·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
• • • • •

Aquamarine Chatter

Yesterday a group of us found that one lying around on the Stanford University campus. Actually the phrase found us in a ‘pocket park’ across from Hoover Tower. There among the dark autumn shadows of several tall Redwoods and a singlular, fully carved - Raven on top - totem pole. A thin slash of light - including a punctuated dash of prismatic color - across the dry, brown leaf filled ground. Pedestrian voices on the periphery. We gathered it in fragments. A collaboration.

It caught my ear. I don’t know what it means. But that clarity:

Aquamarine Chatter

I’ll take it!

If you are in San Francisco this Thursday afternoon, I am giving a poetry reading with Kristin Prevallet at the the SF State University Poetry Center at 3:30. I will be reading from Sleeping With Sappho, Walking Theory and Ghost Walks. It will be a pleasure to have you there!

Could this really be the end, as that song goes? The fire filled Los Angeles Finale of Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locust (once again) finds itself - from Mountain to suburbs to ocean front - filling a recurrent vision of Southern California, if not the world.

I find the TV images - as I guess most of us - to be quite startling. But, even more interesting, as if we needed a literary cap, is the combination of images with the surrounding and interwoven texts, “Planet in Peril“, etc. The power of the images is variously multiplied or moderated by an editorial text manager at the Network Desk. As if somebody out there (the Governor, the President et al) is really in charge? Doubtful. Frankly the fires witnessed are so primal, so wind driven - in a way fantastically beautiful, in the way a solar storm is probably beautiful - there is nothing anyone can humanly do to stop it other than nature itself (winds calm, moisture from the ocean, skys returning).

Yet - if you are like me - it’s hard not to read these incredible events - as signs, as further omens of big changes coming to the planet. Before those possibilities, it will be interesting to see, or, no doubt more importantly, to invest in whatever protective measures (what multiple small and major steps) may be taken. The warning flags appear to be up everywhere.

If you are looking for the post on Laura Ulewicz, Scroll down four entries or use the calender to go to October 14.
My email contact is in the upper end of the sidebar.

The air is filled with infinite straight and brilliant lines, criss-crossing and interweaving without any of them ever obstructing the paths of others, and for each object they represent the true shape of reason. Leonardo De Vinci as found signage in Bilbao’s Gugenheim Museum. August 2007.

A selection of four panels out of sixteen from Bilbao Haptics, Accordion-Fold, August 2007.

Pulse, sound, the rhythm of lisening, according marks - alternating between blue and black: the Serra gallery, moving in and out of iron subdivided, variously sliced cones & tori; the inner-sanctum, tilted this way and that, coiled, vertical, thick steel waves; the breach of space, the eroticism of amber, apricot and blackened curves, opening, closing;

the Anselm Kieffer show, in part an homage to Paul Celan: the vertical NASA map, star filled, black lead books; high dark sunflower stems, blackened seed pods risen from exfoliate leaves, sheaves, pages. Tarred, scarred ferociously large black paintings: cheap school and/or park metal, extended folding-chairs appended, perpendicular to canvas; the open, burnt, large, thick black books on extended plinths. The torture of scorched books.

Bundles of burnt branches, a bombastic insistence there must be a way out of this. Death of utopia, whatever once, civilized, held. The death of crying.

Merkaba: Concrete stairways rise at angles, flat against the tall wall, or lie on the floor, one, upside-down, atop the other, sandwiched. A realization that a stairway is an accordion-fold: echo of a pilgrimage, a Jacob’s ladder, either open, promising, or not.

A Haptic: a pulse, a register, a music, the soft-architecture turned to marks (blue, black). The script in advance of script. To pray with ones hands and fingers. To not, never - well, now and then - stop.

October and the dead come close, real close. The couple - in their Sunday best - used to live at the top of the hill on Liberty near Sanchez Street. Back down here on Valencia, they are happy to glad hand and give a smile to everyone. Oblivious to the fact they could no longer own their former house, nor pay fire and other insurance costs, things now are matters of the spirit. Like many, they, too, have a lost son, a demented daughter, and another making huge sums in software. The grand children are already grown and gone, one rumored to be an Army interrogator in Iraq, the other, a soldier in Afghanistan.

