HONORING JEAN ZIPP

For years, every Sunday afternoon at 2, o’clock, Gary Entsminger, editor and publisher of Pinyon Publishing, spent several hours on the telephone mentoring his Aunt Jean Zipp in creative writing; later publishing her memoir, Windows: Letters to Ayla, and her poetry in several issues of the Pinyon Review. When Entsminger learned that his Aunt Jean was dying, he continued to encourage her poetry writing, even through the last few weeks of her life, and this month he dedicated Pinyon Review #11 to her, featuring Zipp’s last three poems. This issue of the Review, a journal that celebrates the Arts and Sciences, is a salute to Entsminger’s 94-year old aunt who died in Tucson, Arizona. Jean Zipp had led a multifaceted life as the wife of a serviceman, creating a tactile art gallery for the blind, owning a toy store, working in interior design, and, finally, writing a fascinating memoir. Pinyon Review #11 is a tour de force — by far, the finest issue published by Entsminger and Susan Elliott, artist and co-editor of the Review.

I do not usually tout my own poems that have appeared in the Pinyon Review from time to time,  but I’m especially proud that four of my poems were featured in this handsome issue celebrating Jean Zipp’s life — three lead poems and the end poem written about Zipp’s demise. For the memorial issue, Susan Elliott created a sketch entitled I would like you to keep calling every Sunday at 2, an ink and colored pencil sketch on paper in Zipp’s honor, and Entsminger dedicated a poem entitled "Listening to Liszt and Chopin" to his Aunt Jean, a companion piece for Elliott's sketch.

Pinyon Review #11 showcases a variety of poets and artists, beginning with the cover painting, “By Invitation,” an elegant work of art that gives the reader the impression that he’s looking through a window at a brilliant sunrise or sunset. It was executed by Les Taylor of northern California, a music coach who has found her passion in visual art.

Nine Great Blue Heron images of digital art by Steve Friebert (brother of poet and translator Stuart Friebert ) are scattered throughout this celebratory issue. The first photo of a heron facing a page of poetry looks as if he’s announcing a signal event; in later frames, the great bird (so prevalent in my native Louisiana), is shown fishing and making spectacular liftoffs, then soaring into the beyond.

Friebert’s photographs seem to be a metaphor for Zipp’s take-off into the other world, later emphasized in her poem, “Fine Tuning”:  “If I were to live each day/As if it be my last/I’d have to forfeit custom/Rescind the on and on/Cantata/A petition to Infinity/I sing./ Contingency strikes mocking chords/There is dichotomy/Although they prove me hapless now/I’ll tune them/Presently.”

Robert Lake continues the metaphor in his poem, “Spirit Wings,” then notes that when he finished typing his poem about “A bird/Flying ever so high/Disappears/Within a silver lined cloud,” he observed two doves landing in the persimmon tree outside and thought that Aunt Jean’s spirit was poised to leave the earth. A naturalist, Lake works with glass plate photographic images of Yosemite National Park from the early 20th century.

Many of the poems and photographs focus on the natural world and the ecosystem; e.g. “Solar House Living” by Carla Schwartz “with each new day,/with each new visitor, wonder,/questions,” the voices and images taking readers into sacred places and beyond.

Michael Miller, a poet in western Massachusetts, gives us a brief metaphor of love derived from the natural world in “River:” “Our love is the river/That flows on,/Through darkness, through light,/Over rocks and between them,/Unable to stop.”  Miller has published three volumes of poetry with Pinyon and focuses on brevity of style and understatement in his lyrical phrasings.

Readers are also treated to one of Stuart Friebert’s translations of Elisabeth Schmeidel’s “Mein Clown” (“My Clown”). The translation speaks of the clown as an “escort of my soul…[which] grows quiet too, whenever/love wanders over the graves/pale as a shadow…” Although the poem wasn't intended as a requiem poem for Jean Zipp, it, like many of the poems in Pinyon Review #11, emerges as an expression of the departure of the soul into another realm.

