PINYON REVIEW 19, SPRING 2021, LIMITED EDITION

Chenier, a glass piece by Karen Bourque

This pocket-sized literary and art journal is another hand-sewn treasure produced by talented Susan Entsminger, editor/publisher of Pinyon Publishing in Montrose, Colorado. Susan, who began her artistic work alongside her husband, Gary Entsminger, (deceased) a decade or more ago, has continued designing and producing unique poetry and art books since Gary’s death. She has expanded this independent press's list to include international writers, photographers, and artists.

Susan has added poetry to her painting, drawing, and design repertoire in this issue of Pinyon Review 19 with an introductory poem entitled “Cured.” As I read the poem, I imagined the voice of my former editor (Gary) speaking to Susan: “She only heard/one message from the other side/he said, do not waste your joy/Sun on snow… Crows kept calling on the telephone wire/long after she had forgotten his number…” While reading author bios in this issue of Pinyon Review, I also discovered that Susan has been publishing poetry in Mudfish, Main Street Rag, and SAL. As I read, I envisioned Gary agreeing that she hasn’t “wasted her joy.”

In this hand-sewn edition, the poets Susan showcased  include renowned Luci Shaw, whose “Wishing Flower” is a poignant verse featuring a small child who observes “…dandelions proliferated enough/to cover the field with a tablecloth of gold/stars blowing in the wind…” Shaw, a long-time contributor to Pinyon, is Writer in Residence at Regent College, Vancouver, and received the 2013 Denise Levertov Award for Creative Writing.

I’ve had sporadic correspondence with the poet, Chuck Taylor, former Creative Writing Coordinator at Texas A&M who operates Free Slough Press. Chuck, also an accomplished photographer, contributed four lovely nature photographs, “Seeing More Than You See,” in this issue of Pinyon Review. He showcases his photographic work through shows in galleries, literary magazines, and on the web.

My dear friend, Karen Bourque, contributed a glass rendering of Ridges, my recent book of poetry and Don Thornton’s paintings published by Pinyon. The art piece features chenieres of Louisiana that publisher Susan describes as “vivid, visceral paintings.” Karen used stained glass, Apache tear, and kyanite to create her portrayal of the chenieres. It’s an arresting art piece that accompanies selected poems from Ridges, my book Susan will release in May.

Four haiku by Gary Hotham, a long-time contributor to Pinyon Publishing, will delight readers of “Dark Matters, ” a quartet about “early stars/fireflies changing/places.” Hotham is the Vice-President of the Haiku Society of America and has received several book awards for his haiku contributions.

As I said earlier, Pinyon #19 is a treasure created by Susan Entsminger, from the cover art and design of the High Country, Ouray Colorado to the last untitled poem by Simon Perchik “…in ashes, making room on the stove/in rest by a river/where there was none before.”

Limited Edition. Order through Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403

 

PINYON REVIEW #18, FALL 2020

I wish that Gary Entsminger, former editor and publisher of Pinyon Publishing, had lived to see Pinyon Review #18, the journal he and his wife Susan birthed during his lifetime. This latest special journal with hand sewn Japanese Stab Binding on Mohawk Loop Inkwell Vellum EcoWhite Paper is a limited edition dedicated to Stuart Friebert. The work of Friebert, poet and translator of international fame, first appeared in Pinyon Publishing’s inventory with the award-winning book, Floating Heart, and his work remained a constant contribution to the publications of Pinyon until his death this year.

Susan Entsminger, now editor and publisher of Pinyon Review, introduced this special edition with a brief poem of her own entitled “Perspective,” and voiced the lament that the “sequences” in her life, “which had become as sacred as ritual” are no longer (referring, perhaps, to the sudden death of her beloved husband, Gary.) However, she also speaks of “staying suspended in the universe,” a phrase attributed to the poet, XIA Haitao, whose work appears in this issue of Pinyon Review.

