PAINTING THE PINYON REVIEW

Years ago, I encountered a friend from New Iberia in a Barnes and Noble bookstore in Lafayette, Louisiana. He was standing before a rack of books, staring intently at the covers of books that he didn't bother to open. "Looking for something special?" I asked. He barely acknowledged me and continued to scrutinize the covers. As I'm curious about book lovers, I persisted. "What do you like to read?" He frowned, saying, "I never look for book authors or titles; I choose my books according to the color and design of the cover. If a cover attracts me, I buy the book. It's like opening a surprise package."

If my friend should see the latest cover of Pinyon Review #7, Celebrating the Arts and Sciences, he probably wouldn't look much further, and he'd be pleasantly surprised he had chosen a literary journal that would take him beyond the exterior of the publication. The vivid purple and green abstract design of the journal's cover rendered by Susan Elliott, co-publisher of Pinyon Review, is a real eye-catcher. Susan designs all of the Pinyon Review covers, but this one derives from an original painting she created as a watercolor background to accompany poems in Open the Gates, a book of animal-focused poetry by Dabney Stuart. And it's stunning!

"I pressed cellophane into the paint to create abstract designs which I incorporated into images representing forest, ocean, hot air balloon, sky, and land," Susan explains. "I worked on this set of watercolor backdrops while visiting friends in Jericho, Vermont. I recall spreading a dark purple sheet on their deck so I could splatter and splash with abandon. It was spring: birds and flowers popping out, choruses of spring peepers, long distance runs on forest trails..." (Readers will note that Susan's word pictures are as colorful as her actual paintings).

Susan says that two of the bird poems by Stuart needed a painting so she visited the Jericho Settler's Farm to buy eggs and asked if she could collect some chicken feathers. She then created "Quail" and "A Bird, But Who?" with swirling feathers in airy blue and ochre paintings. The dark blue-green and purple feather piece on the cover of Pinyon Review was also created that spring in Vermont. Susan brought it out of archival art boxes this year so that she could scan it, and after making a high-resolution scan of the piece, she enlarged the digital image just enough to emphasize the textures of the feathers and the play between watercolor pigments and rough watercolor paper.

           

Susan had a lot to say about the heavy, rough watercolor paper, which holds more paint (pigment plus water) in the textured grooves. "Normally, watercolor paint dries very quickly but with rough, heavy paper, you have more time to mix 'wet on wet'," Susan said. "This way, you can mix the colors on the paper and let them play together. When the water dries, there is more pigment concentrated in the grooves. The edges of the painting (which were masked with tape) also concentrate the pigment in beautiful patterns, as do the edges of the feather imprints." Voila! The cover of a literary journal that would have entranced my friend who judges books by their covers!

In addition, the Pinyon Review title page image, "Feather Jig," is a reconstruction of focal areas on the full painting. From the digital image, Susan extracted rectangles highlighting the play between paper, pigment, and feathers and arranged the pieces in a jigsaw puzzle-like design, which she described as jiggling "as much as they fit together, invoking a happy dance-like jig." The jig is reminiscent of Susan's personality—lighthearted with a lively dancing spirit.

Susan is what I'd call a "protean woman." She has formidable credentials with a B. S. in Botany and a B.S. in French from Humboldt State University and a Ph.D. in Biology from Dartmouth College, but today she concentrates on the artwork for Pinyon Publishing located on the Uncompahgre Plateau, adjacent to the San Juans of the southern Rocky Mountains. She paints, plays music, designs books, hikes, gardens, cooks, writes, and illustrates books. Her book credits include illustrations for Dabney Stuart's Open the Gates, drawings and paintings for Why Water Plants Don't Drown with Victoria I. Sullivan, and illustrations for Spilled Milk by Gary Hotham. She has co-authored Ophelia's Ghost, Fall of '33, Remembering the Parables and Making the Most of WriteitNow4 with Gary Entsminger, editor and publisher of Pinyon Publishing.

Inside the latest issue of Pinyon Review, readers will find the work of eighteen outstanding poets, a short story, and more art by Jay Friedenberg. Among the poets who have often appeared in this journal are four whose poems represent impassioned social experiences and emotional reflections, including a nostalgic piece by Gary Entsminger.

Gary, whose recent debut book of poetry was Two Miles West, takes readers through a "Wall of Sound" (an excerpt below) in the summer of 1974 when:

he traveled with the band wore tee shirt and blue jeans like
the other guys climbed scaffold to place speakers in the Wall of Sound happy
for the job, already beginning to understand none of this would happen
again...
[while] down front young women danced dresses gliding braless barefeet barely
touching the floor to Jack Straw China Cat Sunflower I Know You Rider
tell the folks back home this is the Promised Land callin'... 

