JP: It seems 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.
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.
|