Some of the outstanding authors who have appeared in former issues of Pinyon and whose books have been published by this independent press include Chuck Taylor, Luci Shaw, Martha McFerren, and Neil Harrison. However, more recent poets such as XIA Haitao will transport readers into vistas overlooking the sea from the summit of Mount Tai in China and from which Susan Entsminger derived the line, “Only when you stay suspended in the universe,” in her introduction to this issue of Pinyon Review. During this time of Covid-19, the particular line that resonated with me and inspired me to read further was XIA Haitao’s long poem covering almost ten pages about a mountain that “has been standing/ since 2.4 billion years ago/in silence as if nothing has ever happened/to him.” It’s a tribute poem that illustrates the lastingness of both geographical formations and poetry, and the appearance of Chinese script, side by side with the poem enhances the format of the translation and contributes to the international flavor of this artistic journal published in southern Colorado.

I loved the imagery about a Religious figure in Mark Mitchell’s “Past,” in lines like “…Relics lack/substance, but they can grow real again. She/kept holy cloths handy in case someone/happened past her room — they must never see/through the spells she’d been taught by evil nuns…” The imagery reminded me of supernatural inhabitants in the works of New Orleans author Anne Rice’s works about other world spirits. Mitchell’s poem is brief but is a powerful evocation of the “also world,” which a Religious friend calls the afterlife.

Maria Roca’s contribution of “It’s Always Windy in Portbou,” translated from the Catalan by Sonia Alland and formatted side by side with the Portuguese version, features more of Susan’s placement of multilingual renditions and is a gusty lyric that “pushes a train car over and it falls on the tracks like an enormous dead animal…blows with sudden blasts…everyone tousled with hair blown backwards or forwards…” The poem will remind Louisiana readers of the furious hurricanes that beset Acadian residents in Louisiana each year. Powerful phrasing that describes“windows trembling and beds shaking," may be traumatic for southern Louisianans, but the translation redeems itself with the line that concludes “everything [is] purified by the wind.” However, as a part-time Louisiana resident, I would venture that we’d rather not experience that form of redemption,

A special section by Richard Kent is another example of Pinyon’s photographic surprises. Kent introduces ‘Lessons in Recursion’ in which a recursive image of a scene captured in photography may alter a viewer’s perspective of an ordinary landscape. When Kent encounters blank wooden signs in which messages have been erased by wear and time, he creates “recursive progressions” or transformations of place by photographing landscape scenes and placing the images on blank signs, some of which might startle viewers as they travel through various states. Seven signs showcase his complex photographic representations, several of which are attached to trees throughout the US.

As usual, this Pinyon Review #18 is a small masterpiece, a volume that will invite new readers and delight old ones as well. This edition is a wonderful tribute to Stuart Friebert and to the Entsmingers for preserving outstanding literary and artistic contributions. It contains some of the creative output of our country’s best word and visual artists.

Copies available through links above or snail mail from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403.

 

BEING BEAT

Yes, that’s a cover illustration of the beat poet, Allen Ginsberg, but it isn’t the work of Ginsberg. Last week’s mail yielded a collection of poetry by Chuck Taylor, Jr. one of my favorite poets who writes in the genre of what he calls “radical rap." Taylor’s authentic voice resonates with high energy and honesty in Being Beat, bringing readers down to earth from the first “Riff on Allen Ginsberg” to the last “Poetry Is Love — For E.M. Forster” where poems will assemble/ and murmur under your bed/like leaves moved by breezes.” Taylor presents as one of the latter-day beat poets with his iconoclastic lyrics, writing tough, a kind of Bukowski (without the vulgarity)/David Kirby/Charles Simic poet. He says he never had a book published by City Lights Press and that the “best minds of his generation went into physics or developed computers” but that he “searches for the beat in the starry dynamo of the evening light,” and tells challenging anti-war and social justice stories with engaging style. 