The poem, reminiscent of the style of e.e. cummings and beat poets, is a toe-tapping, robust experience that causes the reader to want more of Entsminger's highly-charged poems. It begs to be read aloud with other people.

Michael Miller, winner of the 2014 Yeats Poetry Prize and author of Into This World and Lifelines, presents poems that underline the fears and sorrows of the human condition. "A Man Alone" captures a universal feeling of loneliness and existential awareness in such lines as 

At the feeder by his window
The rabbit nibbling the wet grass
At dawn in the small park where he waits
For the sun to rise above the shadowed hill. 

In "Fear," Miller's lyric is unrelenting as he articulates the familiarity of fear

in the night of the invisible scalpel,
In the bleeding end of the dark... 

Miller's poems are often startling insights into human vulnerability and reverberate with emotional power.

Luci Shaw, Writer-in-Residence at Regent College, Vancouver, received the 2013 Denise Levertov Award for Creative Writing. Those who have entered their seventh and eighth decades of life will identify with "Green Season," a succinct, sharp poem using the ordinary image of a barn to articulate the onset of aging: 

I turn the pages like old barn doors
peering into the shadowed spaces and
stalled beasts, wondering if I am
a fiction in my own wrecked, weather-beaten
barn of a life. The smell of rich
horse sweat and dung. The life
shivering beneath their flanks...

In sharp contrast, she gives readers the pleasure of "Flowers in Winter:"

...Infect me with joy!"
Though I'm here, inside my house,
I trace with the stalks of my hands how resurrected I feel,
relishing through frosty glass the winter snow that
covers my crocus bulbs, my hyacinths.

Shaw's delight in the natural world invites readers to get on with things as she attends to the business of creating hope with her delightful poetic vision.

New Orleans born Ken Fontenot, who now lives in Austin Texas, won the 2012 Texas Institute of Letters Award for poetry, and his sense of humor often unleashes itself on more serious readers.  In "It Wants to Stay," his tongue-in-cheek observation about dust reminds readers of their mortality in a revelation of the inevitable within the ordinary:

We breathe
the almost nothingness of dust
which survives us all.
Its reappearance trick
takes its time, arriving finally
as a guest announced.
Just run your finger
over the coffee table.
A mote of dust
contains a mote of truth:
it has the last laugh.

This issue of Pinyon Review is a keeper and represents the best of art and poetry. You may want to frame Susan's cover. Copies of Pinyon Review #7 are available at amazon.com or order from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403.

JUST A TRACE OF MOON

After reading poems in Ken Fontenot's book, In A Kingdom of Birds, a young poet decided to use some lines from his poetry that inspired her to create a "found poem"—one in which she repeated words from lines of Fontenot's work that had carried a certain charge for her, then added her own lines to create a new poem.  However, when I finished reading Fontenot's In A Kingdom of Birds and Just A Trace of Moon, Selected Poems 2006-2013, I felt that I couldn't possibly be among those who wrote "found poetry." I'd be unable to incise any of his wonderful poems and create a new poem for fear that I'd lose some of the wisdom and delight Robert Frost says is inherent in a complete poem.

In Just A Trace of Moon, Fontenot deftly shows readers a wide range of subjects from a poem capturing the energy and capers of young boys in "Friends, 1956" to a profound piece entitled "Things Both Practical and Sublime." Through his investigations into memory and speculations about a "good life"—sometimes cryptic, other times, philosophical—readers experience "just a trace of moon" that provides new and translucent approaches to the real world.

I loved the opening lines of "Friends, 1956," which aptly characterizes young boys about to enter puberty who're filled with "...pure energy without wisdom." Although the time is set in 1956, the poem elicited investigations into my own memory of boys in the mid-forties—"the embarrassment of short pants/and short hair./ We were dust creased in the neck,/fingers around a baseball bat..." and a line not confined to boys of that time (every young person had dirty knees!): "We had green knees forever..." In his relaxed style, Fontenot captures the tone of past time in this piece about a halcyon period in American history, taking his readers back as "lovers of lost time."

Fontenot inserts classical musicians and writers into his work, giving readers a taste of Beethoven and Mahler and quoting lines from Goethe in "That Is the Way" to achieve the idea of the sense of balance needed for old age: "When Goethe said, 'Two souls live in me,' he must have/meant the angelic and the demoniac And he/lived the balance: he could take both into old age. /But the snake sheds its skin. That is the way/There is/no other."

