 Hi everyone. Oh, it's on. How cool We're gonna get started here Good evening and welcome to the 2023 artists of the year profile performance honoring Stephen Kessler I'm Margaret Niven chair of the Santa Cruz County Arts Commission I'd like to introduce some of my fellow commissioners who are in attendance this evening Paula Woods and Don't want to stand up and Cynthia Killian Great timing The Santa Cruz County Arts Commission seeks to promote expand and plan for the cultural life of Santa Cruz County and to bring artists and arts Organizations together with government for the benefit of all citizens of the county To that end several programs have been developed including artist of the year award the percent for art program and the new spotlight award which recognizes local emerging artists in In April of 1991 the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors established the percent for art program Currently in the works are public art projects for the Aptos library The new live oak library annex the heart of Soquel Parkway and the Green Valley multi-use pathway project We're catching up Catching up after the last few years the artists of the year award is given for outstanding Achievement in the discipline of performing visual or literary arts The recipient must be a resident of or operating in Santa Cruz County Have a national or international reputation and have contributed to the local community through their work in the arts If there are any previous recipients of the artist of the year award, would you please stand and be recognized? Jeffrey Dunn Linda Watson and Gary Young and Is Jim Brown here? Not yet. Well, he's Jim Brown director of the Arts Council Santa Cruz County is here tonight And finally, I'd like to ask the County Board of Supervisors the County Arts Commission the County Parks Department I'd like to thank them County Parks Department and all who helped to make this profile performance possible Thank you. And it's now my pleasure to introduce Kiran Kelly Staff to the Board of Supervisors Jerry Zach friend Good evening before we begin Can we please thank the Santa Cruz County Arts Commission for all the valuable work? They do to promote artists and arts here in our community in Santa Cruz County Thank you for all that Supervisor friend wish she could be here today. It is his wedding anniversary. So I guess he gets a rain check for this one But that's a one-time excuse so But before I begin here we have I would like to introduce our 2023 artist of the year Steven Kessler I'm going to read a short list of Steven's many accomplishments here on his official proclamation from the Board of Supervisors Steven Kessler has distinguished himself over the last 50 years as one of his generation's most versatile and prolific writers author of a dozen volumes of original poetry 16 books of literary Translation three collections of essays in a novel the mental traveler throughout the 1970s and 80s He was active as an organizer of an advocate for the Santa Cruz County poetry community Putting on readings writing reviews and essays in the local weeklies co-hosting with Gary Young the poetry show and Bards After Dark on K KUSP radio and serving as an intellectual and journalistic bridge between the literary minority in the general population From his last collect from his first collection Nostalgia the fortune teller through the prose poems of where was I to last call Steven has produced a steady stream of constantly evolving lyric poetry characterized by its musical yet conversational style and a Sensibility influenced by a diverse range of predecessors After writing for Sundays in the Santa Cruz independent through the 1970s He was a founding associate editor and writer with the Santa Cruz Express Founding editor publisher of The Sun and in recent years He is known as a wide-ranging and free thinking and opinion columnist in the Santa Cruz Sentinel Steven is known Steven is known nationally and internationally as a translator of modern Spanish and Latin American poets including the Argentine master Borges Nobel laureates Vicente Alexandre and Pablo Neruda the ex-Alpaniard Luis Sarnuda and the Argentine expatriate Julio Cortesar His three Sarnuda books written in water Desolation of the Chimera and forbidden pleasures have received respectively a lambda literary award the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets in the Penn Center USA translation award and his version of Cortesar's selected poems Saved twilight received a Northern California Book Award Steven has published hundreds of essays features reviews interviews and columns and dozens of periodicals including poetry flash Exquisite corpse San Francisco review of books East Bay Express Los Angeles review of books North Bay Bohemian and the Redwood Coast review So now therefore the chair of the Board of Supervisors hereby honors Steven Kessler as Santa Cruz County's 2023 arts to the year in recognition of his significant contributions to the arts and to the Santa Cruz County community and Now we want to invite his friend poet Gary Young to come on up and join Steven for the profile performance Thank you, and thank you all for joining us here for the festivities this evening. It's nice to see so many old friends It's an honor and Great personal pleasure for me to introduce one of my oldest and dearest friends Steven Kessler Santa Cruz County's 2023 artists of the year this honors will deserve Steven is a local treasure But make no mistake Steven Kessler is a national treasure To use an old-fashioned term Steven is a true man of letters an intellectual an artist and a master of multiple literary forms and genres Nothing seems beyond his reach of his pen or in Steven's case his typewriter Steven is a Bellatrist and as Julio Cortaza one of his literary heroes would have it a polygraph For over 50 years Steven has published poetry novels journalism translation social commentary literary criticism reviews rants provocations and appreciations But the only literary form that he has not mastered is the operatic libretto Although there is plenty of time left for that and I hope that he will consider it Like most people I am in no hurry to die, but Steven has agreed to write my obituary when I do He is a master of that genre as well And if I kick the bucket before he does that will take out a little bit of the sting Steven is the author of a dozen books of poetry a novel and I'm going to repeat all this stuff because it's important Over 20 volumes of translations of both poetry and novels and innumerable journalistic pieces of every stripe The list of his books is too long to enumerate here But I do want to mention several of his prize-winning works He was awarded the Penn Center USA translation award for forbidden pleasures new selected poems by Luis Sarnuda Saved Twilight selected poems of Julio Cortaza received the Northern California Book Award Desolation of the Camero last poems by Luis Sarnuda won the Academy of the American Poets Harold Morton Landon translation award and written in water the prose poems of Luis Sarnuda received the Lambda Literary Award That's a big deal Steven's work though Cosmopolitan Has always been rooted in community to the notion of home This is the opposite of provincialism His work is a devotion to place to community to neighbors But with the windows open to allow input from near and far past and present He has written eloquently about Los Angeles where he was raised about New York City where he wrote a novel and About his travels to Cuba, Nicaragua, Spain and elsewhere But his work has its roots here in Santa Cruz. I Arrived in Santa Cruz in 1969 with the intention of becoming a poet. I Taken a few classes at the University and it frankly been unimpressed with the faculty I'm now one of