people like Adrián Desiderato (1949) of Argentina and José Manuel Pintado (1947) of Mexico, no one I came to know at all well later on. I sent them to the editor of the antho, Jorge Boccanera (1949), an Argentine poet exiled in Mexico. At that time I made the decision that I was not interested in re-translating the great and famous, Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) and César Vallejo (1892-1938), but would concentrate on poets my age and younger.

The one important older poet I have translated is the great Chilean Gonzalo Rojas (1917-2011). Red Dragonfly did a fine bilingual edition of 12 Rojas poems, Velocities of the Possible (2000). Green Integer published my selected Rojas, From the Lightning (2008).

Jorge Boccanera got right back to me and was kindly positive — the translations were good, even my mistakes sounded poetic. Boccanera, his compinche Saúl Ibargoyen (1939) and I had a glad meeting with many abrazos and tequilitas in August, 1982.

Seven of my earliest translations were published by Nimrod in a Latin American issue in 1983. From my marginal notes in La novísima, at that stage I was looking up a plethora of words: desfile, moreno, hirviendo, a cuestas, zarpa, rezar. I was stumped at that time by such as lo pequeño and sobretasa. One thing being a translator will give you is an excellent vocabulary in the source language. By 1984 my Columbia pocket dictionary gave up its covers, and I bought an 1108-page Pequeño Larousse, which, much mended, continues to do yeoman duty on my desk. “John sabe muchas palabras,” people have said more than once. I like how people in Spanish pronounce the name John.

JP: Does political poetry still play a role in Mexico or anywhere else in Latin America?

John: My earliest Mexican friends were leftist poets, members of the partido comunista, God love ‘em. I’m a Red Diaper baby myself. Neruda and Vallejo were Commies too, for the same reason the Polish poets like Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) were anti-Communist; stand up to the neighborhood bully. Jorge, Saúl and Mónica liked my musings on my father’s thirties Stalinism, missing, I believe, the irony.

Truthfully, many of my early Mexican pals weren’t wonderful poets. The political poem is a weak strand in Mexico, it was discouraged by Paz. With few exceptions, Mexican poetry loves to dwell in the interior, murky gleam of words to delve into mortality, viscosity and intimacy.
 
Political poetry has always been much more vital in Nicaragua, whose greatest poets, Rubén Darío  (1869-1917) and Ernesto Cardenal (1920), were fiery populists and even the relatively conservative Pablo Antonio Cuadra (1912-2002) was a socially conscious poet.. Every country has its own idiosyncratic tradition and flavor. Do not expect tacos and enchiladas all the way to Tierra del Fuego.

The first world-class Mexican poet I met was Alberto Blanco (1951). He read at the Homenaje for Paz’s 70th birthday in 1984. I liked how Blanco prefaced his reading: para los poetas de abajo, para los poetas de arriba: For the poets down there (in the audience), for the poets up here (on stage). I came onstage afterward to congratulate him and we hung out a lot thereafter. Through Alberto I met David Huerta (1949), Elsa Cross (1946), and Coral Bracho (1952), certainly the four most important Mexican poets of their generation.

JP: Your Poets In The Schools work in California was tied up with your travels in Latin America, wasn't it? You used it as a springboard to start poets in the schools south of the border too, didn't you?

John: Through a California Poets In The Schools (CPITS) project I funded with the Oakland Unified School District, I set up intensive, week long poet-teaching workshops in Mexico. Chicano CPITS poet Roberto Bedoya and I trained nine locals including Alberto Blanco and Jorge Luján (1943), el músico ambulante, an Argentine who happened to be outside the country when the generals took over and kept moving all the way to the D.F. Jorge had independently invented the wheel of poet-teaching at the very highest level with Taller Nacimiento, an advanced private workshop mostly for the children of exiles from the Cono Sur.

