Reading at Drama on Barcelona

 

Christine Trudeau, Jon Davis, Katie Lasley, Byron Aspaas, and Monty Little. Missing from pictures: Sasha LaPointe and Chuck Calabreze. Photos by Christine Trudeau and whoever used Christine's camera to shoot Christine herself.

Poet Laureate Update

Okay, I'm not going to get any less busy, so best to get on with it.

I'll be on the Santa Fe Radio Cafe on KSFR 101.1 FM with Mary-Charlotte on Wednesday morning.

I'll read with students from the Institute of American Indian Arts on Sunday, November 18, at 3 p.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Santa Fe. (See my September 22 post for details).

For those of you on the south side of town, I'll be reading at the Institute of American Indian Arts' library at 4 P.M. on Tuesday, November 27: http://iaia.libguides.com/content.php?pid=365747&sid=3306156#11741010

On Sunday, December 2, between 3-5 p.m., I'll be reading as part of the Snow Poems Exhibition & Poetry Storm at the Marji Gallery & Contemporary Projects, 340 Read Street. Go to http://snowpoemsproject.com/opening-ceremony/ for details

It is quite a roster of poets, including two former Santa Fe Poets Laureate:

Arthur Sze
Dana Levin
Elizabeth Jacobson
Jamie Figueroa
Joan Logghe
Jon Davis
Kirsten Mundt
Gabe Gomez
Lauren Camp
Lizabeth Lende
Michelle Laflamme-Childs
Miriam Sagan
Monika Cassel
Nicholas Chiarella
Surya Little
Tara Evonne Trudell

If we get final approval (which we expect), I'll be Director of the new MFA Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts after January 1. Which helps to explain why I won't get any less busy!

I'm currently assembling a group reading to take place in Eldorado. As soon as I know the details, I'll let you know.

Meanwhile, I've got a piece (odd humor, not poetry) up at McSweeney's: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/compare-and-contrast-chris-isaak-and-van-morrison

And short stories at The Saturnalian:
http://www.thesaturnalian.com/2012/06/in-review-my-most-recent-relationship.html
Monkeybicycle:
http://monkeybicycle.net/default/
And Foliate Oak:
http://foliateoak.weebly.com/jon-davis.html

Albuquerque Poet Laureate Hakim Bellamy and I are working on some projects together--some readings and a writing project. So stay, as they used to say when tuning was required, tuned.

The image for this post is a drawing (of me!) done on a napkin by Viet Namese poet Nhã Thuyên. Soon, I'll be working with a group of translators to produce a collection of her poems in English.

Upcoming Readings at The IAIA Library

Two readings coming up at the Institute of American Indian Arts' Library, 83 Avan Nu Po Road, Santa Fe, NM 87508:

Tuesday October 23rd 4pm - Dean Ann Filemyr's two recent books of poetry are: The Healer’s Diary, (Sunstone Press, 2012) and Growing Paradise (LaNana Creek Press, 2011).  She won an Honorable Mention for the poem, Love Enough, in the Robinson Jeffers 2012 Tor House Award. She  contributed a chapter on two traditional sacred female figures of the Anishinaabeg (Ojibwe/Chippewa), entitled, “Nokomis Tibik Giizis and Mindemoya: Grandmother Moon and Old Woman of the Mists,”  in the anthology, Goddesses in World Culture (Praeger, 2011).  She helped edit, White Shell Water Place (Sunstone 2012),  an anthology presenting Native American perspectives on Santa Fe’s 400th anniversary. Ann Filemyr has been the academic dean at IAIA since 2005. 

Tuesday November 27th 4pm - Jon Davis has published six books of poetry, most recently, Preliminary Report (Copper Canyon Press, 2010).  In July of this year, Davis was named Santa Fe's poet laureate, a position he will hold through June 2014.  He has been awarded two NEA Fellowships, a Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship, A Lannan Residency, and a Lannan Literary Award. He also writes and publishes short stories and has written screenplays for short films that have screened in a number of film festivals in the U.S. and Canada. Davis has taught in the Creative Writing Program at IAIA since 1990.

Preliminary Report by Jon Davis 

Literary Santa Fe

When I was in graduate school at the University of Montana, I wrote a grant to the National Endowment for the Arts to bring in three visiting writers for readings and class visits. Other than those three, we'd rarely see a real living writer on campus--except for our distinguished professors. Luckily the town was crawling with writers, so we'd see them elsewhere--at the East Gate or the grocery store or Freddy's Feed & Read, the local book store.