the faculty up there So I try to keep that in mind Anyway, I was unimpressed with the fact until I signed up for a class taught by a graduate student Steven Kessler Finally here was what I was looking for a real poet a Visionary a writer of great intelligence passion and artistry a genius Steven seemed to be on fire I had no way of knowing that he was on the verge of a mental breakdown a Psychotic episode that he later described with great artistry insight and fearlessness in his novel the mental traveler Steven left the Academy But he dove headlong into the cultural and literary Riptide of Santa Cruz. I Was luckily enough to follow in his wake like a poor man's Boswell to Steven Samuel Johnson Or maybe Sancho Ponza to his non-kihote or Ponto do his sisco kid Or Watson to his Sherlock Holmes But you get the idea I Proudly joined Steven on the board of the AE Foundation the literary nonprofit that he started and which for decades supported writers with grants and publications We teamed up as co-hosts on the poetry show and Bards After Dark on K us p And I was one of his cub reporters. I'll be at writing prose poems On the Sun arguably the best local independent weekly Santa Cruz has ever seen and Which I've never seen one better anywhere and which he published until the earthquake brought that to an end After the quake Steven moved to Walla where he continued to write But he couldn't resist the journalistic urge and he edited an award-winning Redwood Coast review A small insert in the independent Coast observer which Steven turned into a vital literary journal with a national reach When Steven returned to Santa Cruz he couldn't resist journalism siren song a Lot of you are in here. I know I've heard that song And he began writing a weekly op-ed piece for the Santa Cruz Sentinel His ranging sensibility and appetites are well represented in his opinion columns thumbing through them I picked out a small random sample to suggest the compass of his interests his curiosity his range and his generosity of spirit beauty walking baseball football painting poetry politics baseball politicians antique fairs housing aging despacho women music Israel guns aging Grandmothers the solstice disillusionment COVID friendship beauty gratitude baseball aging hurricanes pleasure walking horse racing women endurance the sea women aging baseball Steven has even written a couple of pieces on our new library, which some of you may have seen Although Steven left the academy He never gave up teaching He has been a mentor and a role model to many poets translators and especially journalists His reach has been enormous and are many grateful beneficiaries to his generosity here in Santa Cruz and beyond Simone vile the French mystic and radical philosopher once said that attention is prayer If she's right, we can consider all of Steven's work his poems essays novels meditations as secular prayers He is our bard our conscience our communities wise uncle It would be hard to find any writer with more facility with words But Steven possesses two virtues that are the most necessary for any poet curiosity and a love for the world All his work is marked by music intelligence independence and integrity Steven has been a mentor a friend and an inspiration to me And in that I'm not alone Please join me in welcoming my dear friend and your 2023 artist of the year Steven Kessler You can tell I have a lot of relatives in the audience well, thank you for that That warm welcome and Thanks for being here at all And to Gary I must say Thank you. I guess it's like for embarrassingly effusive Introduction I I'm I better not blow it because he really talked me up into something bigger than I probably really am um So apart from Gary, of course, I have to thank the arts commission for uh bestowing this honor upon me, uh, it's it's uh, there's a lot of Artists around here some of them in this room who Are equally accomplished in their respective disciplines and I just uh I as a Famous poet once said I can't help it if I'm lucky Koomba must be thanked and all the gang here who are practically my relatives because I spend so much time here But Tim and and bobby who's the emeritus Director of the whatever, you know the manager managing director Dave on the sound and all the volunteers in the kitchen. They make great desserts here And uh, anyway, it's just it's an honor to be on this stage where I have witnessed so many amazing awe-inspiring musicians So, uh, thank you Koomba for for having us and I must um Not neglect to thank the board of supervisors For sending their emissary Karen I've always thought that um poets should sort of remain on the margins and outside of any institutional let alone government approval, um, so when I first uh Heard that I was Getting this award. I was afraid it was going to tarnish my reputation as a renegade But I want to thank the board of supervisors, uh, none of whom Happen to be available to present their proclamation which um suggests that uh, no elected official Wants to be seen on the same stage with me And and therefore it you know, it it, uh, it maintains my reputation as an anti anti-establishment, so thank you Board of supervisors, um Okay, so there's some other people who aren't here who couldn't be here because they're no longer anywhere, but they were really, um Critical to my formation Uh at the at the dawn of my so-called career. I always say so-called career because Poetry unless you're um, well, don't get me started. Um, but I I never really had a career as a poet I I always felt like it was a vocation and it never you know, I never Earned me any uh any money or fame. I mean this is as famous as I'm gonna get so Enjoy it. Um Uh anyhow, there were a number of people Early on who really got me started and I I want to acknowledge them before I Give you what you came for which is poetry. Um Um, first of all on that list is uh Juan Padilla who was my high school Spanish teacher for four years I was a uh An underachieving a b student throughout my high school career because as now the same reason I quit graduate school I'm basically lazy and too lazy to do anything, but write write poetry and You know write newspaper columns and write letters and write whatever, you know Opera librettas I might have one in my In my drawer I've no I've never written a movie script Which is the thing that I was most likely to write growing up where I grew up, but uh, I escaped la pretty early on Anyway, uh, Juan Padilla was a was a genius Teacher of Spanish so I a straight b student without trying any harder I got a's in Spanish and it was partly because I had a an aptitude for it, but Partly because he was just such a great teacher that he made it As easy as you know writing b papers for my English classes So there's Juan Padilla was a one person that is very important to thank. Um In the early 70s, there were a number of upstart community weekly newspapers that that That started out pretty crazy in the early 70s got a little bit more sober in the Early to middle 70s and then got crazy again in the middle in the middle in the 80s. Anyway, I Just a couple of years out of graduate school. I I started sending book reviews to the Santa Cruz independent and the Arts editor of the independent was a person named buzz bazaar who some of you may remember as Some kind of mad genius Editor of newspapers So buzz initially had me writing a literary column called words. So I would write book reviews and reviews and previews of poetry readings and various kinds of Uh, literary writing, which is the only kind of writing I felt qualified to write because I was you know, I was a dropout PhD student in literature The editor of the the editor-in-chief of the paper left for South America or something and buzz was promoted to the You know to edit the