I sold the project to María Engracia Vallejo, education director of the  world-famous Museo Nacional de Antropología. I told the kids we taught in the Museum that I had noticed many Toltec and Aztec sculptures that show the hero emerging from the fangs of a beast, often a jaguar, sometimes an eagle. What animal are you emerging from, or what animal is inside you? One of Jorge’s students, Soledad Funes, age 10, wrote:

El tigre es un animal

que sólo tiene dos vidas:

una dentro de mí

y la otra en el cuerpo de espacio.

The jaguar is an animal

that has only two lives:

one inside me

and the other in the body of space.

We say in Poetry Inside Out, the translation-in-schools program I now direct, translation is the deepest possible reading of a text.

JP: You've tackled tough projects in California to bring poetry to the schools and to children who typically are under served in our Anglo-centric culture.  Tell us about Poetry Inside Out.  What gave you the idea and how does it work?  Where did you get the funding?  How many poets are involved, and how successful has it been? Is it still a viable program in these cash-strapped times?

John: Poetry Inside Out (PIO) was dreamed up in 2000 by Olivia E. Sears, founder of the Center for the Art of Translation, and bilingual teacher Michael P. Ray; I came on board the following year, and since then have largely guided the program as Artistic Director.

The roots of PIO go deep into my own story; I started teaching poetry to kids in 1971 with California Poets In The Schools, found it to be a right livelihood, herded cats the length of California as Statewide Coordinator of CPITS, 1978-81, then developed curricula in collaboration with the Oakland Museum of California and the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City.

The big idea of Poetry Inside Out is that literary translation, combined with poetry, can form an immensely enriching curriculum for students as young as third grade. Translation is the deepest possible reading of a text; translating a poem involves deep engagement with poetic mind.

PIO began as a Spanish bilingual program, teaching Latino and immersion kids to translate from Spanish to English. Spanish-dominant classes became an endangered species as schools hustled everybody into English so they would do better on our important national objective of filling in the correct bubbles. Our niche shrank. And then it occurred to us that translation is larger than Spanish. Robert Hass doesn’t know Polish, yet he translates Milosz. Our Poetry Inside Out students are now translating from 28 languages (more are added constantly; last month we taught our first poem in Serbian).

In seventeenth-century Japan, a frog hurtles into still water and startles the poet Basho:

古池や

蛙飛び込む

水の音

Furu ike ya

kawazu tobikomu

mizu no oto

 

The particle や ya in the first line is particularly “untranslatable”:  it serves to draw attention to what has gone just before, like a backward-facing colon: in this case, 古池 Furu ike, “old pond.” Armed with a glossary, fifth-graders Willie (fluent in Chinese) and Jesús (fluent in Spanish) take a shot:

Ancient pond alert,

frog catapulting in pond,

sound of the water

     — Willie Qiu

Legendary pond!

frog flies into

sound of water

     — Jesús Fragoso

When I ask a class which of these versions is correct, they know immediately what I’m getting at with my trick question. While the standardized test machine teaches that all problems have one right answer, translation teaches that any problem has a variety of interesting solutions. We do 16-session residencies in each classroom, and culminate with a published anthology and public reading of student work.

As of early 2012, we have ten instructors doing Poetry Inside Out in Bay Area schools and reporting to me.  I am so pleased at this stage of my life to have a full-scale opportunity to mentor young writers-in-residence.  Demand for our PIO workshops is rising rapidly. I think many folks in the schools are (finally) getting it that drill-skill kills and what kids of all skill levels need is interesting, engaging work with a component of playful imagination. Over 80% of our students are children of color, mostly immigrants and African-Americans. PIO sometimes makes a dramatic difference in their lives. “Poetry is a light that came to save me,” comments fifth-grader Carmen Jiménez; English is her third language (after Mam and Spanish).

It’s common knowledge in the small community of those who teach writing in the schools that kids are bursting with poetry; however, the best poetry from most programs hits a certain ceiling. Emotion and naïve imagination carry the students just so far. What they learn in Poetry Inside Out, as they work their way through Rimbaud, Sappho and Rilke, has to do with poetic strategy and structure.  Here’s an acrostic poem by a fifth-grader. The rigorous grid she has to work with supports her images and allows her to fly:

Sing and Dance

Skimming the surface of your dreams

In a world of your own entirely

Nothing can stop you now

Gone as soon as it came

Delicate and diligent

All eyes on me

Not a trace of fear

Creating new worlds

Eternity dancing

—Rosalie Zip

JP: I am so happy to know that the Poetry Inside Out program is still flourishing.  It's an amazing accomplishment, John, and you should be proud. I hope it goes on and on.