Being Beat has been divided into sections with headings derived from Walt Whitman whom Taylor calls “the first American beat poet,” e.g., the section entitled “Never More Inception Than There is Now,” and he dedicates his poetry to writers, national and international, who were inspired by the beat movement. He regards Gerald Manley Hopkins as one of these poets and writes passionately about “The Wasted Land.” My interest was stoked by the first two verses: “Why do thoughts of change wear so heavy, wear/so heavy, wear so heavy in the mind,/wear out these times,/in these times, why does earth, the/Heavy earth, sit on our souls, sit on our hearts,/Earth in its heavy minerals, earth in its slowness,/The deep compacted soil, the dry lack of rain,/No running springs of heart, no ideals to sweep/The dust of fractured soil away, where is the sky…” Taylor laments the land laid waste reminiscent of the great Dust Bowl during Depression years and ends his poem with prophetic lines about environmental changes in the U.S., describing the country’s citizens as “the mad conclave ready for dance and change.”

The last lines of a long prose poem entitled “Used Mobile,” further reflect Taylor’s ability to write hopeful and passionate passages about marginalized culture; e.g. when he speaks of showing his daughter “the broad field in the sun by the luminous river not the dark stained room of red wine, she holds my hand past broken boards old tires filled with water no grass the muck of a world she’s not required as yet to know…” Here is a poet who challenges readers with lines that confront climate change, war, addiction, the corrupt politics of our time, and, in the case of this poem — U.S. poverty.

Like many people born into dysfunctional families, Taylor speaks of escaping the father who is a “shade” within himself. In the poem “Shade of Father,” his voice becomes intense as he tries to convince his dad about the passion and power of a beat poet he admires: Jack Kerouac. While they are riding together in a car, the old man’s indifference to Taylor’s passion spurs him on to a greater praise of this poet. Midway in the poem, his father’s voice comes alive as he reminiscences about his own youth: “He tells me how all four/Brothers slept on the back/ Porch and before they went/To bed they stoked the cast/iron pot-bellied stove till it/Glowed orange, but when/They woke before sunrise/In the sea of winter, then/the stove had thin icicles/Hanging down almost to its/Legs…” 

My favorite among Taylor’s poems is “Zensei,” which is Japanese for "a former life." It stands as the most mystical poem in Taylor’s collection, the recording of a dream of a former life, “not a memory of current troubles or/Of childhood tatters…Who am I to thunder out some/Orthodox argument with a cloud…” The Zensei poem reflects Taylor’s love of the Japanese culture as he writes that in the early 1990’s, inspired by Gary Snyder and his poet mentor, Lucien Stryk, he moved to Japan to teach and to become more engaged in Asian aesthetics.

Chuck Taylor has been in correspondence with me since I wrote a review of Magical, Fantastical, Alphabetical Soup published by Pinyon Publishing in Montrose, Colorado. His work shows evidence of an earthy philosopher and poet devoted to what he calls “rants.” I admire his challenging poems that show no allegiance to any writing form. He can write rhyming verse, prose poems, and mini-fiction, but in free verse or “radical rap,” readers hear the beat of a different drum that just might challenge Walt Whitman, one of his mentors. He possesses a highly original mind that speaks to the condition of the postmodern world. 

Taylor has worked as a janitor, laundry worker, survey taker, magician, nursery school teacher, bookseller, and publisher. He has worked in the National Endowment’s CETA Artist Program and taught Beat Literature and American Nature Writing at Texas A&M, served as a Poet in the Schools Program. He has also taught at St. Angelo State University, the Universities of Texas at Tyler, El Paso, and Austin, Texas. His latest books include the poetry collection Like Li-Po Laughing at the Lonely Moon. Being Beat is available at Hercules Publishing, Albuquerque, New Mexico and at Amazon. 

TASTE I SAY, YOU’RE TIMELESS

Yesterday’s mail yielded a book of poetry by Chuck Taylor, a Texas-based writer who has operated Slough Press 43 years. Taylor’s latest, Taste I Say, You’re Timeless, contains characters whose names he says “come off a matchbox, like ‘Strike Anywhere.’”  The poems reflect an artistic sensibility that values personal freedom and explores alternative ways of living. They're reminiscent of “beatniks,” those cultural radicals who typified a vibrant counter culture during the 1950’s and 60’s in this country.

