Martens, Estes & Goodwin Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival

15 December, 2022, The Berkeley Times, Knox Book Beat. 

At last, Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival on the plaza, inter-pandemic, in person! Even though October 15th, 2022 was unseasonably cool and cloudy; Joyce Jenkins, Kirk Lumpkin, and Richard Silberg hosted a stalwart audience and crew of poets, canopied publishers and bookstore tables in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park after a Strawberry Creek Walk; beginning with Aya De León reading “climate fiction,” The Barry Finnerty Trio playing marvelous jazz, rock and swing; and the We Are Nature Open Mic.

California Poets in the Schools K-12 students with poet-teachers Maureen Hurley & Fred Dodsworth were reading when I hustled over from the Community for a Cultural Civic Center info booth at the Farmers’ Market, and even got in a jitterbug or two with Jack Foley later on.

But schmoozing and the poetry was the real draw, and I hustled Three Raven Gate: Haiku & Other Poems by Brian R. Martens (Japanese brush painting illustrations by Michael Hofmann, McCaa Books, Santa Rosa), Cloudbreak by Heather Saunders Estes and Amtrak Starbucks Jazz on the Streets of Richmond by John Peterson (Poetic Matrix Press near Kernville, CA) and Old Snow, White Sun by Caroline Goodwin, first Poet Laureate of San Mateo County, Jack Leg Press.org.

Three Raven Gate: Haiku and Other Poems by Brian Martens
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

For a first book of poetry, Three Raven Gate is wonderful. Often based in nature or seasons, imagistic rather than philosophical or narrative; with the traditional five, seven and five syllables; haiku in English help us stringently condense.
Meditative sharp focus is exactly what Martens seems to want: even his few directive or self-reflective poems have a mystery about them that springs to life as we read them and intuit their inner meaning, feeling, thought or situation.
Opportunity
Leap beyond hesitation
Opening flower
Some of his best are not even suggestive of a particular thought or even emotion, juxtaposing natural images and simple, sensory words that are nonetheless highly evocative. As poet Archibald McLeish said, “A poem should not mean but be,” and Martens has the knack.
Winter darkness hides
Within shells, water houses
Light buries deeper
I particularly admire the ease he has expressing The Big Emotions like faith, trust, joy and love without sappiness, sloganeering or falsehood; and describing the wonder of them in his long poems about observing his grandkids, reflecting on mythology and stories or in nature. Positive energies live within him that he finds signs of all around him. Lots of time spent reading good poetry and teaching California Poetry in the Schools, inspired by people like his parents, teachers and “cross-cultural anthropologist” Angeles Arrien.
Frankly, it seems difficult for some male poets nowadays to do that without self-ridicule, apology or off-the-deep-end woo-woo. We all want to go around describing Our Bad Day and the sh***y world to everybody so that others feel just as bad as we think we need to. Wendell Berry says, however, "Laugh. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts." Martens concurs, attending to the miracles and smiles underfoot or under masks of various kinds that are all around us, too.
Spark within the soul
Creative in survival
Water quenches thirst

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Cloudbreak by Heather Saunders Estes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In Heather Saunder Estes’ Cloudbreak, poetry is full of nature, movement, images and landscape; but is more narrative sketches and “occasional poems,” too. She has a very direct, comfortable, talky, first person style; beautifully crafted, in which she is very visible, audible and confident; even when expressing envy (“Giraffe”), “I Take the Subway to My Therapist,” atomic bomb fear in a Cold War childhood (“Cans of Baked Beans”) and a view in “San Francisco, 14th Avenue.”
The expanse of ocean
is in perpetual conversation
with the mutable sky.
Her inscription page says a lot in a little, “For Mom and Dad, Thank you for sharing your love of words, curiosity, rebellion, and justice.” And the last two lines of “Elegy for a Chief Executive Officer” after she was “37 years as a Planned Parenthood CEO,”
I was a culture warrior.
I came home alive.
Even the pensive poems are very grounded, self-assured and detailed; often going back and forth in time with the same thought, persons or place; but coming back to center between loss and curiosity to contentment, wholeness.
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Old Snow, White Sun by Caroline Goodwin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Caroline Goodwin was loath to give me a copy of her book, made me swear that I would really review it, before her publicist would send me one. I’m glad she did. She was right. It is like a piece of gold.
It is a jewel box that Alaska gave her, a bloodbath, a pinnacle where v’s of geese fly in the shape of a book, where she can get away with lines like
But ah, but oh what bright lichen takes root
on my tongue. What sunbeams of muscle.
These are incantations, nightmares, poultices, daydreams of crepuscular sunrise lasting forever and twelve-line poems where she can earn saying “When I see your face,
I set foot in the street. The power of love.
The power of love.”
and she makes perfect sense. How does she do it? It’s mysterious, it’s intense, melodious and pagan-profane. Heavily botanic-biologic, she somehow seeps into the English-speaking cranium and slowly wends down the pulse-making stream. Does she chart it out? Does she dream it? Does she consult an oracle or Ouija board of her fully-lived life? I don’t know. It just works…
Horsetail makes a pleasant sound in the wind.
It is the sound of mending or of a small waterfall.
It is not the sound of the playground, or of the tetherball
chain. At the back of the house, the pallets,
the rusty nails, the place where my grandmother
sat down to rest in the rain. 