It seems, though, that poetry plays a much more vital role in many countries than it does in the US.  In the Middle East, for example, writing or reciting a poem can land a poet in jail, or worse.  This was also true in some parts of Latin America a few decades ago--that's a degree of power American poets can only envy.  I've known you via an Internet connection for over ten years now and have always admired your work.  You are prolific, and though you have your own, distinctive voice, your poetry is not easily pigeonholed into one style or category. Your unusual book, Caminante (2002, Creative Arts Book Company) comes to mind.  Can you explain what inspired you to write this unique book, what it's about, and share one or two of your favorite caminantes with us? I'd like to add that the cover art is also a lovely watercolor you painted.

John: In 1995 I left my nine-year full-time real-life dirty-hands classroom job, teaching fifth and sixth grades in a beloved leaky portable in East Oakland. I started in Mexico City in September, 1995. Elsa Cross invited me to a little cena in the Colonia Roma house of poet Thelma Nava (1937), widow of Efraín Huerta (1914-1997), the leftist Red Hope to go up against Octavio Paz (no contest).  The dinner had been arranged so the jurado, which had just awarded the important Juan Sabines prize could get to meet their prize young poet, Jorge Fernández Granados (1961). The jury, including Thelma Nava and Elva Macías (1946), loved me of course; they were all buddies of my friend Elsa Cross. All these names convey a lot of information. Mexican bloodlines, political and poetic lineages.

Jorge Fernández Granados was already suffering from an auto-immune condition that has now left him nearly blind. He was/is humble, natural, and gracefully erudite. I was very taken with Jorge’s prize-winning manuscript, Resurrección, written in eight-line stanzas and seventeen-syllable lines. Much later (2008) Tameme Press published my chapbook of Granados translations, Ghosts of the Palace of Blue Tiles/ Fantasma de la casa de los azulejos.

Within a few days, I found myself in picturesque San Cristóbal, Chiapas, where the story of the day was the Zapatistas, tough Mayan peasants who had risen in passionate, romantic revolution less than a year before, led by a charismatic, mestizo chilango poet, Subcomandante Marcos (?). One day I sat down in the plaza of an outlying village, Zinacantán, and began to paint a watercolor of the church. I was soon surrounded by short but brawny men in brown wool vests looking at what I was doing and talking in Tzotzil of which I caught the loan-word foto. On the issue of blasphemy these guys were to the right of the Taliban. Photographing the church in San Juan Chamula is punishable by death. Happily, a combi came along just then, so nodding respectfully to and fro, sin el menor deseo de ofender, I packed up my paints and blew Dodge.

One Sunday morning Conchita Avendaño (1969), crusading editor of the local newspaper, and her husband Roberto Rico Chong (1958), an able Chinese-Mexican and I, along with a cute friend of hers and two-year-old Paolo, stuffed ourselves like circus clowns into her sister’s borrowed VW bug. I drove. Our goal was the important Mayan ruins of Toniná, sixty kilometers east. As we cobblestoned madly through town, Conchita leaned into my ear to shout “Hey! That’s Marcos’s girlfriend!” I craned backward but missed the woman. “One of his girlfriends,” said Roberto wisely.

I drove country roads that got narrower. Villagers rode by on bicycles, balancing bundles on their heads, kid sisters on their handlebars. We signed in at the little guard-station and climbed level after grassy level past shrines, dintels, stelae, and friezes to stand uneasily on the summit.  Unlike the limestone everywhere in the Yucatán and Petén of Uxmal and Tikal, the builders of Toniná had no good massive building material, they managed with piles of more or less flat shale slabs which rock a little where you step. If the colonnades and towers emerging on each level were ever stuccoed, centuries have washed it away.