A short story, “Casino Man,” by Neil Harrison, a plethora of notable poets, digital paintings by Jay Friedenberg…this memorial issue for Jean Zipp celebrates her passing with art and song, “singing surrender to a larger life.”

This is a banner issue of Pinyon Review, a tribute to an aging poet who continued to contribute until her passing last month. Pinyon Review #11 is available from Pinyon Publishing 23847 V 66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403.

THE GIFT

from Sea Quilt by Susan Elliott

During this last cold spell, I received a late Christmas gift from chilly Colorado, home of Pinyon Publishing, the company that published the mystery Chant of Death that I co-authored with Isabel Anders and many of my poems in Pinyon Review. Publishers Gary Entsminger and Susan Elliott sent me a packet of note cards with an illustration Susan rendered — one of a square from Susan's "Sea Quilt," a picture done with watercolor, ink, and thread on 140-lb cold-pressed watercolor paper. The blues in this watercolor express Susan's thoughts of "sensing the ocean in the stillness of snow-covered fields of sagebrush./...The other dimension laps at my ears like the hum of Om."

Susan always writes a long Christmas letter to accompany the gift she and Gary send, and on a cold day here, I visualized her "sitting in my new favorite chair — Mom's Danish rocking chair padded with a Navajo blanket from Dad. Facing the kitchen (aka the apothecary, center of daily dances with the vegetable kingdom) — to my left the wood stove is not lit because the cabin is still warm from last night's fire; to my right, on the counter, sit sprouts (garlic and broccoli) greening and steel-cut oats soaking for oat milk..."

Susan and Gary are vegetarians and eat lots of legumes and vegetables, the latter which they grow on the Uncompahgre Plateau where they live. Many times when one of them e-mails me, they're making tomatillo sauce from home-grown tomatillos. In the Christmas letter, Susan quoted from Thoreau: "Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders."

We sent this couple pecans from Cane River Pecan Company, which Susan was sampling as the "sky lights up here in pinks and cloudy blues to the west and rising yellows to the east." She says she researched the pecans indigenous to the Mississippi River basin and thinks that they may be "a Centennial variety that was developed in the 1850's by Antoine, a black slave. That variety is believed to have initiated the commercial popularization of the nuts now claimed to be the most popular nut in the U.S. (after the peanut)." Susan also discovered that Indians in Texas considered the pecan tree to be a manifestation of the Great Spirit.

Susan Elliott

When I think of Susan, I think of the word "manifest" because she's always manifesting food, music, art, poems, and good spirits in her life on the Plateau. Susan and Gary are Renaissance people, and their interests are many and varied. Both of them compose, play, and record music, mainly on the guitar and banjo; both are authors and editors. They grow a large vegetable garden every year, are avid believers in sustainability and are stalwart hikers. Susan has a Ph.D. in Botany and rendered the illustrations for Why Water Plants Don't Drown by Victoria Sullivan, published by Pinyon a few years ago. She also sews, bakes a good bread, and is an accomplished herbalist. Some of our Christmas gifts have included exotic seasonings that she mixed and tied in packets for family and friends.

At the end of Susan's Christmas letter, she told us to look out the window for the first birds of the year: Mountain Chick-a-dee, Steller's Jay, and Dark-eyed Junco, which we can't see here in swamp country but can imagine perching on the window sill of her cabin (a residence to which they refer as "The Castle").  A woman who seems to be prepared and enthusiastic for any experience, Susan ended the annual letter with a new year greeting: "We're on our way." And here in south Louisiana, following a frosty week-end, today's 70-degree weather bodes better for "our way."