entire newspaper and the first thing he did was to uh Invite me to write a an opinion column on the on the editorial page And my first response to that was well, you know, I don't really I'm not really qualified to write about anything Because I don't know anything about anything except except books And buzz even though he you know, he saw that I was a recovering academic He he saw in his buzz's genius as an editor was that he could he could identify people who could think and write at the same time and So, uh I took a crack at it All it took was like one week, you know, I wrote the first one and that was it. I mean The rest is history. I'm still I'm still doing that because it's just So fun and easy to be a generalist, you know, you don't have to know too much about anything But you can you know, you can learn a little bit I mean the great thing about journalism is you don't have to prove that you know everything I mean unless you're doing deep dive investigative stories And especially if you're just a commentator, you know, you can just say what you think and people can take it or leave it um Anyway, uh buzz bazaar Is to blame for my becoming a journalist. So I have to I have to Give him a a shout out um The next person who had a a significant role in my integration into the poetry community of santa cruz is mort marcus Who was a former artist of the year and I actually met mort On in the mail in 1967 when I was editing the lampeter muse the the literary magazine at bard college And mort who was teaching at lick wilmerding high school in san francisco and coaching the basketball team there Sent me Some poems and I published one Which he later told me was like the first prose poem he ever Published and I remember that poem or at least part of it. It started it was called a poem for my ear And it started out Sometimes my ear wants to be listened to I hear nothing out of the ordinary a teacup a cracker And that was it. I was you know, I was A good editor can see like they have read read like two lines and they can tell whether they're reading something that is worth continuing um, so anyway mort almost single-handedly Wrangled a poetry community out of a few scattered Youths who were barely starting to write poetry a number of them were his former students But anyhow mort you know ended up being like a An annoying big brother figure to me, you know somebody who you kind of Worship and and and admire and also like to fight with And he was a great fighter He had been a boxer and anyway mort marcus deserves an acknowledgement because even though he wasn't my teacher he he You know, I don't credit him with any of my My work, but he did Create an environment for poetry and Santa Cruz that nobody has ever Equaled even though it was a much more intimate group of people and and uh, you know, there's a lot of different Stuff going on now, but um mort marcus Must be acknowledged and Not least for introducing me to George Hitchcock Who as some of you know Was a kind of a legendary Teacher at UC Santa Cruz for about 20 years. He taught acting and and uh playwriting and drama and poetry and I don't I don't know what else, but he he was Uh, mainly known to the outside world as the editor of kayak magazine, which was Easily in my opinion the best poetry magazine ever published in this country And and the most the most unique the most original totally Saturated with george's sensibility and personality and one of the um I actually had met george through the mail uh Before I ever got out here because as a ignorant presumptuous 20 year old undergraduate Poet at bard. I would I would I started sending poems to kayak where you know like real Poets were were publishing and and everybody wanted to be in kayak even though it it only started in like 64 and um Uh, this was like 66 67 I started sending him poems Anyway, the great one of george's exemplary traits as an editor was his um The promptness with which he rejected your poems If you didn't if you didn't get a rejection in like two or three days, you know, you knew he was like considering your work Because like all great editors he could tell like all he needed to read was a few lines and he could tell whether anything was going on um and part of george's work as an artist was making collages and making illustrations for his His magazine kayak. He also printed it and he he enslaved a bunch of volunteers to Collate it, you know every few months when it came out he would have a big party and put out cold cuts and And people would like staple be stapling and stuffing envelopes and so he was creating a community too with with kayak but as the Name of the magazine implied it was like a one man operation, you know It's like a it even had a little definition of a kayak at the beginning of the At the in the opening page of the magazine Which said, you know a kayak is not an ark a gallery or a or a schooner. It is like a you know one person boat So, uh One more thing about george's that has Besides being prompt george's rejection slips were the funniest rejection slips in the history of of little magazines he had a collection of Old magazines from like the 19th and early 20th centuries with a lot of A lot of illustrations You know just drawings and and prints and he would clip these out and paste them into his collages and into kayak And for his rejection slip It usually had a picture of there were three of them that I can remember one was like somebody in front of a firing squad One of them was somebody falling into a crevasse And and one of them was somebody getting their head chopped off And and the line underneath the illustration was something like the editor of kayak Regrets that we are unable to use your work at the present time um So those were great rejection slips, but eventually after a while about the middle 70s george started publishing my poems in kayak, which is just like I mean it was like Forgive me, but it was like more exciting than than what i'm doing now because i've been at this for like 50 years and and uh, you know i'm used to talking forever in front of an audience but but i wasn't used to getting my po my poetry published in like You know arguably the best poetry journal in the country so and and a couple of years after that george published my first book so um You know he just did He he he immeasurably increased my confidence in myself As a as a poet and it wasn't because he was like patting me on the back and telling me, you know How well i was doing i mean george was you know those of you who knew george if there are any still here He was pretty gruff and you never really knew whether he liked you or not or But he did keep publishing my poems, you know and and he he Like all of my mentors who were never actual mentors um, he just said an example that i have uh He's he's a constant point of reference for me as a somebody with absolute artistic integrity and and uh, just a great editor and and uh You know all around all around artist who i'm so grateful to have met Uh Partly thanks to to morton marcus Okay, uh, there's one more person that i must mention um And just to show how everything's connected. Uh, this is somebody that george hitchcock introduced me to Who is uh was fernando alegría who was a chilean writer and uh poet novelist Critic professor Who at the time around i don't know early 70s i can't remember the exact year maybe 73 or 74. Um He was the chair of the department of spanish and portuguese at stanford And he gave a reading over here one time that george organized and I think i gave him a one of my translations And like the next day. I think it was maybe i don't think it took him 48 hours. He was on the phone like Is stefan you want to come over and uh, you know have a sauna in my backyard and Go swimming in my pool and you