South of the Tropic of Cancer sunset is six every evening and sunrise six a.m., unless gringo affectation of daylight savings has been latterly imposed by globalization. Dusk was falling on the mountains of Chiapas as we climbed toward a summit maybe 6 km short of Oxchuc. Suddenly the road went washboardy bumpety bumpety.  I pulled to the scant shoulder over a steep slope. The left rear tire was blown. In the bonnet, the spare was worse — a reef of steel poking from ripped rubber. Venus glared at us over the black mountain. Estamos fritos, said Roberto. We’re French-fries: we’re fucked. The highway inevitably would be claimed, after dark either by the Mexican army, Zapatistas, or bandits. Which would be worst?

I decided to drive on the rim and see what help we might find in Oxchuc. The wheel began to smoke on the downgrade but we finally eased into dirt streets and saw a sign for Vulcanizador, a tire guy, who was evangelical and therefore not drunk like almost everybody else in this 100% Mayan town, this Sunday night. The vulcanizador said the wheel was okay, gracias a Dios, he had two right-size tires and with gringo dinero (about $55 for two tires and emergency service) everything would be fine.

His teenage daughter served us room-temperature cokes. The mountain let you go, she said. The mountain likes company, there was a crash last year up at that curve with a big-rig and a car; there were seven dead. But Thanks to God, she let you go.

About this time I found myself writing eight-line poems. The magical atmosphere surrounding my journey continued, with variations and few humdrum moments, all the way past the borders of Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Colombia, Ecuador, Perú, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay before arriving, having been invited to the VI Festival Internacional de Poesía in Medellín, Colombia in June, 1996, and finally, flying home.

I would typically write the poems down late at night, waking at 3 or 4 am, writing eight lines by flashlight in a succession of hostels and one-star travelers’ hotels where I usually had to stagger down a cold hall to the bathroom. I liked having eight lines as a boat that would fit all shoes, knowing that was how far I was going to go, how much information I could pack in eight lines, take readers to the farthest star and back. I played around with caesura, twist, surprise, which could come in almost any line.

Parameter: I would not write about the trivial present, beloved of purists, boring, but would pick up on something that happened during the last few days, where I had been. Parameter: all right not to make sense at times, work through word salad if that was up.  Parameter: I would not smoke dope for the duration of the poem, which was roughly nine months.

An early poem from the 131-poem sequence, outside a hip breakfast nook in San Cristóbal de Las Casas:

MADRE TIERRA

Sorry, kid, you weren’t supposed to be alive.

Blinded by blows, your mother lost count.

Your father fell feet overhead in a burning lake

of alcohol. You learned no human language.

Outside of Madre Tierra you stumble to my knees

with a primeval groan for all the eternity

of your six years. I will not share even one

crumb of my chocolate croissant with you.

                               

                                San Cristóbal de Las Casas,

                                Chiapas

                                10/14–15/1995

Comentario: Madre Tierra is a popular Gringo Trail bakery breakfast spot in San Cristóbal. She’s pictured on a silkscreen postcard from Taller Leñateros, glued on the cover of my 112th blue notebook, as a lovely young Indian woman with a child wrapped in her rebozo, and bearing a platter on her head and another in her left hand piled high with the goodies of the earth: cinnamon rolls, scones, and pain au chocolat. It’s disheartening to move through this world rejecting the hungry children at every step.

Here I am reacting against a stance of the poet-traveler as saint, the uniquely empathetic and morally praiseworthy I, which occurs in Sharon Doubiago’s magnificent book-length poem South America Mi Hija; the poet is the only one who empathizes with a 12-year-old indigenous vendor-boy who comes aboard at a stop in the Andes to sell chicles; the doors closes and they let the kid off 50 miles away, ja-ja. Sometimes the I-person, like most of us human beings, is an asshole. I did not share my croissant with the developmental kid howling outside Madre Tierra.