PINYON REVIEW #10

Dog lovers will appreciate the photo of the black lab wearing a bright red jacket, head turned toward some sound in a wood of aspen with yellow leaves, that appears on the cover of Pinyon Review #10. The dog’s name is Garcia, and he’s accustomed to proofing manuscripts with Editor Gary Entsminger and Managing Editor Susan Elizabeth Elliott near Montrose, Colorado. Inside "The Castle," the cabin headquarters of Pinyon Publishing, Garcia turns in early after a day of manuscript reading, climbing mountains, dancing to folk music, chasing wildlife, and helping to cultivate his owners’ large garden. Garcia often signs his name to emails addressed to me, and lets me know if my latest poetry offerings to Pinyon Review pass muster with him. I appreciate the attentions of this beautiful dog even though I’m allergic to animal dander and can only admire him from afar. 

Poetry lovers will love this issue of Pinyon Review as it’s primarily a collection of poetry from numerous award-winning poets. It also contains an exhibit of the painting/art design work of Susan Elliott. Bonus material is a suspenseful vignette by the editors that reminded me of Red Lights, one of Georges Simenon’s short psychological novels.

I usually attempt to single out a few authors to tout in a review, but the excellent work of sixteen poets in this issue begged me not to discriminate, so I finally decided to focus on a single poem that contained five parts entitled "Arizona Ruins" by Lyn Lifshin. It’s an arresting study of the Sinagua Indians, a tribe that disappeared into the cosmos and whose ruins I visited during a stay in Sedona, Arizona in the summer of 2007. Lifshin writes: "No one knows/where they went/from the cliffs/with their/earth jars and sandals/Or if they/cursed the/desert moon/as they wrapped/their dead/babies/in bright cloth/and jewels…"

On a hot summer day when I visited the ruins and became unbearably thirsty, I felt in sync with the poet who wrote: "Now cliff swallows/nest in the mud/where the Sinagua/lived/until water ran out…" I wondered if the tribe died of thirst or moved to a new watering hole, but a guide told us that they simply disappeared, and I remember writing my own poem about ghosts of these native Americans who sometimes lived on lizards and nuts. "The people left/ the debris of their lives here/arrows, dung/And were buried/with the bright/turquoise they loved/sometimes carved/into animals and birds."

I love the clean lines of this poem and the powerful images it invokes of people struggling for survival, making stone jewelry and braiding willow stems in the Arizona desert. I blinked when I read a biography of the author who lays claim to writing over 130 books —that fact is the entire bio, which is as mysterious as the poem about the Sinagua, and I respect the privacy of the creator of such powerful imagery.

From start to finish, readers are held in suspense with Gary and Susan’s "Where Was I? —for Tom Martinez," a story about a man who wandered onto the couple’s property, lost, after sunset, one evening. The man had been harvesting pine nuts in the pinyon-juniper woods and had gotten turned around, and in the vignette Gary offers to drive him back to his car via Government Springs in exchange for half his harvest of pine nuts. Gary writes that since pine nuts from Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico are almost impossible to buy, except in a Chevron station in Austin, Nevada, he agreed to make the drive while Susan stayed home and fretted about him driving in the dark to Martinez’s home on the rim of a canyon. It’s a good spin about a repeat incident Gary experienced lending a hand to a lost neighbor who claims his wife’s legally blind and he’s legally insane. Gary and Susan have jointly written several books that include Ophelia’s Ghost, Fall of ’33, and Remembering the Parables.

Also in this issue of Pinyon Review is a stunning, blue-green watercolor entitled "Sea Quilt, 24"x36" in which Susan used watercolor, ink, and thread on 140-lb. cold-pressed watercolor paper. She writes: "On quiet winter morning walks when I pause and gaze across snow-covered fields of sagebrush, I sense the ocean in the stillness. The other dimension laps at my ear like the hum of Om." 

Garcia highly recommends Issue #10 of Pinyon Review and donned his red coat especially to attract readers... or perhaps, in honor of Thanksgiving, he wanted to rustle the feathers of the wild turkeys that often come to breakfast at "The Castle." Copies of this issue can be ordered from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403.

