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

 

LIGHT IN A GLASS ROOM

Glass porch in the morning

The glass porch in our Louisiana home is my favorite room. True, the glass is smudged with bayou country grime from lack of care during the months we are away. Or perhaps the glass is cloudy because the porch is a place friends have visited to tell some dark stories about broken relationships, illnesses, quarrels — the glass porch has often housed usual and unusual tales of human tragedies.

However, this four-season indoor/outdoor room also holds the hopes for new perspective…it is a living room with a better view. Sometimes I go there to write, but the room doesn’t invite labor or action. I frequently fall asleep sitting in a comfortable wicker chair while the sunlight beams through on my winter-pale face.

The room also houses a few of the glass pieces created by Karen Bourque, a talented Church Point, Louisiana artist, and adds to the idea of inspiring joy in this life, albeit smudged with our tragic stories.

All homes should have such a room, perhaps now more than ever in this time of Covid. I went into the glass sanctuary this morning to share in the grief of my dear friend, Kathy, who lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, and who just lost her sister, Mary Kay, to the dread Covid disease.

Wicker chair on glass porch

The glass porch is also a place of prayer. Another smudge has appeared on the glass, and another prayer goes up for Kathy’s release from suffering. The sun fills Karen’s pieces with light in this small blessed space, and I ponder the idea of glassing in our little front porch at Sewanee. However, the porch faces dark woods and only collects shadows…and spiders.

Vickie Sullivan’s photographs capture the essence of this space on a cold winter morning, and I wish that I could say, “Come and sit awhile,” but this open-to-sunlight room doesn’t tolerate masked visitors!

 

 

RIDGES IN GLASS

Cheniere glass art by Karen Bourque

I have the good fortune of owning fourteen glass pieces created by Karen Bourque, the masterful glass artist of Church Point, Louisiana. Many of these pieces have been photographed for the covers of my books of poetry and now hang on the glass porch of our Celeste residence here in New Iberia, Louisiana, and in the windows of our home on Fairbanks Circle in Sewanee, Tennessee.

 

Karen’s latest glass piece is her interpretation of a Louisiana Cheniere, or ridge, and will be featured in the spring edition of Pinyon Review along with several of my poems. The featured poems derive from Ridges, a book of my poetry that Pinyon Publishing will publish this summer.

 

Karen’s latest piece is a beautiful work of stained glass, Apache Tear, and Kyamite that she created this year. It now hangs on the glass porch of my home here in New Iberia, Louisiana. As I look at the purple sky overhanging a cheniere, I’m lifted out of the Covid doldrums and remember a brighter day's visit I made to Cheniere au Tigre many years ago when three female companions and I traveled by boat to this site.

 

Diane on way to Cheniere au Tigre

Karen’s renderings always evoke strong emotional responses in me. A unique non-traditional glass artist, she creates most of her work in a studio beside the Bourque home that she shares with the former poet laureate and humanist, Darrell Bourque. Before the dreaded Covid caused me and my friends to sequester ourselves, I often visited there.

Karen’s work is featured in the Ernest Gaines Center at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, in a window depicting the Holy Spirit at Christ the King Roman Catholic Church near Opelousas Louisiana, at the Louisiana Book Festival, in an issue of Pinyon Review, and many other venues and homes.

As the maxim reads, “One picture is worth a thousand words,” and this photo of Karen Bourque’s latest rendering affirms that critique. Briefly said, her work is a spiritual experience. 

 

 

THE MIND OF TREES

Live Oak on Bayou in Arnaudville

This morning amidst the continuing news about mass shootings and tragedy of the last few days, and while I pray for peace in our troubled country, I received an email from my dear friend, Karen Bourque, a master of glass artistry who lives in Church Point, Louisiana. She had attached a photograph of her latest glass piece featuring a tree in Cajun Country. Like many of Karen’s glass pieces, the work brought with it a feeling of peace. The piece wasn’t requisitioned by me, but Karen shares images of a lot of her work with me, and I share my poetry with her — an exchange of inspiration, and sometimes synchronicity. She said she was reading a poem each night from my latest, The Consolation of Gardens, and meditating on it, and I was cheered by the thought that, although I’m not on any bestseller list, some of the poems have carried the “consolation of gardens” to cherished friends.