Taylor describes his book as a collection of “Prose Poem Anti-Poems,” and I enjoyed his relaxed style that Michel Delville refers to as “a downright illegitimate mode of literary expression.” His opening poem entitled “Where” asks the questions: “Where will the sentence take us?” followed by “Does this sentence start out from an unknown shore…can it row against the currents in search of undiscovered atolls…would the fear of being lost at sea keep us from going…? His metaphysical questions are even stronger: “How often in a day must we be happy to have a happy day? 4.6 hours? Must we bathe in the sweet tea of happy-like sunlight, or can you work in a dim corner by a subway shining shoes day after day so to be in rumbling noise of happiness…?

The poet provides his own answers in a series of prose poems “comical and a bit cynical,” Taylor writes in a letter accompanying the gift book he sent to me. I particularly liked the character “Strike Anywhere” featured in the poem “Cat On A Hot Tin Roof,” whose lonely feet are referred to as “apples in the dust wisely well traveled. I need to learn to bend and fold up in many pockets. Go with the luck of the soul’s water and the solid moment.” “Strike Anywhere” is the perfect personification of Walt Whitman or the wandering vagabonds of beatnik fame – Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Snyder, to name a few.

The strange names in Taste I Say will cause readers to imagine all types of cultural radicals: “Strike Anywhere,” “This Side Up,” “Tobacco Free,” and “And Other” (a tall, carrot-topped Buddhist). Taylor underlines his explorations into alternative ways of living with characters who’re definitely not mainstream but who say it all and who, having “said it and said it, it all lies in the grass waiting for rain.” He takes these contemporary characters on delightful misadventures in existential landscapes until they find the ideal shore to push off from.

Consider this piece of alternative literature entitled “Manage” expressed by a non-materialist: “Down in the bargain basement so long, ‘Keep Away From Children’ [another invention of a comic name] did not know the air was musty, did not know the absence of wind or sunlight, down in the bargain basement for the testimony of the tribe of clearance – woeful shoes, party blouses already lonesome for dance, murderous belts and bolts of cloth so sad you can almost hear the tearing. Down in the bargain basement, hands behind her back, throat clearing, feet in tired heels, doing her dim shining duty.”

Enlightenment comes after two or three readings of the poems, and they’re worth the effort. Taylor’s clever combinations of words remind me of the poets Charles Simic and Charles Bukowski intermixed and chanting ardent “beat” poetry. Comic yet wise messages are passed on from an expert in the fields of Beat Literature and Creative Writing. Taylor has taught at Texas A&M, UT at Tyler, El Paso, and Austin, and Angelo State University and has won the Austin Book Award and Utah Fine Arts Poetry Contest. He also did extensive work in Poets in the Schools Programs.

Taylor does magic tricks for children’s parties, “studies socially-sanctioned investments, took care of his invalid mother, and now spends too much time on Facebook.” His letters are written on the reverse, blank side of college course hand-outs and are as amusing as his prose poem anti-poems.

These prose poems aren’t just cynical excoriations; they contain philosophical and metaphysical nuggets — noteworthy, timeless sentences...in the author's words, "new machines from the river of words…”

Taste I Say, You’re Timeless: Prose Poem Anti-Poems was published through Weasel Press in Manvel, Texas.