Natalie Diaz

What a difference at the Institute of American Arts where I have taught for 22 years. Thanks to the Lannan Foundation (I'll have more to say about the Lannan folks here soon), to our location, to the web of connections that Arthur Sze bequeathed us, to the developing network of indigenous writers who recognize IAIA as an important locus of activity, to our own brilliant and dedicated alums, we've been blessed with a diverse array of writers year after year. In the last 24 hours, we had dinner and a reading with novelist Jayne Anne Phillips, lunch and a reading with Mojave/Pima poet Natalie Diaz, and a book launch and reading with IAIA alum dg nanouk okpik (Inupiat-Inuit).

dg nanouk okpik

On October 9, Slovenian poet Tomaz Salamun will visit. On October 12 & 13, we have alums Elizabeth Woody, Sherwin Bitsui, dg nanouk okpik, James Thomas Stevens, and Joy Harjo on campus to help us celebrate our 50th Anniversary. We also have Natanya Ann Pulley and Layli Long Soldier coming up later in the fall. In the spring poets Jenny Boully and Lisa Jarnot, and fiction writer Junot Diaz are scheduled to visit.

Even our dean and our faculty secretary are poets. In fact, Dean Ann Filemyr will be reading in our library at 4 pm on October 23. The library will feature readings by our creative writing faculty, Evelina Zuni Lucero and James Thomas Stevens, in the spring.

A Poem by Naseer Hassan

This is the first poem we worked on together. The punctuation is deliberately strange, though we are revisiting that issue to be sure the "strangeness" here in English is congruent to the strangeness in the Arabic. But meanwhile, a peek into a poem-in-progress:

The story of (that) time

The story of that time; … like tyrants “gargling” in the depths; in the forest’s quiet we were. Night was inside us; maybe we were stars, maybe we carried our clothes to where the river enters.

Dante says: the centaurs throw the tyrants in the river of blood[i]; I say: the forest is in the heart, and we inhabit al Midan[ii] square in the homeless rooms; judgment days pass colorless through us, and we are naked on the square of the universe.

---

[i] Inferno: XII.

[ii] An old central square in Baghdad.

Drama on Barcelona: Group Reading on November 18

 Photographs courtesy of Alex Traube.

I will be reading, together with some of my students from the Institute of American Indian Arts and the self-proclaimed Santa Fe Poète Maudit Chuck Calabreze (above, right), at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Santa Fe on November 18, 2012, at 3 p.m. The reading will be part of their "Drama on Barcelona" series.  

The plan is to have each of the students read a poem or two. Then I'll read for twenty minutes and Chuck will stalk and growl for ten to wrap things up. 

So far, the luminous Paige Buffington, Sasha LaPointe, Monty Little, Anna Nelson, and Byron Aspaas have all agreed to participate. Two or three more students may join us.

The public is invited and admission is free.

WHEN:        Sunday, November 18, 2012 at 3 p.m.
WHERE:      The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Santa Fe, 107 West Barcelona, Santa Fe

The Morning Ritual: Editing Naseer Hassan's Dayplaces

I wake at five every morning. And every morning for the last 18 days I have begun my day by reading one of Iraqi poet Naseer Hassan's translated poems from his extraordinary book Dayplaces. My job in our collaborative translation process is to question every English word--"putting pressure" on the choices, I call it with my students--to make sure the sound, the tone, the overall arc of the poem is as close as possible to the original Arabic. Naseer's English is very good; I speak no Arabic. So he brings the poem across into English, and I interrogate him about the original, about the intentions of the work, about the sound of the poem in English. Every choice is carefully tended. We've completed a first round of questions and responses on half of the 84 tiny poems and have accumulated over 200 pages of e-mails.  We have at least ten pages of correspondence just on the cultural meanings of the various punctuation marks we're using. It's a wonderful process, truly a joy to be engaged at this level. And the book itself is extraordinary--difficult, mysterious, tragic and joyful. I'm grateful to be attending its (re)birth into English.

dg nanouk okpik's Corpse Whale

Okpik Street in Barrow, Alaska

Corpse Whale by dg nanouk okpik has just been published by the University of Arizona Press. Dg is a graduate of the Institute of American Indian arts, where I have taught--and been taught in turn--for 22 years. She is Inupiaq Inuit originally from Alaska's Arctic Slope. Her family resides in Barrow, Alaska. She holds a BFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA in Creative Writing from Stonecoast College.