know, my wife will make us a barbecue and so that was the beginning of uh fernando's recruitment of me as as his translator for the next 10 years or so i accompanied him to conferences and readings and And uh spent a lot of time at his at his house. Um Where whenever any Latin american poet or writer was in town Fernando would throw a party for them and carmen his wife would make a big paella or something and and uh So I learned a lot. I met a lot of interesting people uh through fernando and uh He also he set a great work ethic because he was Astoundingly prolific But he would get up like at six in the morning and right until nine and then he would go teach his classes at stanford Then he would come home Have lunch take a siesta and then go play golf in the afternoon and like go to a cocktail party at night. Um, he he was the chilean cultural attaché in the iende government in washington dc and part of his gift was as a as a bone vivant and so he he was always throwing parties and and um One of the people he threw a party for was uh julio cortas are Who some of you may know was a uh One of the leading latin american writers of his time. Um in the 60s. He published a book called hopscotch, which was monumental breakthrough in the novel and um It was a master of the short Tail he called them tails relatos not cuentos. Um Rather, you know tails not stories You know subtle distinction for those of us who don't believe Uh synonyms really exist um Anyway, uh julio cortas are whom I met At fernando's and who subsequently came up to my house in the sokel hills and had dinner with his wife carol dunlop and and then we corresponded and and uh It was after his death that I discovered he had published a selected poems. Um In mexico city and also in nicaragua and when I was in monagua nicaragua in the Ministry of culture in their little bookstore. I found this book called salvo salvo crepusculo by julio cortas are and it was his selected poems and I eventually um Translated a selection from that book Lawrence furlinget he published it as a city lights pocket poets book And the first poem I will finally get around to Saying to you. I apologize, but I I can't I can't uh not Talk about all these amazing people that I have Been really lucky to know so one of the first poems in safe twilight Is called to be read in the interrogative Have you seen? Have you truly seen? The snow the stars the felt steps of the breeze Have you touched really have you touched? The plate the bread the face of that woman you love so much Have you lived like a blow to the head? The flash the gasp the fall the flight Have you known known in every pore of your skin? How your eyes your hands your sex your soft heart Must be thrown away Must be wept away Must be invented all over again So another great Argentinian writer I had the I've had the privilege of translating Is Jorge Luis Borges who is also better known to most people as a as a writer of short fictions and and strange non-fictions But Borges too thought himself primarily as a poet and one of the interesting things about him and one of the things that made him A lot easier to translate than than a lot of the other Spanish and Latin American poets. I've translated was that his His paternal grandmother was English His father had a big English library in Buenos Aires where he grew up And his the language he first learned to read in was English And he also traced his awakening to poetry To his father reading him when he was a very small boy Keats is owed to a knight and gale In English and little Georgie, which is what everybody called him Didn't he didn't understand the words, but he was captivated by the sound of the language and So he sounds More like an English poet in some ways than An American poet or a Latin American poet. Anyway, I'll read you one poem from his I think was his last book. So it was written when he was in his 80s And it's called happiness Whoever embraces a woman is Adam The woman is Eve Everything happens for the first time I saw something white in the sky They tell me it is the moon, but what can I do with a word and a mythology? Trees frighten me a little They are so beautiful The calm animals come closer so that I may tell them their names The books in the library have no letters. They spring forth when I open them Leaping through the atlas, I project the shape of Sumatra Whoever lights a match in the dark is inventing fire Inside the mirror and other weights in ambush Whoever looks at the ocean sees England I have dreamed Carthage and the legions that leveled Carthage I have dreamed the sword and the scale Praised be the love wherein there is no possessor and no possessed but both surrender Praised be the nightmare which reveals to us that we have the power to create hell Whoever goes down to a river goes down to the Ganges Whoever looks at an hourglass sees the dissolution of an empire Whoever plays with the dagger foretells the death of Caesar Whoever dreams is every human being In the desert I saw the young Sphinx which has just been sculpted There is nothing else so ancient under the sun Everything happens for the first time, but in a way that is eternal Whoever reads my words is inventing them So Borges was born in 1899 Luis Sernuda, the great Spanish poet Who I had the good luck to discover before there were any good translations available And Sernuda I believe is my ticket to the afterlife Because he's one of the greatest Spanish poets And I managed to get into his voice in a way that I just couldn't stop And I ended up translating a big selection of all his work Sernuda was a member of the generation of 1927 Which his most famous member is Garcia Lorca And he was openly gay in the 20s in Spain Which you know was pretty much unheard of Lorca was gay also and a couple of other members of that generation But Sernuda was the only one who was explicit about it When the Franco invaded the Spanish Republic And the Spanish Civil War started in 1936 And Lorca was murdered A number of people went into exile Sernuda went to the mountains to fight for the Republic for about two weeks And you know he was less cut out to be a soldier than I am And so that didn't last long He was invited by somebody to give some lectures or readings in England And he went to London, he never came back to Spain He ended up in Glasgow Which you know he was from Andalusia He was from Seville And he was not happy in northern cold gray northern climates He was used to hot sun and sandy beaches And beautiful boys and swimsuits And he anyway he ended up staying in Scotland for a while Then he got a job at Mount Holyoke In Massachusetts Which is also in the north and to his unfortunate luck It was a school for girls at that time So he couldn't even scheme on his students Eventually he went to Mexico And ended up living in Cueva Can Which is the same neighborhood where Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera and Leon Trotsky And various other famous people have lived With a contemporary of his and his family And then in the early sixties He taught at San Francisco State for I think a year And then the following year he taught at UCLA Or maybe he taught at San Francisco Anyway he taught at State And then he taught at UCLA and commuted back to Mexico But he lived in Santa Monica I know the building where he lived And so he has a connection to LA Which he liked because it was at least warm But he ended up dying in Mexico Of a heart attack when he was 62 years old 1963 So I want to read one poem of Serenita Also a poem written probably when he was around 60 In exile, disillusioned, heartbroken But he kept writing amazing poems And this poem is the title poem from the book Called Desolation of the Camara The Camara as some of you certainly know Is a mythical beast from Greek