The email with an image of her lovely glass piece reminded me of an oak tree that Karen, Darrell, Vickie, and I viewed after lunch one afternoon in Arnaudville, Louisiana and that Karen used as a model for the cover of my book, A Slow Moving Stream, published in 2016. One of the poems, “The Mind of Trees,” captured my mood and “spoke to my condition” this morning. It is partially excerpted below:

The trees outlasted their language.

No matter who came

the language disappeared into English:

French, Spanish, German, Chitimacha.

English filled the horizon,

the patois of each clan banned,

buried under the oaks, the words waiting.

The trees absorbed all of it

and when hurricanes felled them

they were cut into logs,

the loggers, finding stories in their language

imbedded in the rings,

began to preserve what had been lost.

Word by word they created

an articulation of arriving,

the sound of memory offering itself

from a distant longing. They heard

what they had been told not to hear —

testimonies for their being there.

And they praised the trees

for finding a way without them.

The poem is open to interpretation, but I believe it’s pertinent to what is going on in our country and am glad to repeat it here. Thanks for the “pass along” this morning, Karen Bourque.

Photograph in “The Mind of Trees” by Victoria I. Sullivan and glass piece image on the cover of A Slow Moving Stream by Karen Bourque.

THE VOICE WITHIN THE VOICE

Most mornings in fair weather (often not so fair in spring and summer in Louisiana), Darrell Bourque, Louisiana’s premier poet, can be found writing the lines to a new poem while walking an old path near his home in Church Point, Louisiana. He’s a master of what poets call “voice,” often entering into the voice of some lesser-known figure who has made a significant contribution to the culture and history of his/her native state. 

Bourque’s latest book, From the Other Side, is beautifully illustrated with the art of Bill Gingles, a Shreveport artist, and features poems about Henriette Delille, a former New Orleans religious figure. During the 19th century, Delille organized a group of devout Christian women called the Sisters of the Holy Family to nurse the sick, care for and teach indigent and illiterate Black and Creole children, as well as immigrating adults who settled in the French Quarter of New Orleans. This group was formally recognized in 1942 by St. Augustine Church in the Treme of New Orleans, and Delille, who died in 1862, was first deemed Servant of God in 1988, then advanced to Venerable in the process of canonization by the Roman Catholic Church. Her inclusion in the process continues — the next two steps are beatification and canonization.

Darrell Bourque and his wife, Karen, became interested in this passionate and empathetic nun several years ago — an interest which culminated in Karen designing and rendering a glass triptych for a window of Christ the King Roman Catholic Mission Church in Bellevue near the Bourque’s home in Church Point, Louisiana. The recent publication of Darrell’s book of poetry, From the Other Side: Henriette Delille followed last month’s dedication of this window. 

Although Henriette Delille spoke French (as does Bourque), Bourque captured her voice in what he terms persona sonnets in English within From the Other Side, an impassioned voice that speaks of orphans and the uneducated on the streets of the French Quarter of New Orleans — a voice derived from Bourque’s meditations on the images and colors in Gingles’ paintings; e.g.,:

What If You Dreamed

                    …We teach 

                    reading here the way we teach children to sing. Old

                    women wander from arches to see what this reach

                    

                    will reach. We start with the names of flowers sold

                    on the streets in the Quarter & the Marigny, peach-

                    colored, pink & red & blue-dyed flowers, white gold

                   

                    flowers named how they are named: Daisy, Bream,

                    Belle, Violet, Hyacinth & Myrtle, William, Iris, Reed, 

                    Sorrel & Olive, Lillie & Camellia, Rose, Red & Gleem.

                    We start with who they are & go to what they need.

One of my favorites, All the Time, is accompanied by Gingles’ painting by that name, an acrylic panel including scarlet forms resembling poppies in which Bourque presents Delille’s voice speaking about the work of the Sisters of the Holy Family: 

                       …We moved quietly from one need to another need

                       as we found it. We brought things inside our houses, kept our candles lit,

                       We let the world be the world, let the heart be heart, let creed be creed. 