Ah, poetry! Ah, LIFE!

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Poetry Flash online: https://poetryflash.org/  

The Seizure of Power - Czesław Miłosz

The Seizure of Power by Czesław Miłosz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

 Published in Knox Book Beat, The Berkeley Times, "War is Obsolete," 17 November, 2022.

“I don’t know what kind of weapons World War III will be fought with, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and rocks.” Albert Einstein

     The Seizure of Power by Cal Slavic Language Prof. Czesław Miłosz uses World War II and after in Poland through the lens of about half a dozen characters; one or two main ones followed closely, mostly males, but with pivotal women, a daughter and a lover especially, changing the course trajectories of some of the main characters. He uses short, descriptive chapters; a brisk third person and chronological narrative in Warsaw and Lodz Poland 1939 to about 1945 or so to tell his gripping, values-questioning “story.”

 (Photo: Interior of the Zamoyski Library in Warsaw, One of 70 burned by the Nazis before abandoning what was left of the 85% leveled city, with only 5% of the population remaining, to the Soviet army.)

     Every writer uses the images, dialogues, character possibilities, events and even plots from the lives and scenarios around them as “material;” and over the years (1955-2023), the gaps between Fiction, “Creative Nonfiction,” reportage, memoir and Nonfiction have narrowed. Nobel-winner Miłosz certainly used the world of Warsaw’s Nazi occupation, devastation, rebellion by the Home Army and nasty manipulations of a totalitarian Soviet takeover as his basic canvas, but the echoes to more recent authoritarian takeovers feel disturbingly familiar. 

(Destruction, central Warsaw 1945)
      Seizure of Power is both a brutal and poignant book because the time frame and incidents of military invasion, partisan rebellion against the Nazis and then anguish of choices surrounding the invading, “liberating” Stalinist Soviet military and political manipulations of lives, landscapes and livelihoods is so vivid in intimacy and broad in scope at the same time. 

(Lithuanian stamp of Miłosz, 2011)
    The ending few chapters are a little odd and feel slightly “pasted on” because Miłosz’ excellent characterizations, imagery, immediacy and passion in Seizure suddenly “wax political” in an intellectual, philosophical way that clatters the previously vibrant (and realistically violent, I must add) action and dialogues almost to a halt. Maybe he just couldn’t hold the tension of the national and personal breakdowns of the novel together any more than he could “hold together” his own life and loyalties rationally in light of his very tenuous and narrow individual escape to the relative freedoms of Paris and then the difficult contrasts of cold-war tensions of the United States.

     How much more of our earthly resources; human, spiritual, emotional, media and political parleying; will we abandon and devastate to keep thOur War Machine rumbling on? Is this really just “human nature,” or more like “the reptile brain?” How can we be clearer about the horrors of war in the face of the climate change, resource depletion and threat of nuclear disaster these ventures hang over humanity and Life On Earth? How can we slow these engines and personalities of destruction down? "Stop it! Just STOP IT!" Mother Earth cries...

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Anara Guard - like a complete unknown, Chicago, 1969

 Like A Complete Unknown by Anara Guard

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Published 17 November, 2022, The Berkeley Times, Knox Book Beat as "War is Obsolete."

     War. “HUNH! What is it GOOD FOR? Ab os lute lee NOTHIN!”* Who is it that thinks it’s still useful? And worth spending 3.7% or more of our gross domestic product on as of 2020? (Stockholm International Peace Institute, Wikipedia) And risking global climate change and nuclear disasters?
      I’ve been mulling over these questions for at least 50 years now, and wanted to read like a complete unknown by Sacramento’s Anara Guard about wartime, Vietnam, from one woman and one man's perspectives among about half a dozen characters, set in metropolitan Chicago 1969-70. As a cis-gendered, heterosexual female who had grown up due north (Milwaukee) only about two years earlier than Katya, one of Guard’s main characters, I had a hard time “emotionally distancing myself” from the “novel,” but maybe that’s the point. 