Inevitable languages and back-story is that you had to be there. Indigenous tongues stick out  — Nahuatl, Mayan, Muisca, Quechua, Aymara, Manpundungu and Guaraní —plus a lot of Spanish. You need a glossary at the least, maybe a portable history. I gave you a little political context for Chiapas. Cross a border, it’s an entirely different story, with common themes but other heroes.

So the later addition, after I returned home, of prose comentarios after each 8-liner was welcome. Having an after-say in prose also affords its own ironic platform.  Here I was inspired by the Commentaries of the Red Monk in poems of our beloved, vanished Lew Welch (1925-1971?).

Everywhere I went in my travels. I found and looked up poets. I also had friends already from previous voyages.  The poets lent me attentive ears and arranged no less than 30 readings in Spanish as I traveled south, by bus and occasional short plane leaps, and chiva, the demotic flat-bottom truck transport of Colombia. I read in the Catholic University in Arequipa, the Bar Elenko in Lima and the Café Libro in Quito. I read to five thousand people listening to poetry in the rain on the Cerro Nutibara in Medellín.

I was in deep between languages, talking 90% Spanish and writing 90% English. One night, in Pasto, the northernmost outpost of Tahuintsuyu, the Inca Empire, writing about pissing in the cold bathroom at the end of the hall, I found a triplet of words rippling with equal effect in English and Spanish: nido/ nudo/ puñado // knot, nest, fist.

HOMBRECITO

Holding my little man in my hand

I piss inexhaustible rivers.

They plash on a knot, on a nest,

on a fist of mountains, every way

from here: Cauca, Magdalena, San Juan.

I stand on a hill like a man of stone.

The old hotel is sleeping.

I play my flute of waters.

             

                Pasto, Colombia

              Tahuintsuyu

              1/20-21/1996

Comentario: The “knot of Colombia” is a mountainous triple divide whence a raindrop has an equal chance of flowing via big rivers such as the Cauca, Magdalena, and San Juan to the Pacific, the Amazon or the Caribbean. The stone men, including a bear-figure holding a flute, are at San Agustín. This poem in Spanish:

              Con mi hombrecito en mano

              orino ríos infatigables.

              Chapotean en un nudo, en un nido,

              en un puñado de montañas, a todos lados,

              Cauca, Magdalena, San Juan. Me paro

              en la colina como hombre de piedra.

              El viejo hotel duerme.

              Toco mi flauta de aguas.

All journey long I was writing in two veins — long transcriptions, jotted immediately after in a café, of my interviews with poets, which later would become a book of travel and radiography of Latin American poetry no university press could ever quite pull the trigger on, and at night, the 8-line Caminantes.  I filled up seven blue notebooks, 840 pages.

This poem is the farthest (42o) South I got, the great island of Chiloé in southern Chile, a cold white deserted beach roughly symmetrical to Vancouver Island across the great Pacific arc of the Americas:

CUCAO

This is where they run out of road.

Where the bridge sways with the weight of your breath.

Where the tracks of all your friends are blurred by blowing sand.

To the edge of earth, where water howls and prays,

where seagulls peck at a woven robe of flesh,

where the sun is squeezed to a glowing syllable

and gone, and then, as if to balance things,

the moon’s pale cup is lifted from a final line of hills.

             

                Cucao, Chiloé

              Chile

              4/2-3/1996

Comentario: Sunset on the long white deserted windy beach of Cucao, on the Pacific coast of the great island of Chiloé, 42° South, my closest approach to the South Pole. A whale–vertebra a meter in diameter is stuck in the sand, and birds are still eating the blubber. Fluffy clouds pass over from the south, above the massive forested hills, home to the endangered sequoia–like alerce. When the rain comes again, the clouds will turn and come from the north, symmetrical to how it happens in California. This rhyme pleases me.

The next six years saw an extremely laborious process of editing as I sent out the manuscript to, in the end, 88 places, all the contests, corrupt and clean, many of them two or three times. 162 poems slowly eroding down to 131. Finally, in 2000, Donald S. Ellis, who ran Creative Arts Book Company in Berkeley, offered me a contract and $1000 advance.