The couple have come back down to Valencia to visit, to converse. “Remember when we used to go to Church. It didn’t matter that we had an Irish priest; he spoke Spanish with a chuckle and always kissed our sons and daughter on each cheek.”

They wander in sunshine; they wander in the dark. Yesterday I saw them having lunch under the Palm trees in Dolores Park. All day long they spend looking closely at children on the swings. “This one? No. That one? No.” Flickers of memory water and strain their eyes. What once appeared so real - the red flesh on a cheek, the rust freckled forehead - has disappeared. Later, in the evening, up the street - inside the Cathedral cemetary - I hear their voices singing. “Welcome back. Welcome back.” It’s as if the dead are calling up the dead, layer upon layer, centuries upon centuries. One can imagine each palette rising! “Welcome back. Welcome back.”

Tonight already, candles in hand, another group - dressed in formal black and white- roams in careful columns up and down the street. “Welcome back, welcome back,” I and others momentarily greet and converse before we quickly turn away. You never know who you might meet: an old lover betrayed, a man with an unforgiven grudge, a business deal gone south, the poet who never got or earned recognition. It can be very creepy out there. Many of us disappear into Amnesia, one of our favorite local bars.

Red Ghosts? Maybe it’s the change of season, the cast of shadows, a dark that comes earlier and earlier, but suddenly the neighborhood is sporadically full of red troops crossing the sidewalks!

Hard at work, notice how they haunt subtle cracks with broad red strokes and give a swathe to the risen edges of small erruptions.

Some even say, if these folks are on to you at a party or close by on the street, no one is able to conceal the cracks from one’s inevitable - serious or casual - collisions in a life. Without a thought, it is said, they will tear off your clothes to find, then paint - stroke by large red stroke - the edge of each substantial or subtle fracture in a heart, the soul, the family. Transparent, when this happens, each crack glows, as if flourescent, in the dark.

No, many already insist, it has nothing to do with sentiment. At best, their intentions are cosmetic, at an extreme, surgical. As if with jack-hammer and shovel, they rip up the detritus between the cracks, then carefully smooth and seal the skin of anyone. Not interested at all in niceties, some say, their interests are purely public. They don’t want the rest of us to trip and twist an ankle, if not a soul, on the small mountain of anyone else’s multiple breaks and cracks!

At the end of day, we see them gather on their way home from work,
gathering to converse in the evening dark.

Who knows of what they really speak? Maybe something as simple as rising tomorrow, and discussing the ancient art of putting a good foot down on a new day.

I heard this evening that Laura Ulewicz, an American poet and long time friend, passed away, after a short illness, in the Delta town of Locke, California, where she resided since the 70’s. I would see her occasionally, as bright and as inquisitive as ever, with that suffer no-fools approach to anything she found suspect. According to her close friend and neighbor she continued to write, though she clearly obscured herself from any literary scene. She and Jack Gilbert, the poet, were lovers in the 1950’s. Hopefully, a close look at her archives from this period, may or may not reveal whether or not she was the maker of poems that gave Jack Gilbert his formal impetus, or whether it was a reciprocal working relationship, or whether Jack took the lead. And possibly none of these possibilities at all! I continue to find her poems quite brave, tough and compelling, particularly those collected in her one small volume, The Inheritance (Turret Books, England, 1967).

Though for awhile in the 50’s she was very much in North Beach and friendly with many of the Beats, Allen Ginsberg et al, she refused to be branded as a Beat. Donald Allen requested her poems for the seminal New American Poets Anthology, but she and Jack Gilbert left SF the day after for the Northwest - I think to take a workshop with Theodore Roethke (of this I am not positive) - and she never responded. (She told me this a year ago). In the late sixties and early seventies, she owned and managed the I & Thou coffee shop on Haight Street which hosted several series of poetry readings. By the mid-seventies, probably burnt out by the intensity of local street life - which had little or nothing to with making or hearing poetry - Laura moved to Locke, west of the City on the Sacramento River. She continued to write but published little, and, after working in a tomato cannery for some years, she went to work for Child Protection Services in the Social Welfare Department for the county County. Most recently she managed a gallery in Locke.