IN A CONVENT GARDEN

For those readers who responded so enthusiastically to my last blog about Penny, the dog who aspires to the diaconate, I’ve included a poem about her in my newest collection of poetry entitled In a Convent Garden and Other Poems, which will be published in a few weeks. The volume is a product of this summer’s writing, and rather than review my own work, I’m including the acknowledgements of fellow authors in this blog for those who read the poetry I write while I’m sojourning on The Mountain here at Sewanee, Tennessee. The acknowledgements are humbling and affirming, and I’m happy to share the endorsements of gifted writers and discerning readers:

“I do not profess to know the mind of the talented Diane Marquart Moore but I do know something of its grasp of the essential, in things both ordinary and extraordinary, from the poems collected in In a Convent Garden and Other Poems. Moore is an intuitive, fiercely intelligent, and contemplative poet who renders each poem with a precision of language that makes her ideas of the metaphysical palpable and clear. Her poems, propelled by still, but spirited narration, captivate. We are taken many places: the convent garden, a fortress on the bluff, No Name Road, the plains of Khuzestan—each place absorbed by Moore through all of her senses then conveyed in sharp but measured detail to her readers, for the purpose of leading us to higher ground. This life, seen by Moore, is never spare or hopeless, which is the true gift of this book. In fact the whole book is an urging to hope. She does not spare us the truth of the ‘marrow of bondage’ all of humanity shares, but her poems promise freedom. Moore assuredly directs us to an ineffable Source. Grace surmounts the suffering of this world, and we are led into a revelation of holy shimmer that drizzles on dogs and cats, stone angels, and gratefully on us.”

—Clare L. Martin, poet and author of Eating the Heart First, Press 53, 2012.

"Time out to reveal the heart"—such is the work Diane Marquart Moore has made for herself as a poet. Remembering to breathe inside the lines, remembering to delight in the gifts of the spirit, she turns In a Convent Garden and Other Poems into a new book of common prayer. Nothing escapes her heart and eye: the elder nuns, slugs, the convent cat, songs in dreams, wandering, the dog's way, Brother Rabbit, Appalachian dulcimers and the songs of katydids.

—Darrell Bourque, former poet laureate of Louisiana, author of Megan's Guitar and Other Poems from Acadie.

My heart leaps up when Diane Moore brings out a new book. She seems to breathe in life, then breathe out poetry—she "poems" with such ease and grace. Her poems are strikingly original and challenging; she makes the reader work hard, but the rewards are great.

—Jane F. Bonin, retired professor of English, University of Louisiana, Lafayette, and author of Major Themes in Prizewinning American Drama and Mario Fratti.

Diane Moore is the rare poet who has the courage to probe the exquisite wounds of human existence: loneliness, despair, suffering, want, night terrors, and betrayal. Just when the reader is at the point of pressing the button for a narcotic to dull the pain, with imagination and skillful craft, she swings through with the wry humor of a raccoon singing barroom ballads, a demonic cat dusting her allergies with dander, a sweet Sister instructing a Psalm reader to break at the asterisk or risk being swept away with the wicked, and, most healing, with joy-filled lessons learned in the course of her God-centered life.

—Anne Simon, Louisiana District Judge, Retired.

Diane Moore's eye is more precise than most painters, and she uses that eye to make a sacred music full of love and sympathy for what often gets ignored or forgotten. She is a wonderful contemporary amalgam of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. Read her now and be delighted.

—Chuck Taylor, author of Magical, Fantastical, Alphabetical Soup.

Diane Moore has become a master of seeing, describing, and immersing herself in other lives. Her retired nun, Sister Mary Zita, "enters a dark cell / but her soul is not asleep;" a sculpture, "the stone angel is laughing;" and of Thomas Wolfe, she writes, "Each time I want his ghost / to give me a stone, a leaf, a door"… In A Convent Garden consists of meditations on spirituality, dreams, art, writers, travel, music, and nature.

—Gary Entsminger, author of Ophelia's Ghost and Fall of '33.

The cover photograph of In A Convent Garden and Other Poems was taken by Sr. Madeleine Mary, sister-in-charge of St. Mary’s Convent, Sewanee, Tennessee, and cover design was rendered by Martin Wayne Romero. Order copies from amazon.com after September 15, 2013.