Caminante is a handsome book, with my watercolor of the convent of Santa Catarina in Arequipa, Perú, on the cover, and I am grateful to Donald S. Ellis for bringing it to light. Gary Snyder (1930) blurbed me: "… a major poem, gritty and elegant, hard-earned, oriented by stars and late night conversations on the long road…"

One of the sequence’s final poems, crossing a river from Uruguay to Argentina:

GARZA

Folding and unfolding origami wings

a white heron rises from the border river.

I hand over my coin, my stamped paper

and perch myself in the stern of the little lancha

with the guapos talking about fu’vol.  The captain

drains his maté and we putt–putt through the mist.

The fisherman in the green rowboat doesn’t care

whether he’s in Uruguay or Argentina.

             

                Salto, Uruguay/Concordia, Argentina

              5/20-21/1996

Comentario: I stumble down toward the Río Uruguay at dawn, carrying a mesh bag that once held pine–cones for poet Silvia Guerra’s fireplace, now bulging with books of Uruguayan poetry. Guapo means cute in Mexico but tough in Argentina, and fu’vol is what we North Americans would call soccer. The heron flexes great wings and flies into bare Argentine branches catching first light. Garza, says the ferryman, chewing his dead cornhusk cigarette.

Shortly legal trouble reared its ugly head at Creative Arts. In 2003 it came out that Ellis had been shorting the vanity authors. They sued him as a group. He filed for bankruptcy. I bought my 126 remaining books (Ellis must never have printed more than the initial run of 300) from him at 50% for a total of $826, so much for my big advance! Doled out, the books have lasted these ten years; I must have twelve left. One of the privileges of my obscurity.

Papa Hemingway wrote that every young writer should have a war.  I think every writer should brush intimately up against another culture. The greatest poet of the Twentieth Century, Pablo Neruda, spent nine years working as Chilean consul in Rangoon and Colombo, sleeping with homicidal brown women and speaking very little Spanish to anyone. He wrote Residencia en la Tierra. I spent nine months traveling down Latin America, and wrote Caminante.

JP: What fantastic journeys you've taken, John.  I envy you your bravery.

In the last couple of years, you've connected in an even closer way with children.  Your granddaughter, Tesla Rose, was born, and you began an ambitious project to document her life and times in poetry.  I have had the honor of reading many of these poems and you and your son-in-law's mother, (in the more elegant Spanish, your consuegra) both had Tesla Rose poems published in the anthology Child of My Child last year in which grandparents wrote poems for their grandchildren.  What a generous project to embark on!  I can only imagine how Tesla Rose will feel when she is old enough to appreciate how very much you loved her.  What made you embark on this project?  What are your plans for the poems you wrote for her?

John: Everybody has four grandparents, but only a small minority get to be grandparents; something must be wrong with the math.

I am so grateful that in all my poet’s erratic misbehaviors I have somehow managed to be a good enough parent that my daughter trusts me with her daughter. I am so lucky that they live nearby, in the Temescal neighborhood of North Oakland, ten minutes away from my West Berkeley cottage. From her earliest infancy I would sling Tesla Rose in the Björn and take long walks, sometimes up through the hills of Mountain View cemetery where several of her ancestors are buried, push her in a baby swing at Totland, and drive with her in the car-seat. Plan A was that I would only address her in Spanish so she would grow up instinctively bilingual, which research says is good for the brain, but I couldn’t do it, the feeling was too deep and primal to conduct in my second language.


I’m a poet. Just as I had written Caminante in eight-line poems with prose commentary, I sought parameters for what I started writing. First of all, the Tesla Rose Poems are written in 11-syllable lines. I stole that unit from the Spanish endecasílabo, the basic unit of verse as blank verse is in English.

The naked 11-syllable line can turn on a dime from conversational to prosy to profound. My technical focus on the count allows me to rely for the music on my five-decades poet’s ear, and also to be ready for the unsuspected or unallowed in terms of content. The 11-syllable is sinuous and muscular, resolving into dissonances of feminine iambic pentameter and dancing away again. Hardly anybody in the poetry world seems able to read it. Rejections rain back every day. Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke.