This is one among many poems in the volume that show Bourque’s ability to achieve what A. E. Housman called “not the thing said but a way of saying it.”

Another poem in which Bourque imagines Delille speaking of her dedication to work with children of the New Orleans streets is the poignant:

The Difference Island 

              …My wings

              are who I am. They flew me to this difference island where I am no more

              a trace or line. We crossed bayous & bays & lakes & rivulets as fine as lace

              to this other world beyond geographies where I knew what I had to live for,

              the poor despised, the cipher bought and sold, what I saw in an orphan’s face.

Bourque used the titles of Gingles’ paintings for all of the poems in this volume and points to the language of the paintings as influencing the language of his poems. “Without these paintings I know I could not have accessed this particular set of poems spoken by the powerful and holy human being Henriette Delille is,” he writes in the acknowledgements to From the Other Side. I would add that Bourque’s deft gift of imagining the voice within the voice (“…What’s just beyond the tree leans on what we never knew we knew…”) influences the reader’s understanding of “the other side”and the art that takes us there. 

The Sisters of the Holy Family continue to carry out Delille’s mission in retirement homes, schools, and other sacred service organizations in New Orleans, Shreveport, Galveston, Little Rock, Washington, DC, in California, in Belize, and in Africa. Delille’s original prayer penned in French was a simple but cogent one: “I believe in God. I hope in God. I love. I want to live and die for God.”

Order from yellowflagpress.com or darrellbourque@gmail.com. 

LOUISIANA’S POET MAGNIFIQUE

If readers can obtain a copy of the latest 64 Parishes magazine, published by The Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, the article featuring Darrell Bourque, 2019 Humanist of the Year, written by Chris Turner-Neal with photographs by Akasha Rabut, is cause for celebration. I first saw the stunning cover of this magazine during our last lunch two weeks ago with Darrell and Karen before we left Louisiana for our second home in Tennessee. We’d just accompanied the Bourques to Christ the King Church for which Karen had created a glass triptych honoring Henriette Delille and were doing our pre-lunch briefing before enjoying barbecue.  Henriette Delille, a religious "humanist," has been presented for sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church in honor of her former work with the indigent in New Orleans, and From the Other Side, Henriette Delille, Darrell's book of poetry about her, is presently in press.

I loved the photograph of the leonine face of this poet who has been telling stories about southwest Louisiana in his passionate and profound voice during the forty years I’ve been his friend and enjoyed his mentoring. A former Louisiana Poet Laureate, Darrell also received the 2014 Louisiana Book Festival Writer Award and the ULL Center for Louisiana Studies James Rivers Award, among other recent awards and honors. At a reading in Grand Coteau I asked his wife Karen if there were any awards left that could be bestowed on him and then answered my own question with “The Humanist of the Year Award.” 

Darrell served as the first Friends of the Humanities Honor Professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, once directed the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program there, and was president of the National Association for Humanities Education. He also served as project director for a reading series in Lafayette featuring Louisiana African-American writers and calls himself a “kind of social activist” in the article written by Chris Turner-Neal — a modest remark about his work honoring the music, history and culture of Acadians, Creoles, and blacks in his native region. 

My history with Darrell can be traced back to an interview with him when I was a feature writer for the Daily Iberian in New Iberia, Louisiana during the 80’s, and he loaned me a copy of the manuscript for Burnt Water Suite, providing me  background for work that became his second book of poetry. I was asked to introduce Darrell at a poetry reading in New Iberia when this book was still in manuscript form, and I knew then that I was listening to an authentic voice, one that mirrored the Cajun culture in a mystical and musical way that hasn’t been duplicated by any of Louisiana’s finest poets. 

He has encouraged and supported the work of many “wannabe” and established poets with warmth and sincerity throughout the forty years I’ve known him. Each time I declare that I won’t write poetry again, he laughs and says he looks forward to reading my latest. Each time I received an unwarranted criticism from a fellow student in a Creative Writing class Darrell taught, he’d chide me for not having confidence in my work and urge me to move on.