mythology That as the head of a lion And the body of a goat and the tail of a serpent But it's pretty much any kind of freakish monster Of put together parts Serenita was also a scholar of English poetry And I'm sure this poem is a riff On Shelly's famous sonnet, Azamandias Which I think that was a poem that he wrote Like in 15 minutes when, you know, for a contest The romantic poets, they would have these little salons And they would say, okay, now let's everybody write a poem And then we'll see who writes the best poem in 10 minutes So Shelly wrote this immortal sonnet Called Azamandias about this ruin in a desert It starts out, I met a traveler from an antique land Who said, too vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert, and then it goes on And then the inscription on the statue is My name is Azamandias, king of kings Look on my works ye mighty and despair Nothing beside remains Round the decay of that colossal wreck Boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away So this is Serenita's version of that And it holds its own, I think, against any immortal poem And that's the reason I want to read it to you It's called Desolation of the Camero This is a, he thought of himself as an old man He could see his time running out So this is like an old man, even though he was only like 60 This is an old poet who has had his illusions Shattered, Desolation of the Camero The whole day's heat distilled into a suffocating vapor The sand releases Against the deep blue background of the night Like an impossible drizzle of water The frozen splendor of the stars Is proudly aligned alongside the full moon Which, from a great height, Distainfully illumines the remains of beasts in a boneyard Jackals can be heard howling in the distance There is no water, palm frond, underbrush or pond In its full splendor, the moon looks down on the pitiful Camero Its stone corroded in its desert It's missing wings like stumps Its breasts and claws mutilated by time The hollows where its vanished nose and hair once curled Are now home to the obscene birds feeding On desolation, on death When moonlight touches the Camero It seems to come alive with a sob A moan that rises not from the ruin But from the centuries rooted inside it Immortally crying over not being able to die As the forms that man gives life to always die Dying is hard, but not being able to die If everything dies is perhaps harder still The Camero murmurs at the moon And its voice is so sweet it eases its desolation No victims, no lovers, where did the people go? They no longer believe in me And the unanswerable riddles I posed Like the Sphinx, my rival and sister no longer tempt them The divine survives in all its protean forms Even though the gods die That's why this deathless desire is alive in me Though my form is wasted, though I'm less than a shade A desire to see humanity humbled in fear before me Before my tempting, indecipherable secret Man is like an animal tamed by the whip But how beautiful his strength and his beauty O gods, how captivating There is delight in man When man is beautiful, how delightful he is Centuries have passed since man deserted me And disdainfully forgot my secrets And while a few still pay me some attention I find no enchantment among the poets As my secret scarcely tempts them And I see in them no beauty Skinny, flaccid, balding, bespectacled, toothless That's the physical aspect of my former servant And his character looks the same Even so, not many seek my secret now Since they find in woman their personal sad chimera And it's just as well unforgotten Because anyone changing infant's diapers and wiping noses While he thinks about some critic's praise or bad review Has no time to pay me any attention Can they really believe in being poets If they no longer have the power, the madness To believe in me and my secret Better for them an academic chair Than barrenness, ruin, and death The generous recompense I gave my victims Once I had possession of their souls When man and poets still preferred A cruel mirage to bourgeois certainty Clearly for me those times were different When with a light heart I danced happily Through the labyrinth where I lost so many And so many others I endowed with my eternal madness Joyful imagination, dreams of the future Hopes of love, sunny voyages But the prudent ones, the cautious men I strangled with my powerful claws Since a grain of madness is the salt of life Now that I've been and gone I don't have any more promises for man The moon's reflection sliding over the deaf sand of the desert Leaves the chimera stranded among shadows The captive music of its sweet voice quieted And as the sea pulls back the tide Leaving the beach denuded of its magic The voices' spell pulled back Leaves the desert even more unwelcoming Its dunes, blind, dulled Without the old mirage Mute in darkness The chimera seems to have retreated Into the ancestral night of primal chaos But neither gods nor men nor their creations Are ever nullified once they've been They must exist until the bitter end Disappearing into the dust Immobile, sad, the noseless chimera can smell The freshness of dawn, dawn of another day When death will not have pity on it But its desolate existence will continue People have asked me over the years Doesn't translating take away from writing your own poetry? That is my own poetry It's the way a cover version of somebody else's song is your own song That's what translating is Translators are not stenographers They are recreators of the original work At best, you know, they don't always Don't always measure up But anyway, one more Spanish poet I must read you One poem by is Vicente Alexandre Who is also a member of Serenita's generation of 1927 He was born in 1898 He was also gay according to rumor He never really revealed it But lived with his sister all his life He never left Spain because he was semi-invalid So he was there all through the Spanish Civil War And after And when I first met him During the Franco dictatorship in 1973 Through a sequence of unbelievably serendipitous events He was still living in the house You know, in the same house where Garcia Lorca used to play the piano And where all visiting poets from Spain or Latin America Or anybody knew anything about Spanish poetry Ended up paying a call upon Vicente Alexandre And so I was one of those young poets I think I was 26 Had never published I'd published a few, maybe a few translations But I think I was really starting out as a translator And doing the really easy stuff Like Pablo Neruda's Ode You know, which are They were written for the newspapers And they were meant to be immediately accessible to anybody Alexandre was the most baroque of Spanish poetry of his generation And he encouraged me When he found out that I was starting out as a translator He encouraged me to translate this book That he published in the 30s called La Descripciono Al Amor Destruction or Love And as it happened I had like I had bought a copy of that book Like two days before In a bookstore in Madrid Without ever expecting Without even knowing whether Alexandre was alive So the, you know, the combination of forces Were just unbelievable The problem was that those poems were just so hard to Even understand, let alone translate Because it was, they were written during His surrealist period And surrealist poetry is like You know, good luck with surrealist poetry They were, and they were erotic love poems on top of that So when Alexandre invited me to translate his poems I said, well, you know I'll get back to you on that Because I had to go home and read the poems And see whether I had Anyway, eventually I found my way into them I translated a selection from From that book Shortly after the publication of that book In the fall of 1977 Alexandre