Poetry, Story, Novella -- Reprint from the 4 November, 2021 Knox Book Beat, The Berkeley Times, © 2021, Wyndy J. Knox Carr
I was getting ready for Seasonal Affective Disorder (the “Winter Blues”) by stocking up on a variety of writers and genres, in spite of most of the dry, sunny California "winters" I’ve experienced since 2012. Long-time residents tell me it used to rain for four months straight in The Bay Area, and they had lots of time to curl up and read. Anyway,
People finally attended an in person (outdoors) poetry reading August 29th for Sixteen Rivers Press with readers Stella Beratlis and Dane Cervine. What fun!
It was in the garden behind the Northbrae Community Church on the Alameda, where both readers were excellent, and all well-managed; but as a Northern California poet who “lived in Berkeley on Bienvenue” during grad school, Cervine donated BTx a copy of The World is God’s Language: Prose Poems.
Thank you! As I lazed in the shade of the warm afternoon, his “kind of blended American haiku and haibun in prose-poem format” lifted my tech-befuddled brain out of my weary body and quickly made my cellphone irritating, but totally irrelevant. The present moment, as the Buddhists say, took over, as Cervine seemed to be in each of his short prose poems.
His title comes from Simone Weil,* another mystic he admires, but remembered more for her philosophically and politically minded writings and activities. His poems are clear human images taken “from life;” stripped down into real, contemporary, but also beatific “Histories,” “Bali,” “World” and “Colors of the Underworld.”
Looking in and looking out from a centered place is what spiritual and creative practices give us all, and gives Cervine a place of words and heart to stand in while small-minded “Gated Communities” fight over who will have “the privilege of being the last to starve” outside.
The Big Picture is his universe, expressed in authentic images from his intimately human and caringly connected mind and life. He is so bare, so courageous, I cannot help but admire his work and hope to seek out his other six books.
I just had to reproduce the photo here during the Nativity Solstice season!
I have great respect for Sixteen Rivers Press, “a sustainable, shared-work publishing collective run by and for Bay Area poets.” We Berkeley poets who hang out at cafes like Nefeli (NOW CLOSED! Oh no! "merged with A & V" Wonderful baklava and espresso…) and read at poetry readings there and Le Bateau Ivre” (The Drunken Boat – still open – Thursday through Sunday! Patio seating, and 25% indoors) on Telegraph Avenue, deeply appreciate their support of poetry, writing, writers, independent bookselling, distribution and publishing.
Mr. Moody wrote in his BTx poem “Trompe 2016,” “Because self-pity is the sole noise available to the duped,/ we whined for compassion./ And tromped ourselves.” But “The Jaunt” is a third person narrative that goes to the edge of thour delusionary blunders of humanity and self-ignorance, but then knows somehow, a more authentic way, true-to-self-and-thour-world and then returns, relatively unscathed and newly whole in the person of the observed observer, “He.”
And that self is very honest, and the self is really real, in a real Northern California place, person and time that rings with both questioning inquiry and the risky verisimilitude of being on the edge. I won’t say any more than that, except Moody did a fine job, and people should look for the Carquinez Review 2020 on the Benicia Literary Arts site. Holiday time is almost here! Treat yourself or treat a friend…
Its depth, honesty and intimate, homespun-to-contemporary lyricism just “knocked my socks off,” Rashomon in chorus, or a Scandinavian-American mini There, There. The idea that this little, dark-jacketed booklet could grab me to the core was astounding. So glad she sent it to me after meeting me at the Ralph Walbridge memorial. I just love the literary crossroads of Berkeley and the Bay Area.
Sixteen Rivers is having an online benefit reading through eventbrite 3 p.m. this Sunday November 7th, too, and are sponsoring a Youth Poetry Contest. See their sixteenrivers.org site. Be aware, be present, be humane…
*“The bag referred to here is a hunting bag containing the different kinds of animals and birds that the hunter has shot.” Collins COBUILD Idioms Dictionary, 3rd ed. © HarperCollins Publishers 2012
**For Weil, "The beautiful is the experiential proof that the incarnation is possible". The beauty which is inherent in the form of the world (this inherency is proven, for her, in geometry, and expressed in all good art) is the proof that the world points to something beyond itself; it establishes the essentially telic character of all that exists. Her concept of beauty extends throughout the universe:
"[W]e must have faith that the universe is beautiful on all levels...and that it has a fullness of beauty in relation to the bodily and psychic structure of each of the thinking beings that actually do exist and of all those that are possible. It is this very agreement of an infinity of perfect beauties that gives a transcendent character to the beauty of the world...He (Christ) is really present in the universal beauty. The love of this beauty proceeds from God dwelling in our souls and goes out to God present in the universe".
She also wrote that "The beauty of this world is Christ's tender smile coming to us through matter".[72]
Beauty also served a soteriological function for Weil: "Beauty captivates the flesh in order to obtain permission to pass right to the soul." It constitutes, then, another way in which the divine reality behind the world invades our lives. Where affliction conquers us with brute force, beauty sneaks in and topples the empire of the self from within.
Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, (28 November 2021) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_Weil "Simone Weil." (5 December 2021)
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