More parameters: the You in the poems is always Tesla Rose, addressed in the poem’s present epoch when she is 19 or 23 or 31 months old and as well in a hypothetical present when she is old enough to read and understand the poems, and beyond a certain stage of which I — or at least the character named in the poems as “Grandpa” — will surely be gone.

One strand throughout the sequence is a study of language acquisition in the in-my-face case of Tesla Rose. Ontogeny recapitulates the story of our language explosion as a species: from the unconditional she understands at six months, into point-and-noun pidgin (13-26) months to state-of-the-art repartee closing on three years, my language is intimately engaged with hers. What she says goes in “quotes.” What I or others say in itals.

A typical poem has gone through four to eight revisions. As Tesla Rose approached her third birthday, March 2, 2011, I was beginning to feel the need for closure. I went back and forth about it, talked indecisively to poet-friends, and finally went directly to the oracle: I asked Tesla Rose. I wouldn’t have asked if I wasn’t willing to accept the answer. “I think you should ‘top,” she told me firmly and plainly. She had trouble pronouncing s-consonant combinations for a while there.

So the cycle ends. I also appreciate the benefit of not lingering, nattering on indefinitely over her shoulder, chronicling and journaling her bonks and blessings inevitably to the exclusion of her own voice. When Tesla Rose makes an infrequent appearance in my current poems, it is as she, not you.

Now I’m in the metarevision stage of sculpting and resculpting the manuscript. I wrote a total of 178 pages of Tesla Rose poems; I just sent a 32-page chapbook manuscript, probably the strongest shaping yet, out to a contest. Along the way, I have to kill a lot of darlings.

JP: What is your favorite Tesla Rose poem of all those you've written for her and why?

John: Favorite one poem? Joani, you must be joking.

This is the last poem in the current manuscript, written after a holiday-season outing (we are ecumenical in our clan, lighting Hanukkah candles and decorating trees) to a children’s performance of the Nutcracker when Tesla Rose was 33 months old. Many thanks to my consuegra, poet and fiction-writer Linda Lancione, who organized our expedition, yet goes unmentioned in the poem. Tesla Rose didn’t entirely get it and wanted more explanation.

TESLA ROSE 33 MONTHS: NUTCRACKER

What we imagine a child dreams of magic
(toys with a life of their own in Candyland,
Nutcracker versus Royal Rodent swordfight)
isn’t categorized intuitively,
requiring clarifications of Why,
so you sit in my lap for most of the show

where my running commentary, Kruk and Kuip
on ballet, sugar plum fairy up on point,
won’t overly disturb equally besieged
moms, dads, and grands swarmed over by toddlers.
Because it’s magic, I explain. Happily
they live ever after. Whirls of tutus spin
as Clara leaps and is carried like a swan,
like clouds massing to rain above the ocean.
Magic isn’t exactly your first language,
but homeward on BART you lie down on my lap
with your furry eskimo coat under you,
and visions of sugar-plums dance in your head.

JP: You've made it a mission of sorts to try to get recognition for some of the talented poets you've befriended over the years that you felt have been ignored or marginalized by readers or other poets. The deceased poet Donald Schenker is one about whom you've written the wonderful poem "All Over the Place." Who else do you feel deserves more exposure for their poetry and who has mentored you as a writer?

John: I never really took kindly to mentoring. I studied with Daniel Hoffman, a sweet guy, at Swarthmore and rebelled against the whole Anglophile academic hegemony he represented. As a young man I sat at the feet of three West Coast masters, Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, and Lew Welch, and attended Jack Spicer’s last reading, at the Berkeley Poetry Conference in August 1965, when he read straight through the seven books of seven poems each of The Holy Grail in a tired monotone.  Spicer was dead a month later. I learned a lot from the women, who turned the world inside out around 1970, reversing the conventional order of the pronouns: Judy Grahn, Susan Griffin, and Alta, who is the mother of my daughter. More than anything, I’ve learned from the poets I translate, but I’ll save that for the next question.

