TO GARY, THE GHOST OF MAXWELL PERKINS

Yesterday afternoon, I received a sad message from Susan Entsminger about Gary Entsminger, my publisher/ editor/ and cherished friend of Pinyon Publishing who published Chant of Death, a mystery I co-wrote with Isabel Anders of Sewanee, TN, as well as many of my poems in Pinyon Review. Although Gary had written to me several weeks ago about the blood clots in his lungs and explained that he planned to recover, I was stunned to learn that he had died. Gary wasn’t just an editor/publisher to me, he had become a close friend, and through email we had developed a relationship that, for lack of a better phrase, made us soul mates. It was and still is a spiritual friendship that covered eleven short years, and he, along with one other male poet, is probably the outstanding mentor in my life. I came to know him through long emails, the books, and collages of photographs he sent me throughout the years, and through his constant endorsement of my work. I never met him in person or heard his voice, but he was among several voices I heard every time I sat down to write. Susan took the photographs in this blog that show him climbing peaks in the Colorado Rocky Mountains near the plateau where he and Susan set up publishing headquarters in a log cabin and lived an intentional life of sustainability.

During the early hours of this morning, I kept trying to write a tribute to Gary in my mind, but I have had a difficult time imagining that he is no longer alive. When I went into the dining room for breakfast, I asked Victoria Sullivan (another writer Gary published. His wife Susan rendered the drawings for Vickie’s Why Water Plants Don’t Drown) to find the photographs of him on my computer. Needless to say, Gary’s spirit has a large place in this household. While we mourn his death, we were comforted last night by a message from Darrell Bourque who said, “I know his eternal energy is working its way to Right Source and I know that some of it is coming to you… as you grieve his passing.” 

Language seems to fail me this morning, so I defer to a prose poem I wrote about Gary in 2012, the title of which is the title of this blog and which appeared in a book of my poetry entitled Everything Is Blue:

Among my papers I find two cards, embellished photographs of a book cover: a yellowed parchment bearing ancient chants bordered by stains of spilled blood; cards that record a happier time, your good intent to make me a ‘brand,’ a recognized author of mysteries.

For nearly three years you have nurtured me, a poet on this stony mountain still searching for metaphor and mood after a lifetime, unrecognized in the mist of once known -- becoming known again, becoming read again…

You stalk my words with good intention, urging me to love the lines I write, assurances to a broken winged writer lying under the hemlock now wrapped in arms of unrelenting trust.

I lie down at night, pondering new blessings: my poems you have published, my “essays” you carefully read. A man who reads everything, you always find the something others fail to notice, raising your glass to say “Cheers” for the poet who fears she is lost, the hungry fox who is a writer.

In the winter, you toast with IPA, in the summer, you sip chardonnay. Language is your red hot salsa, wit and perfection part of your garden, you imagine a parable in each season and what you shall make of this tomato, this berry, brought in from the sun, anthems soon rising from the steaming pot.

You write of hauling barrels of water for Susan’s plateau garden, of hiking 12,000 foot peaks in one morning, send me photographs of a bearded man with ascetic brow, standing on a lonely trail alongside a black Lab facing a meadow leading to the unknown.

Every scene is a fragment of the larger picture: making books that balance readers’ spirits, the lion man who knows that plants will sprout and grow, each seedling harvested, a moment given over to creation, sturdy and useful.

I hold you in my skull as an idea that scorns danger, your will arguing fiercely against the thing we writers most fear… that our words will not matter, that our language will not last.

Gary was a poet (Four Ravens and Two Miles West), a publisher, naturalist, computer programmer, has written nine programming books; over 100 scientific and technical articles; and computer software that helps scientists understand patterns of biodiversity and biogeography. With his wife Susan, he wrote Fall of ’33, Ophelia’s Ghost, and Remembering the Parables, books that integrate fiction, philosophy, history, poetry, and art. He was also a musician and music composer (guitar, mandolin, keyboard), writing tunes like "If the Birds Spoke to Us." 

Gary nurtured writers scattered throughout the U.S. and abroad (especially Chinese poets) and was an authentic Renaissance man. Although he called himself a “Luddite,” he remained on the cutting edge of the arts as evidenced in Pinyon Review, a journal celebrating the arts and sciences that he established in 2012. He was featured in many of my past blog posts on “A Words Worth” (revmoore.blogspot.com). Follow the links to purchase his books at Pinyon Publishing (23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403). Several interviews with Gary appear on the Pinyon Publishing website. 

Here is one of my favorites among Gary’s poetry in Four Ravens. It’s entitled “Yew:”

“No one knew

how the yew

survived so long

generating roots

branches strong

some said —mystical

from those places

where poets rhymed

with old magicians

where birds entwine

in branches

singing of immortality”

Rest in peace, Gary Entsminger, let light perpetual shine upon you. 

Love, Diane

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.

