INTIMACIES & OTHER DEVICES

Earlier this year, I was one of two Louisiana poets who read at a Valentine’s Day poetry reading on the stage of Casa Azul in Grand Coteau, Louisiana. Although Patrice Melnick, owner of Casa Azul and coordinator of the program, didn’t mandate that we read love poems, I prefaced my reading with an explication of the four categories of love C.S. Lewis wrote about. I explained that Lewis, the great Anglican apologist, didn’t discover Eros until he married late in life and that he wondered why he’d been hanging out with all those grumpy guys in the Inklings group so many years instead of romancing someone like his wife Joy.

The four categories Lewis wrote about are storge, or affection, which Lewis said was a ready-made love in families, the result of fondness due to familiarity; Philio, or the love defining friendship; Eros, or the love that Lewis says can become a god to people who fully submit to it; and finally, Agape, the love that engenders caring–charitable love, a type of sacrificial love.

Before the reading, I selected poems that exemplified the four categories, and Eros sorta’ got the short end of the stick because I was a bit shy about reading words that expressed the deepest intimacies of love, even if some of them were more comic than passionate. This morning I finished reading the work of a writer named Kurt Heinzelman, a poet who definitely isn’t reticent about paying homage to Eros. Intimacies & Other Devices, published by Pinyon Publishing, could be classified as poetry written by an “intellectual romantic”–his poems range from classical and contemporary emotive poetry to ballads that are adaptations of Paul Verlaine, Pablo Neruda, Homer, and others. His eloquent words and rhythms convey the message of the quotation by Gaston Bachelard in the opening pages of Intimacies: “There does not exist a real / intimacy that is repellent. / All the spaces of intimacy / are designated by attraction. / Their being is well-being.”

Since I prefer contemporary poetry to classical poetry, the less formal poems in Intimacies resonated more readily with me; e.g., “Study For the Figure of Time:” “So fine those hips…the muslin sheathed/the sheathing showed how movement moved/like a fingering of flutes seen before the sound/warm as breath can be blown through/time’s cold hands.” I thought of the poets Billy Collins and Charles Simic when I read the poem designated “after Paul Celan” entitled “Corona:” “Standing at the window now we embrace, the people/look up from the street:/it is time they knew!!/It is time that the stones deigned to bloom,/that unrest got a heart-beat of its own./Time now that it were time./It’s time.”

Heinzelman’s work is playful and sensual as he acknowledges Eros, and he seems totally unabashed about celebrating lust in “Lust, At Your Age: “A cello with no/need so dire/it stirs any echo/A viola with a/lilt so tender it/fills every hollow./A violin as un-/equivocally civil/as a stand/of sugar maples/that first warm week/before they run.”

My favorite in the collection is entitled “The Wound of Water in the Stones of the Day,” after a line from Yves Bonnefoy, a contemporary French poet and philosopher. The last few lines are intensely concentrated, full of sensual energy and the imagery of natural beauty: “As a child you said how you liked sledding/into that hollow between the barn and house/hearing the strop of runners on ice-pack/the hiss of salt needling in/knowing by late spring how still water/passes a fallen stone wall over.”

The work of Pierre de Ronsard, French poet of poets, has been described as “an easy mix of scholarship and love of natural beauty,” a phrase I think aptly captures the essence of Intimacies & Other Devices. Gary Entsminger, editor and publisher of Pinyon Publishing, reports that Heinzelman ranks in the top 60 in Amazon’s “Love Poems” category. His work stands alongside Pablo Neruda, Rumi, Shakespeare, Blake, and other notables. This is a collection of poetry executed in its many forms and feelings by a master poet, a book in which the author isn’t afraid to raise the shades on the window into intimacy. Additionally, the photograph on the cover of Intimacies, derived from the painting, A Young Woman Reading by Lucius Rossi, is a real eye catcher.

Heinzelman is editor-at-large for Bat City Review, editor-in-chief of Texas Studies in Literature and Language, and a member of the Texas Institute of Letters.

Order 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. 

RUMINATIONS ABOUT PERSIAN RULERS

A few days ago, I attended morning services at St. Mary’s Chapel as I usually do on Tuesdays. It was a day overhung with thick fog, and I confess that my mind was as befogged as the outdoors when the lector began reading the Old Testament lesson. I was jolted awake by the names Cyrus and Darius, two Achaemenid kings who reigned over Persia during the fifth and sixth centuries BCE. I lived in Iran (contemporary name for Persia) during the 70’s and read a lot of history about the Persian Empire when it was at its apex during the two kings’ reigns, so the names caused me to pay more attention to the reading about Cyrus freeing the Jews from Babylon captivity and supporting the beginning of the rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple. I remembered that Darius, who followed Cyrus, continued generous funding for the reconstruction of this temple. This great Persian king ruled over forty different ethnic tribes in a domain that stretched from India into the Balkans, and his empire covered three million square miles.

Darius supported faiths and religions that were “alien” as long as they were peaceable, sometimes giving grants for their religious work. He favored Greek cults, supported Elamite priests, built the temple for the Egyptian god, Amun, and restored many other Greek temples that had been destroyed. In Persia he built Persepolis and Susa, promoted learning, agriculture and forestation, earning his name as the greatest of Persia’s kings. One of the sites I visited at Naqs-e-Rustam bore several inscriptions on Darius’s tomb, which was carved out of rock face, and the one that impressed me read: “I am Darius the Great King, King of Kings, King of countries containing all kinds of men. King in this great earth far and wide…”

The day following my reminiscences about Darius, I picked up the newspaper and read that the new president of Iran, Hasan Rouhani, has informed the UN General Assembly that he seeks to work with the international community, and Iran stands ready for “constructive engagement.” He has also freed political prisoners, replaced the military with the foreign ministry to lead nuclear negotiations, even acknowledged Jews worldwide by wishing them well on Rosh Hashanah. To me and many Americans, his words sound encouraging.

Having lived in Iran for two years, I have some sympathy for the people and the future of this country. My “what if” thoughts about Rouhani border on wild and crazy miracles when I express that I wish he’d take a leaf from history and would really return to the views of the ancient Achaemenian kings, Cyrus and Darius, who practiced tolerance for and generosity toward the faiths and religions of other countries.

However, most opinion pieces in the news are contrary to my “what if” feelings, and I do admit that I am skeptical about Rouhani’s declarations. A few years ago, I expressed that skepticism metaphorically in a poem entitled “Persepolis” in my book, Farda, the last verses appearing below:

“[Alexander] set fire to the state of the free,

the wealth of social accord,

destroying that final bloom,

imperial eastern civilization,

its art now reduced to building missiles,

its architecture to flimsy tents in hot wind,

ghazals about lost battles drifting…

across cloudy mirrors.”

The above picture is a segment of a painting done by Paul Schexnayder of New Iberia, Louisiana for the cover of my book, Sophie’s Sojourn in Persia.