There is a whole outlaw wing of American poetry that is very poorly recognized. d.a. levy, lower-case, was the most important American poet of his (and my) generation when he shot himself in 1968. Charles Potts flamed out in Berkeley that same year and has since maintained a tradition of what he calls Pacific Northwest spiritual poetry out of a hole in the wall in Walla Walla, Washington. Richard Krech took a quarter century off, became a criminal defense lawyer, and has written some of the most radically moral poems of our time. Sharon Doubiago preceded me down the South American trail. Everywhere you look in this country there are neglected poets. Several are reading this interview right now. I commiserate. Some of our famous poets are very fine; I’ll mention Robert Hass, Paul Muldoon, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Ron Silliman, Mary Oliver, Kay Ryan, and Juan Felipe Herrera.

ALL OVER THE PLACE

     

for Donald Schenker

Don says there's poems all over the place,

it's practically embarrassing, and I nod

without enthusiasm, driving into downtown

Oakland thinking yeah, those two pigeons

squatting on the blue-gray sign HOTEL MORO,

how the part of it that's a poem could fall out

between the word and the bird, or the word Moro

all the way back to the reconquest of Spain

and all the bloody hemisphere ending up

on this block I don't care if I see again.

Don says he could just stop anyone

and look at them, they're all so deep

and beautiful, and I say what's interesting

is the stories they all carry around

stranger than fiction, stronger than truth

all these gente waiting to cross the street

each one forgetting their great-grandparents

each one forgetting to tell their children

and I'm no novelist, I can't move a

character across the room, much less two guys

to lunch at a Vietnamese place on Webster.

Over bowls of translucent noodles and odd meat

Don says he always felt like the other poets

were the big boys, and I see how the grand

famous names of his peers, now pushing sixty

have turned into the padded artifacts

of their own careers, while Don's obscurity

has kept him fresh and sweet, and Don says

he loves his tumors, the big one that hurts

in his left hip, the one that's hammering out

among sparse hairs inside his baseball cap,

and though it's his own death that gives him truth

I'm stuck in my heart without any words

while poems in Vietnamese are fluttering up

from all the restaurant tables around us

and escaping into so much empty light.

JP: My final question brings us to the reason your work is so perfect for our first themed issue of THIS, "The Other."  Your first book, Roads to Dawn Lake, was published by Oyez in 1968 followed by five more, some of which contain translations of your own poems into Spanish, either by yourself or by others such as the previously mentioned Mexican poet Elsa Cross, and some incorporate Hispanic poets' work you've translated into English.  You've also published a slew of chapbooks. You've had a long career in poetry which has frequently had as its motivation or underpinning the idea of interaction with "the other."  How important has this incorporation of "the other" been to your work?

John: Translation is my deepest encounter with the other. When I translate I burrow inside another poet’s skin and find my own face staring out. When I’m translated, someone takes on my tongue and teeth and emerges with a language that is tangent to mine at every point on a multi-dimensional surface.

Another deep encounter with the other comes out of my work with children, going to the roots of where poetry begins, the first day when a fourth-grader realizes she can toss words up into the air and any way they fall will turn into a poem. Poetry thrives in all cultures and therefore goes back to the origins of syntactic language in the sea-caves of South Africa 70,000 years ago. Poetry is a meme, a virus, it is transmitted; it does not exist in isolation.

The torch was passed to me by my stepfather John Adler, who loved to quote Tennyson: Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough / Gleams that untrodden world whose margin fades / Forever and forever when I move, and also by Jeffrey Campbell, my high-school English teacher, an African-American conscientious objector who would belt out the Welsh national anthem at the least excuse, and who told me after reading my first earnest scribbles, “that’s poetry.”

I’ve passed it on to many. Age three and a half, here’s Tesla Rose’s first poem:

I wish the moon

upon a star,

a castle bright

upon a star of light.

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