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.”

A Poem and a Writing Prompt

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I decided two weeks ago that I would read some poetry each morning–searching for peace & justice there, if lacking elsewhere–and write something of my own. My general feeling is to put more into the world of what I want to be there. 

For the last two days I’ve been reading Koon Woon‘s Water Chasing Water (Kaya Press, 2013) and feeling my own heart swell upwards as if on a rising tide. Other reviewers have described him as a “writer of solitudes,” but I love the community Koon Woon invokes in almost every poem. I love his poems for his father, poems about sleeping under bridges, about the Chinese waiter reading Nietzsche and dreaming a writing life into being. In this time of madness and isolation, he gives me hope.

Yesterday I copied out this poem:

Around Us

I know now the startling animals and their flying droves
in my wooded new neighborhood,
see the sadness waiting for the return of warm spring rains,
the threat of inverse proportional air
and the sped-up activities of clouds
as winds blow and roll empty trash cans down the street.
Pears and peaches, store-bought, slowly rot
in the fridge, and unattended bills continue to penalize
regardless of who is president of the land.

Jazz and espresso will be as permanent as the Statue of Liberty;
at the tea shop ladies lament that the waitress will grow old.
Rivers burn in the middle of December,
and veterans of unsung daily battles for bread
think in their meditative moments of bovine pastures.
I try to keep an orderly room so that chaos is minimal
because nightly a startling feeling inside my sleep
makes me flee across the pillows of a Third Avenue hotel,
and this time I am fleeing with a ledger,
with the photo of the last girl,
and, hatless in a light rain, seeing
all the cigarette butts in North Beach as the Normandy Invasion.
I shrug, shrug and am gone.

-Koon Woon

My assignment then, was to look carefully–lovingly, compassionately–at all that was going on around me and try to create my own catalog to hold it.

Koon once told me–quoting Confucius–“you must go where your heart goes.” Where is your heart going today?