FINDING THE WAY

Editor Gary Entsminger and his Managing Editor Susan Elliott have two of the most intellectually active minds I know, and in the latest issue of Pinyon Review, Entsminger contributes an intriguing article entitled “Finding the Way.” It’s an instructive essay about how the Earth and all living creatures project energy fields and is the introductory piece in this eclectic magazine that features noteworthy poets, photographers, scientists, and artists. In the article, Entsminger, a masterful analyst, explains how readers can determine personal polarities using a compass and a pendulum. I was surprised by the sentence: “Men often, but not always, have positive polarity and women negative polarity…” and suddenly remembered having read that Jesus had 100 percent positive energy. When I find a compass, I’m going to conduct my own polarity test and see what’s going on in my energy field. Entsminger’s interests in science, philosophy, history, and literature are frequently reflected in the editorial page of Pinyon Review issues.  I recommend reading the brief article in Pinyon Review #9, which you can order from Pinyon Publishing in Montrose, Colorado.

The ninth issue of this small press magazine also features seventeen writers ranging from an artist and ecologist to a photographer who often provides the photography for covers and articles related to night sky landscapes. The latter, Stan Honda, spent a month at Chaco Culture National Historical Park in northwestern New Mexico as an artist-in-residence and reported on the landscape, ancient pueblos, and the vast sky above them, photographing the changing moonlight moving across the landscape during certain lunar phases, as well as scenes like Jupiter above the North wall of Penasco Blanco.

Susan Elliott, whose artwork has appeared in many of Pinyon’s books, contributed a debut poem that reveals the energy of a highly creative mind, “a meditation on the emblem on the flag in the Death card”: “artichokes bloom[ing] in front of the mason’s old stone cottage/ – purple astral spheres/ full moon/hung/over windless/morning waters…” Susan’s word imagery matches the magic of her visual art, and her exquisite poetry reflects the insights of a practiced observer.

Stuart Friebert, who often corresponds with me, is an outstanding translator of German poetry, as well as an excellent poet. Friebert founded the Creative Writing program at Oberlin College and recently published Floating Heart with Pinyon. His prose piece “Burying Beetles,” in this issue of Pinyon Review showcases the range of his talent in a true story that reveals the cultural conditions prevailing in post-WWII Germany.  As one of the first exchange students sent to Germany after WWII, Friebert spent a winter break from his studies at the Technische Hochschule in Darmstadt, Germany with Richard and Sybille Kramer, relatives of one of his grandmother’s friends back home. He includes accounts of the efforts of German military to track down former Nazis and a drinking party in which the soldiers suggest doing what the Nazis perfected – “take hostages and kill one an hour until the swastika-worshippers give themselves up.” Friebert hints at a frightening understory, and the suspenseful account alludes to his experiences after learning that Sybille was a Jewess saved by Richard and hidden in the loft of a barn belonging to the widow of Richard’s best friend Dieter Braunfel. Readers shouldn’t be daunted by the title “Burying Beetles.” It’s a page turner!

Noteworthy among poems by Robert Shaw, whose latest poetry collection, A Late Spring, and After, will be published by Pinyon this year, is a poignant one entitled “Voicemail,” an amusing commentary about the recording voice of the woman in his voice mail message: “Once or twice, knowing how crazy it was,/I’ve dialed my own number to hear her,/stopping myself short from leaving a message./I couldn’t ask her – could I? – to call me back./I think the utterly disquieting truth/is that holding her calm voice to my ear/even now feels to me like protection,/and that I fear erasing it would set /a seal for all time on the house’s silence,/unbroken now unless I talk to myself.” According to my personal terminology, “Voicemail” is “pathotic.”

As usual, Pinyon Review #9, contains the work of authors with innovative approaches to memories, feelings, observations, and revelations and is a significant contribution to the body of literature published by small presses in the U.S.