Here is something I wrote about her work on the Buffalo Poetry listserv a few years back, including one of her poems from The Inheritance :

In the late fifties through the early seventies, Laura Ulewicz - a
Polish-American woman from Detroit - was very present in both North Beach
and the Haight-Ashbury. (In the late sixties she owned the I & Thou Coffee Shop on Haight Street, a singular venue for poetry readings during a time in which the interest in poetry had been replaced by the music, drugs, etc.) I am not sure Laura would have ever fit - or even wanted to fit - the aesthetic dimensions of the Allen anthology. There were people at the time such as both Laura and Jack Gilbert (a member of Spicer’s workshop) who were
definitely involved, friendly, aware, influenced, and combative within the
local scene, but by temperament they sustained a fierce independence from
the Duncan, Spicer or other group umbrellas that fed into the construction of the
Pacific portion of the Allen anthology. If any mentor, she had an affection for Kenneth Rexroth’s person and work. But, without going further down that
track of associations, I would say that Laura wrote some very significant
poems, indeed quite fierce, probing and smart - drawing from her Polish
American roots, her wanderings back and forth across the country, and her
encounters in California. Romantic in its sense of quest, but definitely
very smart and counter-romantic in terms of its continental yield.
Ironically her only literary success was in 1964 when she won the Guinness
Poetry Prize at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature which led to a small
publication, The Inheritance, by Turret books in 1967. She received an NEA Grant for her poetry in 1968.
To get a limited sense of the work, here’s a section of a two part series, Within OneTemperate Zone (2)

It wasn’t on the map. heat stalled the car
At the valley or base of the 10th hill. Lost.
A post office side the town of San Sinduda. Not
On the map. I asked Carl, “Who do you suppose
has ever climbed that hill?” In a thousand
Years maybe one Indian. A ranch-hand
After cattle. A bull after a cow.
Two boys in black jeans leaned against a log fence
Playing a pocket radio and cursing
Loud to beat the vastness down. A matter
Of will and hot jazz. I said, “It’s pretty
Tame here” - being, of course, wrong. I might
Have meant “too wild with people”. And so
we climbed,
Until the car should cool, more to escape
Noise than to discover. That seconded
The wrong. Yet, pausing for breath on the ascent,
Carl told me how on his
mother’s grave in Concord,
While drunk, he first made love to another man.
In Concord - where the hills are monumented
With Hawthorne, Melville, Walden Pond, and our first
Revolution for severance - the fought one.
Now we looked eastward across a namelessness
Of hills. For beyond this one was another equal
In size, and beyond it another, until
Our minds, wanting to fix, were trapped in freedom.
Often I dream I open a hundred doors
And behind each door there is only another door.

It is with sadness and fondness for Laura that I give this news. The idea of ever wishing her to ‘rest in peace’ would be contrary to her fierce, questioning character, and love of a good fight! Wherever and however, I wish her well; her friendship was important to me, here in this not always friendly City , when I started to make my way as a writer and poet.

Stephen Vincent

“Mama told me there would be days like this!”
Probably not. Someone might say the caption, or the words to describe this, no doubt, exist in a parallel universe. But why would anyone want to go there? The mere fact here, call it, if one will, the factual sublime. The mattress embraced, well, subtley embraced is substantial enough.

Is the cirmcumstance erotic, or merely affectionate, and, is that, the happenstance snuggly, the borderline warm character of it, enough to satisfy?

What is it, when we look at pictures, that the eye, if not the heart, wants in the form of satisfaction? Some say a little astonishment goes a long way. Certainly, for starters, I was the one that pushed the Canon camera trigger. For that sweet moment, I was satisfied. For this moment, now that we are witness to the photograph, why is anyone compelled to give it a name, give it description, connection, etc., the critical works. Blotto! Let the image just hang there, mattress to tree skin, there among the fallen leaves, down below the tennis court. Imagine what one will, it’s Fall, and things, take them with glee, as we do, mattress into tree, the fallen falling, as soon it will be, except among the evergreen, everywhere.

Temporarily occupied elsewhere. Will return soon. In case you had concerns!