My favorite in this new volume of selected poems is a nostalgic piece entitled "Back Then," in which Fontenot reveals his family's Cajun background and describes his mother's occupation as a "housewife" or "homemaker," relating how she crisscrossed the country with Western Union and "teletyped her way into marriage and 1946." The poem culminates in a touching picture of Fontenot's father ministering to his wife, getting her drunk for a toothache and later making iced tea because she felt "too bad to make it herself." Fontenot closes with the poignant end lines: "I know it was my father. /I know he would/have fought the whole terrible War (WWII) just for her." Some readers might consider this condensed sentimentality, but I read it as a tender portrait of married love.

In "Winter," Fontenot moves from the concrete to a larger, transformative context, describing the need for warmth on a winter night where he invites his mate to "relearn the tenderness of clouds, /how once long ago only the angels/could see whatever it is we see now."

Here is a poet who has come to terms with life as revealed in "Things Both Practical and Sublime," showing his deep philosophical bent when he combines poetry and enlightenment in a concluding verse: "The best we can bargain for is authenticity/and gratitude (even more than love?), /for the cow is grateful to the grass, each/showing its true self. So remind me to serve up/a meal of life, the main course of which is grace."

Fontenot reminds me of William Blake's wife's description of her husband as having one foot in this world and one foot in the next!

Although Fontenot's finest contribution to literature is his poetry, he donated his personal collection of hundreds of volumes of poetry by renowned writers to the Ruth Stephan Poetry Collection at the University of Texas. Fontenot, a native New Orleanian, now lives and works in Austin, Texas. His third book of poetry, In A Kingdom of Birds, won the 2013 Texas Institute of Letters award for best poetry book of Texas. Both In A Kingdom of Birds and Just A Trace of Moon were published by Pinyon Publishing in Montrose, Colorado, an independent press on the rise in the "world of letters."

Available from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, Colorado 81403.

A PUFF FOR PINYON REVIEW #4

I knew I was in for visual excitement and good reading when I opened the fourth volume of Pinyon Review. On the title page of this journal celebrating the Arts and Sciences, a bewhiskered bobcat stared at me, his grey-green eyes watchful for prey. It was a photograph taken by Susan Elliott, artist, illustrator, and managing editor of the Review, who seems to be as accomplished at photographing wildlife as she is at drawing and painting it. From e-mails exchanged with Gary Entsminger, publisher and editor of the Pinyon Review, I knew that the bobcat had wandered near the cabin that houses the independent press he and Susan operate on the Uncompahgre Plateau near Montrose, Colorado. I’m expecting to see a piece of original music composed by Susan appear in the Review any day now since Susan is also an accomplished musician, composer…scientist, gardener, chef…the list of her talents is long!

A long short story in this issue of the Pinyon Review is certain to attract and hold the interest of writers. It’s a cogent lesson for writers about the friendship of a wannabe writer and a seasoned writer/teacher. The wisdom and eloquence of William Blake, e. e. cummings, and Tennyson is included in this gut-wrenching spin about life in the shadow of death. The fulfillment of a teacher’s desire to return to his second home in mountain wilderness and a student’s realization of his purpose in the world combine in a poignant story by Neil Harrison who derived his title “Cold Earth Wanderer” from a passage in one of Blake’s poems: “I traveled through a land of men/A land of men and women too/And heard and saw such dreadful things/As cold Earth wanderers never knew.” Harrison wove many passages about writing into the story without being didactic, and a paragraph toward the end of the story captures the mystique of the writing process better than any manuals on the craft I’ve read: “…There he’d learned the alchemical magic of words, that rare, inexplicable phenomenon whereby the basest of materials, a broken stick, a piece of charcoal, a pencil or pen, could conjure up spiritual gold, imbuing the wielder with a sense of belonging, of oneness with the vast universe in its ever-ongoing creation. At the front of that classroom his teacher and soon-to-be friend, Alan Horn had voiced the precise words Everett needed to hear at the time, perhaps not even fully aware that he was offering the keys to a kingdom…” Wow!

Twenty-four poems showcase the work of poets ranging from haiku by Jay Friedenburg to a prose piece about writing by Jane Hilberry. Friedenberg also treats the reader to his impressionistic pastels of landscapes; e.g., “Blue Mesa,” a soft pastel of an Arizona scene.