This morning I re-read the ten books he has written that I carried with me to Sewanee and finally decided that my re-examinations of his work only impressed me further, and his true, original voice would remain one of those soul-stirring invitations to honor our common humanity. I also know that the recent Humanist Award isn’t the tip of the iceberg —he still has to be named Poet Laureate of the United States. You rock, Darrell Bourque!

ART, KING CAKES, AND CATAWBA TREES…

Glasswork by Karen Bourque commemorating Henriette DeLille

Those of us who have passed the 80-year old mark will remember Sunday afternoon drives through rural countryside as a way to end a week peacefully. At times I’m treated to such a drive across the prairie of southwestern Louisiana near Church Point, Louisiana. Usually the drive follows lunch in the home of Darrell Bourque, former Louisiana poet laureate, and his wife Karen, an outstanding glass artist. Yesterday, we scheduled the drive, not only to ramble through the countryside but to view Karen’s recently-installed glass pieces honoring Henriette DeLille in three windows of Christ the King Roman Catholic Mission in Bellevue, just down the road from the Bourque’s home.

Henriette DeLille (1812-1862), a French-speaking woman of West African descent, was brought up in the French Quarter of New Orleans as a free woman of color who received education in music, literature, and nursing and was also a member of the system of placage in which mixed race women became kept women of wealthy white planters. During the 1830’s, DeLille began to break away from this system of social mores, became a nun, and eventually formed the Sisters of the Holy Family, an order that provided education for the disenfranchised people of color, as well as care for the elderly, and which burgeoned into a worldwide mission for the poor that remains active today. 

Karen’s beautiful stained glass windows (one large centerpiece window and two smaller pieces in windows on each side of the centerpiece) are a tribute to The Venerable Delille, in which Karen created images of the Holy Trinity using vivid blues, greens, and a brilliant red symbolizing DeLille’s heart and Christ’s love. Golden rays above the center image represent God, and the Host and chalice in the center suggest a vision of Christ and his love for creation. Although the stained glass windows proved to be difficult to photograph, Vickie Sullivan captured the imagery well in the light that illuminated the lovely glass pieces Karen had been inspired to create. She says she feels privileged to share this art with others so they can “explore their own spirituality more deeply as they pass through a real world filled with challenge, trial, mystery, and miracle.” 

Darrell and I climbed the steps to the choir loft and looked down at the immaculate interior of this mission church which he says congregants maintain without outside help — cleaning, painting, and repairing when necessary. He has written a book of poetry commemorating Delille that is in press with Yellow Flag Press and will appear this year. I‘ve read the manuscript, and believe that the Delille commemorative book and another forthcoming one that contains his versions of ghazals accompanied by the art of Bill Gingles will be acknowledged as his finest works. 

Darrell was recently named Humanist of the Year by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities and will be honored at a ceremony this spring. We’re always honored to break bread with the Bourques when we sojourn in Louisiana during the winter months and our visits are customarily celebrations. We’ll enjoy another visit because Darrell wrote this morning that he’d eaten a piece of the king cake we'd brought for dessert yesterday, and he bit into the baby (a plastic baby imbedded in the cake, and the person biting into a piece containing it has to serve the next cake during pre-Lenten days).

Catalpa trees photographed by Karen Bourque

On the ride back to the Bourque’s home, Darrell meandered by crawfish ponds that had once been rice fields and showed us his family’s former land, including a line of catawba trees on his grandfather’s property that had survived, several of which Karen photographed for Let the Trees Answer, a book of poetry I wrote last year. I’m sure you Louisiana fishermen know that these trees harbor a plethora of catawba worms, yellow creatures with black lines running down their back that make good fish bait. I’ve caught a gracious plenty of catfish using them, but they’re pretty squishy when you bait your hook!