was a recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature And my translation and Little book by Lewis Hyde that Robert Bly Published of Alexandre translations Were the only books of his poetry available in English And when Robert Bly wrote a Little essay about Alexandre on the front page Of the New York Times book review After he won the Nobel You know, suddenly I was a famous translator You know, like I said, I can't help it if I'm lucky So That was the first book of Alexandre that I translated Then much more recently I translated one of his last books It's called Poems of Consumption So this is an old man Writing as if posthumously I'm sure some of you geezers will identify with this It's called If Someone Had Told Me If only you could have told me what you didn't say On this near perfect night under the dome On this cool summer night when the moon has blazed The chariot burned, the stars sank And in the night sky curdled with livid hollows There's nothing but grief And there's memory and solitude and forgetting And even the reflected leaves are falling They fall and they last They live If someone had told me I'm not young yet I exist And this hand moves It slips snake-like through this darkness Explaining its venom Its mysterious doubts before your living body The cold's birthday was long ago The moon fell into the water The ocean closed with green flashes It's been asleep who knows how long The waves keep hushing The spray sounds the same Only silent It's like a sad fist And it grabs the dead And tries to explain them And shakes them And smashes them against the rocks And splashes them Because the dead smashed Pounded against the crafty granite Splash They're matter And they don't stink They're even more dead And they're scattered and spread And they don't make a sound They're dead and gone Maybe not even begun Some of them loved Others talked a lot And they explained themselves Pointlessly Nobody listens to the living But the dead keep quiet with truer silences If only you told me I knew you and I died All that's missing is a fist A miserable fist to pound me To lift me up and smash me And scatter my voice Okay, now I have to follow all these great poets that I translated But I learned a lot from them More than from anybody else Certainly, translation has been my lifelong workshop Okay, so this is a poem of mine written about 30 years ago It's called Jack's Last Words That last afternoon When the nurse came in And sucked the liquid out of his lungs With a plastic tube down his nose Plugged in the wall My father said When she was done Give her a dollar He always was the big tipper Maybe because his sister When their old man didn't come home Had to quit school and take a job as a waitress He barely spoke that day The son of L.A. Blazing mid-July Cool room, shady, facing the Hollywood Hills Hamburger hamlet across the street where we ate Waiting for him to die Each of us had our turn to be with him alone Lying there dignified Silent in the white sheets Face hollowed out and bald head glowing Radiation tanned I told him he looked beautiful And he groaned The bandage around the IV was too tight After the nurse fixed that He had a couple of hours I was there for a while The two of us just quiet Until he said with a shrug in his tired voice I paid for it Don't encourage me We only have until nine o'clock Okay, the earliest poem I'll read for you tonight Was written about 40 years ago For somebody who used to come visit me Sometimes It's called Love Song You arrive by sunlight Sweetening the afternoon with fruit Your mouth on mine A frontier between hungers A spell Unspeakable allegiance touches us Sense of the real A voice, face Changing landscape whose textures the eyes are absorbed in Desiring to know Subtly Hold in the mind always A moment Spoken for Spirit moves through lips One tongue to another Listening Whispering Or whistles Calypso Living inspired songs Birds Wind The lifting force Mystery stirs Moves evasive through muscles In search of some musical resolution Or simply a wave which pulls seaword all past ground And dissolves known sand Tides pulse along your pale throat That far from the future I breathe lightly drawn by the soft lines we trace In creation Here's another kind of a love poem It's called Death by Tiramisu Throw me on top No, pull me up No, taste my grateful tears as I take a bite of your lips This is the right way to die The heart caught by its tongue in a kiss to arrest history With fatal sweetness, with perfect espresso and rum-soaked richness After a tender filet consumed in a booth In a room bathed in burgundy light Facing a face whose beauty you've induced endlessly In more rooms than you can remember In beds where you both were known to glow With the immeasurable pleasure of the familiar Increasingly unknown as you deepen union In speechless realms of redemption Thickly, the heart is happy to stop with such satisfaction So the beat generation was a generation preceding my generation And of course I had to figure out what they were doing It took me quite a while actually I was reading like 19th century English poetry in the middle 60s When the beats were taking off And it took me a long time to figure out how to read Alan Ginsburg And Gary Snyder and Lawrence Furlingeddy Who I should not include in that group Because Lawrence did not like to be called a beat poet Anyway, there was a young man in the 10, 15 years ago Who was producing a series of events Called Sparring with Beatnik Ghosts And he would take his little show around in various cities And invite local poets to participate And he did this at least once I think a couple of times in Santa Cruz Once at Felix Copa's little gallery And once at the Coconut Grove of all places And he invited some pretty well-known poets Like my dear late friend Wanda Coleman And he called it the something, you know Something if Santa Cruz Poetry Festival Anyway, I have mixed feelings about the beats And so I thought that I should write a poem for this occasion Because Sparring with Beatnik Ghosts didn't go nearly far enough As far as I was concerned And so this is called I mean this is both an homage to and an attack on the beats It's called driving a stake through the heart of Beatnik vampires Out of the bars of North Beach Out of the back seats of 55 Chevy's Out of Duck Down alleyways Six blocks from Venice Beach Out of the seedy cafes of Greenwich Village And the soulfully seedier dives of Negro neighborhoods Where white men go to try to get down and funky From Tibetan mountaintops and Moroccan cosbos From highway truck stops and Buddhist temples From spiritual quests and boozy binges From smoke-filled paths where the joint is passed perpetually From groovy coffee houses where they howl to the beat of bongos From bandstands where they try to keep up with the jasmine Out of drunken macho weepy tough guy sentimentality Out of hours huddled over notebooks composing incantatory odes The undead Beatniks come Dragging their cigarette butts and their sorry asses Wearing their unshaved mugs and their soggy berets Their fishnet leggy babes and their black turtlenecks Inexplicably hanging onto their arms Popping their pills, puffing their smokes Desperately chugging their beers And claiming to speak for all the beatdown souls And all the beatific hard luck angel food cake eaters From the stages of poetry festivals and political demonstrations The undead beats keep coming unstoppable Hijacking open mics and polite salons With their canned rebellion long past its sell-by date With their wine-stained teeth and their raggedy manuscripts With the cool idea that poetry corrupts the young And that verses rhymes with verses and they are against everything They must be stopped and sent back to the last century We must redeem our