My friend, Michael Miller, jolts us into an awareness of our good fortune in having been born in this country in a short poem entitled "Gasoline," when the smell of gasoline evokes an image of “a citizen of Tibet running down the street ablaze,” and he concludes that fortune favors us with “our place of birth/we walk freely/Beneath the vast estate of sky.”

Editor and publisher Gary Entsminger treats us to one of his poems entitled “Masks,” in which he describes a dim view seen at night when he pulls the curtain back and looks out at “the porch cav[ing] into ruined couch/below unshingled casts from lamplight,” a view which is transformed as he ascends “well rested stairs toward bed/as if heaven waits.” Gary, who has written and published many of his poems throughout the years, makes his debut in Pinyon Review with this single poem from his collections.

This edition of Pinyon Review is packed with the work of award-winning and notable poets including Luci Shaw, Robert Shaw, Ken Fontenot, and other fine poets. As a Louisianan, I was drawn to Elizabeth Schultz’s poem about “Reviewing Kate Chopin’s The Awakening,” which is a highly visual poem based on Chopin’s iconic feminist novel. Schultz features the heroine, Edna Pontellier, stripping on the shore of Grand Isle and crawling “through the waves’ swelling sheen,/through the shadows of birds/and sinks with the dolphins around her.”

Stan Honda, who photographs night sky landscapes and is a photographer for Agence France-Presse based in New York City, contributed the cover photograph and a special section of Wupatki Sky photographs for the Review.

Entsminger aptly describes Pinyon Review as one that contains “contrasting colors and images that highlight place and mood during the transition from summer to fall,” and he and Susan certainly achieved that effect when they put together this exciting issue. Impressive!

Order copies from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, Colorado 81403. 

IN A KINGDOM OF BIRDS…

Spring is the time for poets, and a plethora of poetry books have come my way lately, one of which is Pinyon Publishing’s latest poetry title. The handsome cover of this book of poetry, In A Kingdom of Birds by Ken Fontenot, is alluring enough (a copy of John James Audubon’s painting of blue jays), but the poems inside the book further move the serious reader of poetry to treasure this volume.

Naomi Nye (one of my favorite poets) says that Ken Fontenot’s wisdom “sears,” and I’d transpose that to read: “it soars,” particularly his observations about the kingdom of birds: owls, sparrows, grackles, doves...

Fontenot’s poems about his relatives – nephew, mother, father, grandfather –are equally arresting. The latter character is featured in haunting poems about an old man whose drunkenness and incarceration seem to be as painful to his grandson, the poet, as his ruthless killing of an unwanted pup with a hammer.

Fontenot’s poems based on Louisiana experiences are seductive to me, a native Louisianan; e.g., “A Fan That Reminds Me of A Morning Long Ago,” in which Fontenot speaks of a Louisiana hunt with his grandfather “somewhere out there beyond/the crawfish mounds, beyond the cows/bowing to their god, beyond the cow pond/and its menagerie, beyond the fields/they have let go…” The oscillating fan in this poem also resonates with me because I still remember the sound of Grandmother Nell’s old Emerson fan from childhood naptime, still “whispering,” as Fontenot says about the sound of this dust stirrer.

Many of Fontenot’s poems are rooted in irony. In “Poets and Blackberries,” he grounds the poem in ordinary problems like being indigent, then moves into hope as “we eat a fresh blackberry,/suddenly blackberries are gods./In our poems we praise blackberries,/saying there was never anything their equal./Our town becomes Blackberry Town./Our world becomes Blackberry World,..” and returns to the problem: “The mail arrives./ A bill we can’t pay./And it’s as if blackberries didn’t exist.”

An entire poem devoted to “Trouble” invites the reader to consider the tragedy of the human condition in these lines: “The heart wants out!/Three million years now/and it wants to belong/to some other kind of body…” And yet – yet : “The birds rescue my faith in them by taking the only/road they know, the air. And because they keep /falling, almost unnoticed, out of the gray sky,/we know another miracle has put birds in our/dreams, and has let us fly when we most want to.” This exquisite poem lives up to the feeling the book’s title engenders in poetry readers and evokes a sense of the transcendent goodness that still survives in the universe.

Fontenot’s lyrics speak to the philosophical mind; they are sometimes brittle but are filled with energy and never sentimental. In natural and imaginative imagery, Fontenot brings us to the edge and leads us back.

This is another outstanding poet on Pinyon-Publishing’s list and can be ordered from Pinyon-Publishing, 23847 V 66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403.