FROZEN RED DIRT

Red clay hills near Brandon, Mississippi

A friend of mine recently told me that I have a migratory spirit, and I have to agree with him. ‘Seems like when I’m in Sewanee, Tennessee, I make at least six visits to sites in surrounding states during my six-month sojourn. When I’m in Louisiana, I search for places to explore in Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas. I know the old adage, “A rolling stone gathers no moss,” but the idea of becoming a mossback has no appeal for me either. Last week, I stopped in Meridian, Mississippi to visit the MAX Arts Center there and had an envee to stay awhile but continued on to Louisiana. Since that visit to the magnolia state, I’ve been yearning to return to the birth site of my maternal great-grandmother in Brandon, Mississippi.

This morning I was reading an old edition of Off the Beaten Path published by the Reader’s Digest, and I discovered a notation about Flora, Mississippi, site of a Mississippi petrified forest. A photograph of what I call “frozen red dirt” had been placed beside the article, and I developed pangs to explore the only petrified forest east of the Rockies created from remains of primeval forests — driftwood buried in and preserved by silt and sand. I looked at the picture “long and long” before putting it on a list that I’d made to satisfy my migratory spirit. The photo showed deeply-eroded cliffs studded with petrified logs. According to the article in Off the Beaten Path, the red sands that identify them to me as “frozen red dirt” were river deposits in which the petrified process had begun —the vivid red dirt fascinated me.

Brown Cotton and Red Dirt by Karen Bourque

In 2017 I asked my friend Karen Bourque, glass artist in Church Point, Louisiana, to create a glass piece that I could photograph for a book of poetry I’d written entitled Sifting Red Dirt, and she gifted me with her version of Mississippi hills around Brandon, Mississippi where my maternal great-grandmother was born. The book contained a collection of poems about my forebears (the red dirt side that balances out my Cajun side).

After seeing the photo of the petrified forest in Flora (near Jackson, Mississippi), I went out on the glass porch where I keep some of Karen’s art and stood before the glass piece she entitled “Brown Cotton and Red Dirt.”

“We have to make a trip to a petrified forest in Mississippi,” I told my traveling companion, Dr. Victoria Sullivan. “The spirits of my Mississippi ancestors must be hovering in that area. The petrified formations are 36 million years old.”

“Your ancestors’ spirits hover everywhere,” she said. “They’re ubiquitous. Where are we going now?”

“Flora, Mississippi. It’s near Jackson.”

“Population under 2000, I’m sure.”

“How did you guess? I know you like cities, but the most interesting places are those less frequented.”

“Your ancestors were country hicks on both sides. They must have been afraid of tall buildings,” she said.

“It’s important to visit places that carry the spirit of your cultural identity,” I retorted.

Dr. Sullivan sighed and went to the computer. As publisher of most of my poetry writings, she keeps a file of photos that appear on the covers of my books, so I knew why she had sought out her computer. 

Pandora C. Runnels Greenlaw

“It’s under Sifting Red Dirt,” I instructed, and before I could continue, she brought up the photo that had been the model for Karen’s glass piece. “Just think about how arresting that frozen red dirt will be on another cover.” I began to recite the first few verses of “Pandora’s Legacy” (That was great-grandmother’s name, but she shortened it to Dora. As far as my family knows, she was pure-dee redneck, but whence the name “Pandora”??)

PANDORA’S LEGACY

Great Grandmother Dora Runnels

planted her feet in red dirt,

her happiness, not of this earth;

in barren places among soughing pines

she rode a path to martyrdom,

her boots making snail tracks in dust,

the traveling feet of a missionary,

a pilgrim marching toward Calvary.

The night I was born

she disappeared into earth

leaving me faded photographs,

the promise of another light beckoning.

She was an old woman gone mute,

puffs of red dust sifting into a grave,

the past slipping between her fingers

passing on her love, a bidding to me.

Dora Runnels knew her way

through red clay hills,

remote light guiding her,

narrow rails through empty towns.

Her life, now a silent movie reel

out of focus, slowly unwinds

each time I pass red mounds

and fallen needles…”

There are five more verses to this elegy, and as I re-read it, I pencil in “Flora” on my wander list, knowing that I may not be lingering in New Iberia beyond November before taking a trip. As I quoted in the epigram of Sifting Red Dirt: “As though memory/were a large orchestra/without a repertoire/till it began.” Erratic Facts, Kay Ryan