silver crosses from the pawn shops And our bespoke suits from the haberdasher's We must empty all the old ashtrays and fire up the dishwashers We must wash the hair of the bedraggled and clip their toenails We must teach them to read Tennyson again And Longfellow and Kipling and Elliot and Strunk and White We must we must send them back to get their MFAs We must feed them fast food to slow down their meth metabolism They must be stopped because if they continue to come They will drag the sixties behind them What a nightmare Never again Never again the speed-wrapping metaphysical inanities Never again the crab lice Never again the all night that all night taste in the mouth Wrong kisses on the tongue wrong juices on the upholstery Never again the self-righteous self-pitying rambling rants And snivelings never again the whining over spilled wine The beatnik vampires must be stopped or they will suck us dry They will drag us into the swamps of their arrested adolescence They will pull us down into the depths of their dusty couches Where we will succumb to their bohemian sitcoms They will drive us again forever down dead-end roads They will wrap their speeding old mobiles around trees And us without seat belts in the shotgun seat They will run red lights and blue lights in pursuit of what can't be caught And in the process crash our careers as creative writers We must stop them We must resolve to resist their market research We must rip their commodified khakis off their behinds We must unsubscribe from their spam We must delete their apps from our iPhones We must purge their works from our kindles And offload their archives from our iPads We must smash their icons and hijack their typewriters We must repossess their beat-up broken-down Buicks We must drive our skateboards and our redwood stakes Into their undead hearts So I read a lot inspired by other artists This poem is called Van Gogh's Rain, Philadelphia Museum of Art I think it was written in 2010 Was that the first year the Giants won the World Series? Van Gogh's Rain, Philadelphia Museum of Art I happened to be at a conference of translators in Philadelphia And took a break from all the boring panels and everything And went to the art museum This is what happened Van Gogh's Rain, Philadelphia Museum of Art From Vincent's hospital window A walled wheat field The same one trembling with color in the other pictures Appears to be suffering Yet also thriving under sheets of driving rain The canvas behind the sheet of non-glare glass Stopping me as I walk Still dazed by a small saison Through this wing of the museum in late October The Giants are playing the fillies tonight in the playoffs And every bar in town will be tuned to that green Eden Of grown men behaving like boys on a summer day Vincent's picture is almost grim So gray and muted through the downpour But look closely into the slanting streaks And hundreds of colors ravish your seized eyes Like all those lovely faces you'll never touch And so his terrible sadness touches you Drenches you Like the expansive landscape under that storm of emotion The painter caught and drove through the strokes of his brushes After an hour I'm saturated and must exit Past the construction Down the long broad steps and back downtown along Benjamin Franklin Parkway Returning to the world of hotels and homelessness And games through which we escape for a while Into the timeless grace of double plays Impossible catches And pictures who look too young to throw such tricky strikes How strange that Vincent's tears will outlast the winner's fame So how are you doing are you um I'm just getting started frankly No uh I don't want to tire you out But I have about 20 more poems to read But I won't read them all don't worry I'll perform a little triage Here's a closest I come to writing a nature poem It's about sex But it's also about the San Lorenzo River I wrote this poem For the occasion of my late friend Robert Swords inaugural event as the Santa Cruz County poet laureate he he had a What he called a reading by the river and um There were a bunch of us invited to celebrate Robert as poet laureate and and I really like to write poems for occasions You know like write it to do it right then I didn't write any for this occasion because I already had way too many But um, this is called river lovers My river ran off After all our after all our curved swirls and rippling swells and sweet rapids of release One rainy night she slipped out of bed And fled through town leaving a trail of heartaches in her wake A flood of suitors who didn't rise to her level Logs and ripped out roots from way up the valley Smashing into our bridges and washing up on the beaches evidence of our devastation Egrets taking flight in one last flash Of the beauty we knew the grace I had to call the core of engineers and even they couldn't contain her The wetlands of our flood plains spreading again with every storm It felt so good we couldn't hold the pain And so these birdlike cries Until a quake or the wildfire rakes through the ruins to take what little remains The climate has changed It scarcely rains anymore The stream has thinned like an elderly vegan who needs a burger and a shake And yet in its desiccated state it displays its ducks And delinquent gulls and random great blue heron And tough and tender rushes in the shallows sadly sipping last season's watery kisses Now I wait for storms to fill the reservoirs and look for shreds of myself Evenings across from the railroad trestle when we smoked in the dark and looked up river At the lights reflected in the water and the shadowy shapes of the mountains Where the walk I took along the bike path when I was leaving town for the last time Following my bliss to a bigger river on the other coast Or pausing on the footbridge after lunch on the way back to jury duty To gaze at the timeless calm of the trees And smell the breeze blowing in from the boardwalk with corn dogs and cotton candy on its breath A little wilderness snakes through town and who even notices but those who have next to nothing And who need a place to chill or do their illicit deals Or hide from a world that disdains them Or write their confessions no one will read Or drown their losses in a fog of intoxication Or make love under an indifferent sky I got to read one prose poem From a book called where was I which started out as a A column in the Santa Cruz weekly back in the before the weekly bought the good times and became the good times Back when Tracy Huckel was the editor of the weekly and she had a little feature on page six A bottom of page six was called street signs and she invited people to submit Little pieces of local color no more than 350 words So I started writing these things and of course once I started writing in whatever form I just Can't seem to stop and eventually I I Was working on I found I figured I was working on a book and then I started writing poems about About places other than around Santa Cruz. Um, and then around imaginary places. So anyway, this book is a prose poems about place And um, I have a lot of favorites in here, but I got to read this one since I You'll you'll you'll see why this is this is an imaginary place, but I actually dreamed this this poem or The setting for this poem It's called my dream library It's downtown, but it's in the mountains It has no computers, but there's a full bar The bartenders double as librarians The walls are solid books except for the plate glass facing the redwood groves Late last night or was it early this morning? They were serving akhmatova gimlets while a chanteuse was scatting a remarkably long rift of dewy decimals And the librarian setting my drink on the brass bar winked at me from behind her designer frames as if we knew something No one else did about