TWO MILES WEST

Gary Entsminger, editor and publisher of Pinyon Publishing in Montrose, Colorado, spends many hours every day encouraging, supporting, and publishing poets. Like Ezra Pound, he believes that "the more every man/woman knows about poetry the better." At some hour during his busy day as a publisher, naturalist, computer programmer, and musician, he manages to write. He has published two novels, two non-fiction books, and numerous scientific articles and poetry in literary journals; however, this month he celebrates the publication of Two Miles West, his first full-length book of poetry, and it is a work of signature brilliance, a dazzling piece de résistance.

The cover of this inspiring book features the artistry of Susan Elliott, Entsminger's publishing partner. Elliott photographed and enhanced the "pictographs in the Barrier Canyon Style of the characteristic ghostly anthropomorphs, some six or seven feet tall in the Thompson Wash in southeast Utah." The cover design sets the tone of wonder and awe inherent in the text of Two Miles West. Section drawings of women symbolize the muses or sages mentioned in Yeats' epigraph poem at the beginning of Two Miles West and emphasize the roles various women have played in Entsminger's life; e.g., grandmother, mother, aunt, lover.

Perhaps what Entsminger does best in this work is to present a way to understand ourselves and our potential within the context of time and this universe, melding imagination, insight, and wit in lyrics that celebrate surprising moments. In Two Miles West we find capricious explorations into philosophy, music, and nature. The inner "scape" of each poem has a distinctive voice (the evocation of the Muse) that keeps watch over emotional reactions as well as physical impressions of the world two miles west and beyond Entsminger's cabin on a plateau in southwestern Colorado.

While reading this volume that contains many metaphysical poems, I was reminded of Ken Wilber's A Theory of Everything in which he presents ideas that invite readers to integrate body, mind, and spirit. This reminder occurred in the poem, "Reading Rilke," in which Entsminger probes the question: "... why weren't/we comfortable/with paradise? /I make a note/as the cottonwood crackles/where are the angels? / we fare no better now/in our interpreted worlds/beneath the higher stars/still as terrified/yet if we beckon/will they reappear/as themselves/and will we recognize/our past echoes in their wings?" Entsminger's poetic questions seem to be designed to cast light upon the hidden and to introduce some measure of light through philosophical enquiry without being didactic.

Entsminger's naturalist inclinations appear in the poem "Pelicans," in which he observes the pouches of lady slippers growing in the mountains and likens them to "strangers in a strange land/..." agreeing to nod and make no sound, remaining lady's slippers until they fade in spring "when sunshine bends/and words leaf/then pelicans/leave the ground."

Entsminger moves us from level to level, from memory to reality in inspired leaps, from childhood characters to the invented a la Kerouac persona named McQ, and he accomplishes these leaps with images not unlike the pictograph photographs that extend the reader's boundaries, including and transcending along the way. "Music At Three" is a poignant recollection of Entsminger's grandmother who is captured in a "full-cut apron/hugging her wide hips/canvas shoes to ease/sore feet smell [ing] of/onions and fried potatoes/I ask for munie/and dance/snapping fingers/and thumbs where/the beat purses/her lips/as if to kiss/then pinches my cheek/but it never hurts a bit."

Brittle wit on the cusp of being idiosyncratic emerges in Entsminger's "Robbery," a poem about the human experience of lost opportunities that expresses the poet's regret from making wise choices (!): "...I was already up/making plans/to steal a million/we'd rush out/before breakfast/with our haul/mount a bay/and pinto/ride to Colorado/saddlebags slapping/against hair/and skin/until time/caught up with us/with the sheriff's posse our butts/in a sling/should've made love/chile rellenos & refried beans/I could'a been somebody." "Robbery" is a laugh-aloud moment for readers.

One of my favorite poems in Two Miles West is a short piece entitled "Feathers" about a nursery rhyme that "has escaped somewhere," a poem that draws the reader in with the delight Robert Frost spoke of as inclining to the impulse, assuming "direction with the first line laid down." In "Feathers," Entsminger "lays it down," imagining two girls and a boy leaving their houses to "run into the woods/live with crows/eat corn get/chased/learn to fly/in time the girls/become crow/maidens and the boy/ a night watch/man with feathers/where his arms used to be." From the initial image of "a nursery rhyme escaping somewhere" (I love that line!) to the end line of "a watch man with feathers/where his arms used to be," Entsminger unfolds a poem that was predestined to achieve the element of surprise, a characteristic of many of his poems.

 "Metamorphosis" establishes Entsminger's role as a prophet of hope and belief in the potential of men/women despite their preoccupation with "stuff," and their struggles as "wooly bears" "...one day to the next/climbing higher/to just below/somewhere else/soon to become tiger moths." This poem "comes right with a click like a closing box," as Yeats said in his Letters on Poetry.

Perhaps the tantamount vision in Entsminger's Two Miles West is that of the possibility of humans being elevated to joy in life while living in a complex, mechanized society. Readers are treated to his appreciation of women, his liberation from time and space limitations, his devotion to truth, and his love of a natural world that presents glad surprises for his poetizing. Thinker, storyteller, a poet who poses questions about the visible and audible world, as well as the spiritual realm, Entsminger emerges as a contemporary version of a renaissance man in this debut volume of poetry.

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