Her work is imagistic, but also linguistically and sonically rich. I was asked by the press to write a blurb, but the request came at a time when I just couldn’t get it done. Blurbs are difficult. One doesn’t want to make extraordinary claims, but one also doesn’t want to understate a poet's or a book’s promise. So I failed to come up with a usable blurb in time. However, near the deadline I dreamed a blurb that turned out to be too odd to use in marketing a book. I awoke one morning with the line “If the ears could speak, this is the language they would use” in my head.  Although those words might not help sell copies, I stand by my dreamwords. Corpse Whale bridges the intuitive and the scientific, the traditional and contemporary, through a language that derives both from dg's traditional culture and language and the sonic legacy of poets like T. S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas. 

(By the way, a corpse whale is a narwhal, whose name is derived from the Old Norse word nár, meaning "corpse," which refers to the animal's greyish, mottled pigmentation, like that of a drowned sailor.⁾

My former colleague, Arthur Sze, wrote a beautiful essay introducing dg’s work here:

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/21591

One of dg’s poems can be found here:

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/21709

Here is dg’s website: 

http://dgokpik.com/

Buy the book from one of our local independent bookstores (Collected Works, as everyone knows, is my favorite). Support face-to-face contact before it disappears altogether:

http://www.collectedworksbookstore.com/

The Palace Print Shop & Bindery

Today I visited with Tom Leech and his assistant James Bourland at the Palace Press, also known as The Palace Print Shop & Bindery, located in the courtyard of the Palace of the Governors. I’d been there years ago, but everything has changed. The reconfigured print shop now houses, among several recreated print shops, a recreation of Gustave Baumann’s studio, including his original press and inks. This was especially interesting to me because among the projects I’m planning as Poet Laureate is an exhibit, talk, and reading at the New Mexico History Museum on the history of poetry in Santa Fe. Baumann, of course, was one of a group of artists, writers, and poets who became central to Santa Fe’s cultural life.

One of the pleasures, I’m discovering, of being Santa Fe’s Poet Laureate, is that I’m being dragged into a more public life, into the communal life of the city. And I’m enjoying it. Twenty years ago, I moved here in large part to have access to the arts, to music, to art films, and to readings. But the workaday world (especially when one loves their work—just a little too much, as I do) and the inertia of that have caused me to miss much of the cultural life I came here to find. So walking through the print shop with Tom was a revelation; he’s produced absolutely gorgeous work that I totally missed—broadsides, posters, chapbooks, folios . . .  All beautifully printed, letter pressed, often on handmade papers.  If you have not visited his shop at the Palace of the Governors, do so. Right now.  Before the inertia takes over.

Here’s the web site for the Palace Print Shop & Bindery:

http://www.palaceofthegovernors.org/PrintShop/hmpg.html

And here’s an interview with Thomas Leech:

http://www.collectorsguide.com/fa/fa142.shtml

Rotary Club del Sur

On September 5, I spoke at the Rotary Club del Sur. Before I went I took some time to find out what a Rotary Club is and what they do. Good work, it turns out. Good, charitable work. And it was a pleasant meeting. At least until I called on my imaginary friend Chuck Calabreze to speak briefly. Briefly, that is, in Chuck time.

Chuck defined poetry for the Rotarians (“a narrowing of the prose for which there is no known cure”), then, after explaining that he was “half feminist . . . on [his] mother’s side,” he delivered a feminist response to Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee.” Here is the poem, which Chuck delivered in his trademark arm-wagging and growling style:

TO MR. POE, FROM HIS BEAUTIFUL ANNABEL LEE

My dear Mr. Poe, you silly twit, to sleep so by the sea!

I’m dead, you’re not, and that is why it’s over between you and me.

Get a house in town, get a job, clear your head;

Get dressed, comb your hair, find a girl who’s not dead

Like your beautiful Annabel Lee.

We loved, it is true, and we walked by the sea.

We walked and we walked and we walked, didn’t we?