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

PINYON REVIEW #8

When I opened the latest edition of Pinyon Review, A Journal Celebrating the Arts and Sciences, I was initially puzzled by Editor Entsminger’s introduction to the journal entitled “The Scarecrow,” but after reading the entire issue I realized that he had transposed and woven short lines from most of the selections within its pages to form a lovely introductory mosaic. In this issue, he also treats us to one of his own lighthearted poems about a cowgirl in a “pheasant feathered felt derby hat” who roams in a place where “no one spends/ their lives on indifferent things,” setting the tone that represents most Pinyon Review issues – a tone that combines levity and serious thought.

The Pinyon Review is always a “glad surprise,”* and this November issue contains a gracious plenty of poetry and art, but the cogent selection that spoke to my condition was a provocative book review of Notes on the Death of Culture by Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa. In this critical review about cultural decline, Jack Starr underlines LLosa’s idea that “…committed writers should resist the temptation to seek immediate success through entertainment alone…and must breathe life back into our culture, our development of the mind, our way of life, and our spirit that guides…” In the short three-page review, Starr elucidates Llosa’s warnings that modern culture has become “a spectacle, a vehicle of entertainment lacking value in all but the present moment or hour, to relieve our boredom…we measure our pleasures as quantities not qualities – and thus, we easily forget them…” These excerpts are just the tip of the iceberg in a review that will startle readers into serious pondering about Llosa’s ideas concerning the return of literature and art to their place as “the common denominator of culture,” and a return of religion to the spiritual realm, rather than to systems devoted to dogma.

There are so many excellent poets in this issue that I’d stretch the limits of this blog to include all of them, but as I began writing this, I glanced at the top of the bureau where an alebrijes creature stands. Friends bought this art piece crafted by a native Zapotecan for me on a trip to Oaxaca City, Mexico. They advised that I should view it daily to remind myself to persist in writing poetry rather than let some negative monster in the mind devour the Muse. Carried by some mysterious current of synchronicity, I turned to the pages featuring Eva Olsgard’s three poems, and saw the title “Angels de Oaxaca.” Imagine my shock when I read these lines: “Ninas know how to receive you. They know what to make/of your spiked tail, tongue and ears. Know that only the joy/of reaching your many textures will dispel the delusion/of using your many colors to delineate a difference/between your horns and your wings...When the wind knocks you/down,/the wind knocked out of you/releases your:/tail/wings/horns/spiked tongue…you persist to remind them./It is in their own hands,/recreating themselves,/enlivening the loving delight they find in themselves.” If you’ve ever seen one of these delightful creatures the Zapotecans create, you’ll appreciate the mystical imagery in Angels de Oaxaca. The poem gave me a new perspective about the creature above, which I've been regarding as an object that devours creative ability. "Angels de Oaxaca" is written by a poet who performs her own poetry, and readers can envision her performing this particular poem, costumed as an alebrijes character.

Three renderings of Jay Friedenberg’s pastel work appear in “Color and Rock” — depictions of “Pink Canyon” on the Apache Trail east of Phoenix, “Distant Butte” in Bryce Canyon, Utah, and “Mountain Range” showing the red mountains near Red Rock State Park, Nevada. Friedenberg also writes haiku, and readers can discern a touch of poetry in his soft and hard pastels of rock formations featured in this issue of Pinyon Review.

Many more poets in this issue deserve recognition and celebration, but I hope I've provided enough to titillate the interest of Pinyon Review readers. Susan Elliott’s breathtaking image of a white, pink, and orange canyon wall on the front cover of Pinyon Review #8 and her poetic text description on the back cover should entice readers to enjoy another banner issue of eclectic reading. I know they’ll appreciate that Pinyon Publishing is doing its best to “breathe life back into our culture.” 

Available at Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403.