the volumes arrayed and rose all around And the view into the trees where she hinted we had once rendezvoused to read rilke And contemplate the ways memories replace romance as we age This place is a refuge at all hours A shelter for those with no place else to go And there's always entertainment dead or alive All these pages teeming with evidence of lost and found existences And the performers somehow tap into your mood and seem to be attuned to how blue or green or pink or Purple you feel and echo that tone in whatever they're playing The bar keeps recommend books No bestsellers and through the skylight mural overhead the stars are visible Or mythic clouds full of gods or a golden radiance Wirelessly we are connected here to so many immortals it is dizzying to consider we inhabit the same world I ask with my eyes across the circulation desk if you'll meet me in the stack so we can compare our readings of women and love But you pretend you don't notice leaving me to imagine our intelligent conversation Which only intensifies my desire Heard melodies are sweet but unheard nobody knows the difference These nights and days on the last barricades before paper is obsolete have the intense flavor of our final kiss When we could savor paradise disappearing That's why i'm nursing this drink the long sips of this book your face Trying to hold in the mind what we read together those eternal evenings Taste whatever your tongue was trying to tell me Okay, uh up to my final or Well, my last call is the name of my most recent book. I hope hope it's not my final book, but you never know I got about three or four poems from this book if you can if you can hold up that long um Or I could just Promise you that I'm not going to read anymore and you'll have to buy the book to find out Find out what's in it. Um, this is called gray eminence These poems are all written between 2017 and 2021 Gray eminence My t-shirt today is gray. My shirt is gray. My beard is gray. I am a gray man in a gray mood Though the sky is blue And the flowers at the farmers market are yellow And the lips of some of the saturday girls are red And the fiddle in mandolin music is bright as a summer morning in the mountains I was up there once and remember its green smell And the sweet blue black stains on fingertips that had picked wild berries on a trail along the creek But I had been shrinking Incredibly inexorably to fit a more urban flat on death row Where my reduced footprint will go unnoticed because of my advanced youth I don't seem bereft. I had my fun and did what I could to help But the headlines tell me it's all over and I can't help wondering if I made a bad turn somewhere Took this out of the way road to my dream and lived it largely awake and woke up to nothing much But these sheets of lost beds with loves in them and pages of poems I always got mixed up with those mates. I could hardly tell them apart until it was too late Now I write them letters in my sleep confessing everything, but they don't reply That gate is shut Garden gone wild No way back This must explain my eminence above all So far removed I have gone gray Cloud-like in my darkening lightness This is called The name of the book is last call. It's got a Manray photograph of lee miller with her hand on her lips. Uh Love that photograph And uh This poem is called brainy girls And you know who you are I'm in love with all the brainy girls Their sexy thinking seduces me every time Their talk about everything is so intelligent Their letters are full of touching revelations Even their emails are intimate And back in the days of face-to-face conversation Before the age of the prophylactic mask To see their lips as they spoke so crisply and smartly And to catch a dazzling glimpse of their eyes brightness Was to feel a tender bondage laced with the sweet pain of longing To be one with each of them and polyamorous with all This plural intimacy is not promiscuous But a deeply selective adoration and gratitude for shared understanding The brainy girls or the women I grew up to love At impossible distances and closenesses So uh two more poems. Uh, I gotta read this one because it's very it's very local Written well, I don't think it was written in the venue, but it's written about an incident Based as they say in the movies. This is based on a true story It's called ghost bars of california Juliet Binosh, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Pope Francis are in town I saw them at the Nickelodeon And after the movie they adjourned like me a few minutes later to Oswald cool restaurant named after a presidential assassin Where a man drinking a martini Has started a conversation with me just before they entered and took seats at the other end of the bar A couple of stools to my right. I heard how's it going? He caught me while I was musing on the good looks of the staff Talking to me He caught me while I was oh, yeah talking to me. He was and he needed to talk And the bartender was busy with the new customers white robed black robed and sexually disheveled in peresian non-silence So he told me about his family's ranch in Hollister And how he had made and lost two fortunes in business And showed me on his smartphone some of his photographs from a book. He was working on ghost barns of california And that he'd grown up around great wine because one of his grandfathers was a vintner And he loved to humiliate sommeliers by asking them a trick question about the wine Because he couldn't tolerate pretentiousness And that his grandmother had been an english professor at stanford and knew six languages He ordered another martini and told the bartender to bring me another beer Whether I'd drink it or not. I could look at it and he kept talking I was distracted and kept glancing over at the celebrities as if the bartenders and waitresses weren't attractive enough But the man's monologue was interesting He was giving himself a pep talk to try some new thing at 53 Is a black and white photo book or some startup something or other that would get him through middle age and the style he liked He said he used to write poetry, but decided it was self-indulgent I agreed completely But then no more so than telling your life story to a stranger over drinks I finished the second pilsner and wished him well We'd probably meet again at this marble slab But when I turned labinosh rbg and the pope Had paid their tab and gone so this is uh This is the final This is this is the encore I won't be taking questions, but you're welcome to catch up with me After the after the reading and i'd be happy to speak with with anybody laurence furlinggetty Said something that has really stuck with me It's better to leave the audience with the poems echoing in their head than with discourse about the poems So that's why I never go to the the talk back performances of the of any drama. I want to hear the anyway, um This is called the perfect poem And it's a sonnet Which is a form that I have been playing around with since I was a teenager Uh So here we go the perfect poem The perfect poem is where you want to live Lingering in each line as you read through to the end and then read again Gaining more of its music and its meaning in circular motions that move through you Leaving a little residue to reside Somewhere inside where it remains by heart where you have it when you need it But you can't live there it lives in you As long as you retain those lines moving in circles in your mind in time Spheres of influence where you find rhymes Arriving in rhythm as the world turns As if it were a place where you could live Thank you. Thank you so much And uh, that's our evening. You're welcome to stay and hang out. Stephen's books are back there if you'd like to buy some And we have the place for a little while longer