Angels didn’t much envy our romance, my twitness,

They envied the cardiovascular fitness

Of your beautiful Annabel Lee.

Ed, I hated that beach, the sand and the sun

(the moon by the time you and I were quite done

Walking that beach in the rain in the wind).

Bedraggled, I’d wallow; you’d breathe deep and grin,

“You’re beautiful, Annabel Lee.”

Oh, it’s true we were children; we walked by the sea.

It’s true, I loved you and I guess you loved me.

True, you pointed to stars, to the moon, to the tides.

Still, I wish you’d had something to tell me besides

“You’re beautiful, Annabel Lee.”

But now that I’m dead, you’re walking no more.

You’re balding, you’re fat, and you’ve started to snore.

I look down from this heaven, and I must confide

I’m glad I have left what you’re sleeping beside--

The body of Annabel Lee.

Are you happier now that I’ve not much to say?

I’m consistently pretty--don’t have a bad day.

It’s your favorite dress and my hair is arranged--

Come to think of it, Eddie, not too much has changed

For beautiful Annabel Lee.

And I’m so glad to know our souls won’t be “dissevered,”

(While you sleep with my body) --you’re ever so clever.

Poor Annabel Lee, you’ve bedazzled, bedeviled her.

But I guess I was always a roll in the sepulcher.

Signed, beautiful Annabel Lee.

The Chuck Calabreze, uh, Issue

It's no secret that I often appear as Chuck Calabreze, a character I created at least partly to lampoon myself. A number of people have asked about Chuck's role in the laureateship. Understandable. The dude's fun to have around. But I, Jon Davis, am the Poet Laureate. And I have assured the folks at the Arts Commission that Chuck would not, for example, show up at the Mayor's Inauguration, shambling onstage with crumpled poems tucked into his mismatched boots.Though even as I made the promise, I became fascinated by the idea of Chuck as court jester . . . But, no, Chuck won't be reading at any public events. He'll be around. He's always around. But he's not, as he likes to think, the co-Poet Laureate. He's the Poète maudit of Santa Fe. 

Officially Official

Okay. It's officially official now and I can speak of it. I'll serve the City of Santa Fe as Poet Laureate for the next two years. 


My thoughts immediately turn to the social purpose of poetry and a quote from Carl Jung that I have carried with me for a while: 


"Therein lies the social significance of art: It is constantly at work educating the spirit of the age, conjuring up the forms in which the age is more lacking. The unsatisfied yearning of the artist reaches back to the primordial image in the unconscious, which is best fitted to compensate the inadequacy and one-sidedness of the present. The artist seizes on this image and, in raising it from deepest unconsciousness, he brings it into relation with conscious values, thereby transforming it until it can be accepted by the minds of his contemporaries according to their powers."


It seems both correct and too large a claim, especially in these days of modest claims, but if it is at least partly true, then I'd propose that one of the "primordial images" I've brought back from the unconscious over and over is the image of the inward person, the contemplative. Our culture is all about performance and action and surface, and I certainly participate in that culture, but I worry about the loss, in myself and others, of quiet and stillness and reflection. So that will be one important theme of my laureateship. 

            

Poet Laureate of Santa Fe

The press release goes out today, Wednesday, July 11, 2012, so I assume that tomorrow is day one of my tenure as Poet Laureate of Santa Fe. But I am in Marfa, Texas, occupying one of the Lannan Foundation's beautiful houses for 33 days, working on poems, stories, translations, and whatever else occurs. So this feels a little strange.

The last two months have been more than a little out of the ordinary, since I have been traveling, first with the University of Iowa's International Writing Program in Cambodia and Vietnam, then on to Barrow, Alaska, to work with a former student on a young adult novel. After a quick stop in Fairbanks to visit some poet friends and their (so far non-poet) daughters, I returned to Santa Fe and the excitement of my own daughter's wedding to her then fiance, now husband, Mike at the Scottish Rite Temple. After two weeks in Santa Fe, I shipped out again, this time to the quiet, small town of Marfa, Texas, population 2121, which to add strangeness to oddness, was temporary home to the vacationing Beyonce, about whom I know almost nothing, except that she sure caused a stir among the locals.

So knowing that I'll be Poet Laureate of Santa Fe feels more than a little surreal right now.  I'm honored. I'm looking forward to getting started. But, hey, I'm in Marfa, Texas!