MAGICAL, FANTASTICAL, ALPHABETICAL SOUP

I have on my desk this morning the latest publication of Pinyon Publishing in Montrose, Colorado: Magical, Fantastical, Alphabetical Soup, Mini Fictions, Prose Poems, & Rants by Chuck Taylor. The author of this volume invites readers not to be “weighted down by too many predetermined notions of what narrative should be,” and I felt free enough this morning to pursue the book straight through from A to Z. As I turned the pages, I was reminded of Montaigne who described his unique daydream-like writing: “I cannot keep my subject still...it goes along…staggering with a natural drunkenness…” Montaigne’s rumination aptly describes the natural flow of Taylor’s writing.

That last statement isn’t a negative assessment of his work. I think he has the kind of genuine vision attributed to the poet Charles Simic, moving us through surrealism and a sometimes dark view of human problems: hunger, poverty, violence, while managing to transform the everyday world into a place of mystery, “everything teetering on the edge of everything/With a polite smile...” as Simic says.

Taylor begins his alphabetical soup with a prose poem entitled “Artist of Shadows,” propelling us into the inner sanctum of a writer with a description that is familiar to many writers who take their insomnia to the computer and begin to compose: “the lamp lit, the fan running – white noise to block exterior sounds – the blinds shut tight; artist of the shadows of heart, the strange beatings inside, the mind waking with extraordinary thoughts, worries best kept to oneself, the others in the house sleeping…a tough old ox alone, artist of the shadows, his books on the wall…his laptop’s blue glow, tap, tap, words on the screen out in the night onto the Web for other artists of shadows who seek what they do not know…”

By the time I reached the letter “C,” I was smiling, as Taylor cruises along in his cool Chrysler convertible and crushes a chicken in his path, lamenting that he’s always quoting Albert Schweitzer concerning reverence for life. He pulls off the road to examine his car for remnants of the bird, only to discover moths and butterfly bits of wings, then sets these remains on a pyre of twigs and lights it. As he imagines himself an Indian, he sings mourning songs in the dark and “dreams respect for the living and the dead.” Profundity and wit combine in two pages of a prose poem that will delight those who like to hear the sound of a sardonic voice within wise revelations.

In one of the most humorous mini essays in Magical,Fantastical, Alphabetical Soup, Taylor exhorts everyone, at least once in their lives, to wear a dress, citing the example of Sinclair Lewis who once put on an evening gown to impress flappers. He defines the dress as being the opposite of armor, touting that it displays vulnerability and trust and that the world doesn’t deserve women wearing dresses. “The world contains way too much dope, rape, destruction, and war,” he writes. “But women don’t think about it. They persevere, they continue to love, leaving themselves open for what begins life and what bears life, when they step out into the light wearing, like petals of a sunflower opening, a dangerous dress.” This prose is a “wow” piece of symbolism and wisdom.

Taylor’s prose poem entitled “Nature” reveals his perception that a relationship with nature is a necessary part of the awakening of consciousness and a surrender to stillness, “…the astonishment, the reality you hold in the moment, that you are not mortal.” The beautiful photograph on the cover of Magical, Fantastical, Alphabetical Soup taken by Taylor and designed by Susan Elliott reflects his perceptions about the natural world.

Youth, love, war, nature, Taylor covers both the surreal and ordinary, the social and political landscapes of American life, probing spiritual and moral concerns with irony, poetic skill, and philosophical insight . This book is indeed a magical, fantastical read, and Gary Entsminger at Pinyon has done it again by providing us with the work of a unique writer. Taylor’s prose poems and mini stories contain startling imagery and metaphors in a style reminiscent of those beat writers who freed themselves from the traditional canon of literature. He moves us from the staleness of form that permeates a civilization preoccupied with form into the light of the present moment wearing Simic’s “polite smile.”

Chuck Taylor has been a balloon clown, a soft water salesman, janitor, laundry worker, children’s magician, nursery school teacher, bookseller, and publisher. He operates an independent literary press, Slough, and teaches creative writing, Beat Literature, and American Nature Writing at Texas A&M. His book of poems, What Do You Want, Blood? was awarded the Austin Book Award.

Order from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403.