*phrase taken from the Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas: “The World, and the Men in it are full of glad surprises…a glimpse of the Truth that is in him, a momentary contact with his goodness, a recognition of his nobility – all of these are at once a joy, a surprise, and a rich promise…”  

    

AFTER EDEN

This rainy morning when the world outside my window is afloat, I was surprised when I opened a new collection of poetry from Pinyon Publishing in Montrose, Colorado (located on a high and dry plateau), and a poem that fit the inundations of the day leaped from the page:

“DO NOT

leave
the
Ark
unless
you
know
a
gull
from
a
dove
in
the
blinding
rain. “

This whimsical piece spoke to my condition as I looked out at the gunmetal sky from which sheets of rain fell. The poem appears in After Eden by Diane Vreuls and is an amusing innovation placed among more serious poems that “curve back again to [their] norm,” as T.S. Eliot once wrote.

Most of the lyrics in this volume express the entirety of the poet’s sensitive life through spiritual musings in which the reader should not fear abstractions or ornamentation. There is clarity and concise perfection in Vreuls’ poetry about her spiritual journey, beginning with her observations about the Annunciation and culminating in “Botanicon,” a poem using plant symbolism to represent the depth of the poet’s feelings about Christ’s resurrection: “Each march/the earth/sends forth/fresh shoots/of bush and tree/not pale/firstlings/of green growth/but wine-/red tendrils/carmine whips/a blush/of buds/burst from/earth’s blood/announcing Resurrection.” Here, the poet takes the mysterious and inscrutable and translates it into one of Nature’s rituals without using elaborate art or superfluous lyrics.

In five sections of poetry that are a mixture of exaltation and truth seeking, Vreuls’ voice is at once prophetic and sympathetic. Her lyrics speak of both imperfect and perfect experiences and are expressed with a true poet’s sensibility. The poems often cast light on what is hidden in the human experience; e.g., the beautiful tribute to Saint Sourise, which is my favorite: “The night she heard the cries of a man being tortured/two countries distant, she prayed for the one/who awakened her, then for the torturer…Reclining after her midday meal she heard the cries/of the infant Jesus and ran to gather him close./In the stall lay a newborn calf nosing the teat of its mother…The cries of a woman in labor/gladden her heart. It is the sound,/she says, of the Earth birthing the day…Come to the altar, she cries,/and you will hear your name whispered/in the pouring wine…She is said to have died of grief—the grief/of others. If you wake in the night, she told us,/you have heard my cry.” There is something deeply Celtic in this poem, particularly in the line “of the Earth birthing day,” and the last line reads like a spiritual invocation. I could envision the Anglican sisters at St. Mary’s in Sewanee, where I worship when I am in Tennessee, chanting this poem at Morning Prayer or Vespers.

Among Vreuls’ brief poems representing her ability to craft a poem that has clarity and concision is a piece entitled “Source.” “Three transfusions,/can’t tell/whose/blood is/in my veins,/but at/Eucharist/I know.” As Yeats says, [This] poem comes right with a click like a closing box.”

The final poem in After Eden, entitled “Anno Animae In Terra 2015,” resonates with all of us who have been involved in the struggle to acknowledge and conform to a higher will. The last stanza records Vreuls’ acquaintance with this struggle: “…In this place all is mystery./ In its hunger you are my bowl./In its pain you measure music./In its primer you read the first word—/the Yes I am trying to learn.” Again, the poet shows her ability to write with clarity and concision reminiscent of the Acmeists who claimed they were dedicated to “beautiful clarity.”

Diane Vreuls is a poet who does not oversimplify the human predicament but is a powerful spokeswoman for the spiritual life and expresses the finer shades of feeling in her visionary work. She represents the growing body of outstanding contemporary poets being published by Pinyon Publishing. A recipient of an NEA Fellowship, she has published a novel, a short story collection, a children’s book, and a book of poems. Her work has appeared in Commonweal, The New Yorker, and the Best American Short Stories. She lives in Oberlin, Ohio.

Pinyon Publishing is an independent press located in Montrose, Colorado and its co-editors/publishers, Gary Entsminger and Susan Elliott, are dedicated to producing some of the best writing and art of our times.

Available at Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403