(photo, Chicago's Lincoln Park during the 1968 Democratic Convention Anti- Vietnam War Protest, by Victor Albert Grigas, NBC News, before the arrests and police riot.)
     The music she references (The Doors' “When you’re strange,” “When the moon is in the seventh house” from Hair, etc.), the clothing (jeans, army surplus, embroidered sheepskin vest) and definitely the weather (hot, sweaty, humid summer; cold, brutal winter, wind off Lake Michigan) spoke to every memory of my late teen and early 1970s years. And the conundrums and quandaries of being an intelligent, creative, rebellious, extremely naïve young woman expected by her parents only to “get a good husband” in a brave new world full of global literature, film and TV images; sex, drugs and rock and roll. She gripped me like a pair of Beatle boots from the back of the closet that had shrunk up tight. Ouch!
      I could have “ended up like” that. The whole thing, especially the last third, gripped me viscerally every time Katya came into view – I could have been like that. I WAS like that! rang through my brain, heart and body as she went through totally unnecessary physical, emotional, social, economic and mental suffering as a gross injustice for her trust, love, kindness, sensitivity, sexuality and compassion.
      Guard selects action in the last few chapters that is ALL immediate, ALL tooth-grindingly physical and relationship-bound, climaxing in childbirth and "finding a new life." Is that “the difference between girls and boys?” Do we really have different foci and “value systems?” Experiences and expectations in society and/ because of thOur biological lives? Or was it all the 1950s (conservative, Western, sexist, racist...) culture crashing up against the "counter-cultural revolution" going on around us?
 

     Her other, older, very sympathetic, male main character is so good at heart, missing his dead wife so much and being so truly, unassumingly HELPFUL where her erotic partner was NOT shows a good contrast in possibilities. 

An excellent first novel. May there be many more!

* Written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong for the Motown label in 1969, Edwin Starr was the vocalist when “War” was a number-one hit on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1970. https://genius.com/Edwin-starr-war-ly...


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Petrushevskya: The Girl from the Metropol Hotel

 The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

3 November, 2022, The Berkeley Times, "Knox Book Beat," as "Body Politic Survival."

If you think living under four years of an angry, vicious, ignorant, autocratic, propagandist, anti-intellectual, ego-maniacal, military-adventurist, intolerant, sectarian-dominated national government "won't be too bad;" you need to read this book. Ludmilla Petrushevskaya (also spelled Lyudmila Petrushevskaya) really had a terrifying fall in Stalin’s Soviet Union when her family of academics became “relatives of arrested enemies of the people,” (Bolsheviks, non-ruling Party members) and she, an Aunt and Granny fled to Samara (Kuibyshev) by train “the beginning of the terrible winter of 1941,” when she was only 3 ½. 

        Under totalitarianism, “Grandpa was fired because he wasn’t quick enough to praise Stalin’s article ‘Marxism and the Problems of Linguistics,’” three of his children were “disappeared” because they belonged to the wrong political party, and her father distanced them all. Sound familiar? Presidential staff members in one week, out the next when they aren't quick enough to affirm and applaud?
        “Aunt Vava took home potato peels from the compost heap outside the Officer’s Club… We also looked for food in our neighbors’ garbage,” she couldn’t go to school because she had no shoes, she sang and begged in the streets, “led the life of pariahs, untouchables,” and when they returned to her mother and family in Moscow after the Nazi surrender, even though her Granny had recited many Russian classics of literature to her every night and she could read and write, she “had become an unmanageable, wild child, a real Mowgli.”
        Details of this portion of her life are both astonishing and harrowing, not a little because several millions of Russians, Ukrainians, Cossacks and others were perishing of starvation, massacres, administrative “bungling” and outright genocide during the same period, while she was slipping under the tent to see the elephant in the circus, Bolshoi Theater, constantly got demoted for bad behavior while also dodging bullies and rapists. "Resilience and ingenuity thread through the hardship," Ingrid Norton says in her article in Dissent magazine, "Truth through Fairy Tale," and that is the clue to her charm. She's a storyteller par excellence, and says "Russia is a land of women...who tell their stories orally...I'm just a listener among them."

        And a very good oral historian herself! She faked her way into a graduate internship in journalism by claiming to be following Comrade Khrushchev’s call to “proletarian work for the benefit of common peasants, workers,” because she knew it was "the Party line."
        When offered a radio interview and spot after tagging along to cover “the student brigades” in Kazakhstan, “and very soon sat in a warm, bright studio in front of the microphone, recapping my newsletter…sang…a huge novelty,” that connected her to “the head of the arts and culture section” when she returned to Moscow. What a character! 

She SURVIVED.
        “Never have I been frightened by circumstances,” she says, “A little warmth, a little bread, my little ones with me, and life begins, happiness begins.”
         May we all be so resilient, so resourceful, and attentive to any opportunity! And LUCKY. We may need it. Fortuna, smile upon us! 

Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, (22 February, 2023) "Lyudmila Petrushevskaya," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyudmila_Petrushevskaya (4 April, 2023)

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