PINYON REVIEW #16

This is the first Pinyon Review without Gary Entsminger, former editor and publisher, at the helm, but Susan Entsminger, his wife who is co-editor and publisher of this journal, hasn’t missed a beat in her “troubadour’s” (as she calls Gary) song, launching the new edition with excerpts from Gary’s poems that appear in Two Miles West. Susan Entsminger poses rhetorical questions about her talented husband who died in early fall, then answers them in “The Troubadour Sings A Love Song”; e.g., “Was it the parents’ country guitars that first vibrated at a frequency which awakened in Gary that silver thread of Jungian collective memory, the Castanedaian glimmering energy with that which frees us from ourselves so that we might glimpse the source of Plato’s shadows on the cave wall and hear the songs of our ancestors?…”  She also acknowledges writers and artists who have appeared in the pages of his brainchild, The Pinyon Review: “…Gary’s imagination and quest for truth are alive in his sculpted prose, his guitar improvisations, and the exceptional family of artists we call Pinyon. The Troubadour sings love songs.”

Readers are also given a glimpse of Gary and Susan’s work in progress, Egypt ’78, in which the characters Rosalina and Robinson have decided to embrace fiction and non-fiction simultaneously. “They had invented characters, who themselves had ideas about their lives, and she would meet and talk to them here in the cottage or garden, on the hillside, by the ocean, at Robinson’s tower…” I don’t know how much copy of this co-authored work Gary and Susan had achieved, but I feel sure Susan will honor her talented husband by completing the manuscript. At one point following Gary’s death, she told me that his spirit still lives in the canyon near their cabin in Colorado. “I asked Gary the other night:/Do you miss talking?… I think he said:/What does it look like where you are?” she writes in this issue of Pinyon Review.

Toni Ortner, a newcomer to Pinyon, writes about grief in a brief poem entitled “How to think about grief": “It is futile to ask when it will subside…Grief is water running down a mountainside. The rivulet twists/ and turns through every nook around every rock and crevice. It/cuts like a knife into the dirt and washes away the leaves plants/and pebbles. It becomes a stream. Season after season it slices/and chops the dirt to silt. Then it is a river./Dream whatever you want it will make no difference.” Although this poem has an “inevitable” quality, the transcendent tone of nature somehow provides soothe to readers.

When readers turn the page, they will discover new life in “Baby Lucy’s Quilt,” a display of quilts that Laurel Brody, A Chinese Medicine practitioner, co-created for the arrival of a friend’s baby. Along with friends of the parents, she embroidered, and others machine quilted the vibrant quilt with purple edgings that inspired the parents to paint the infant’s room a matching shade of purple. Brody writes: “The process nourishes. The outcome is tangible and lasts through the years. There’s a reason women have been doing this for generations.” 

Diane Vreuls returns to Pinyon with three works, including a poem entitled “Fifth Grade.” I could readily identify with this bit of nostalgia as I’ve often said that life, for me, began in the third grade. Vreuls takes readers back fifty years, bringing alive amusing and comforting memories: “…Carol got to do the shamrock because she was Catholic./We watched it sun out the windows. Watched it cloud,/rain, snow. It was always warm in the room. Nothing bad/ever happened. No one was sick for long, or moved away./It’s been over 50 years now. I close my eyes: there’s my desk,/the children reading aloud, the rocking chair,/Mrs. Fern…” Vreuls treats readers to a profound recollection using evocative concrete detail. A former professor at Oberlin College in Ohio, she has also published short stories, children’s literature, and poetry. 

The photographs of Fabrice Poussin, arresting scenes in Oregon and Utah, showcase the work of an artist whose work has gained recognition in over 200 art and literature magazines in the U.S. and abroad. In his “A Gentle Dream,” the photograph captures a dusty road that curves around a rock formation and perhaps suggested to Gary “the turn beyond” when he was reviewing work for this issue that was initiated while he was still alive. Gary was always mystically inclined, sought harmony in nature, and engaged in philosophical searches. Poussin’s work centers on western landscapes in both black and white and color, taking readers “beyond the gate,” the title for his art contribution.

Susan described this issue aptly in her opening summary: “a fifth-grade classroom, the light touch of a friend, mystery deep in hemlock roots, radiator clank echoing clinking rings, an overgrown orchard, mountain meadow, embracing bodies, dusty trail…the liberating spaces of the mind’s eye, perhaps a small tickle of a deeply repressed memory…”

Pinyon #16 is a meet tribute to Gary Entsminger, “the troubadour” whose life mission was to celebrate the arts and sciences and whose wife Susan continues the mission. I also have a poem in this issue and appreciate the recognition as one of Pinyon’s “family.” 

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

MIGRARÉ

I looked for my CD of “In A Persian Market” by William Ketelbey this morning so I could play it while I wrote about Darrell Bourque’s newest book of poetry, migraré,  because the volume is a beautiful collection of ghazals evoking memories of my sojourn in Persia during the 1970’s. However, I did not find the CD and had to rely on the music playing in my mind as I re-read the arresting couplets that accompany Bill Gingles’s abstract art.

Bourque uses this ancient form of poetry familiar to readers of Rumi and Hafez, two poets with whom I became fascinated while living in Persia, and in this collection, he addresses the subject of immigration — migraré or “I will move”( in Spanish), referring to mass movements of people either for survival, or for life-threatening reasons, or as messengers called to divine purposes.

Bourque “moves into” the ghazals through the medium of ekphrasis wherein a poet creates a poem by looking at images and builds around “tensions, composition, line, color, and the theater created in expressionistic artworks,” according to Bourque. 

Bourque derives his poems from his experience involving the Immigration Team from Narrative 4, a story exchange program designed to foster empathy and break down barriers among students worldwide, equipping them to improve their communities and the world. Storytellers from around the world met in Arnaudville, Louisiana, where Bourque encountered carriers of the ghazal. He seems to be continually inspired by experiences that explore the histories of people deeply affected by separation and immigration; e.g., his own ancestry dating back to the 19th century when Acadians were expelled from France and Acadie. In a passionate “Foreword,” he writes that humans “must be vigilant and not separate themselves from each other in destructive and debilitating ways…”

Readers enter the sphere of Bourque’s ghazals with poems like “Division Stream,” which I felt was among the finest in this collection and featured his great-grandmother. Lines like 

…When great imperceptibles come to live with you

and you cannot travel far enough to get away, you swim daily in your division stream… 

Taken as a whole, the ghazal impresses readers with Bourque’s philosophical gifts translated (maybe migrated) into poetic form. 

She arrived one day with a small satchel and all her belongings and no husband.

What took him from her she couldn’t even begin to know. Death’s a division stream… 

However, ever the master of sensuality, he describes his great-grandmother’s separations as: 

turn[ing] to clabbers and soft cheeses spread on biscuits in the morning,

with mayhaw jellies and blackberries she picked while praying into the division stream… 

Bourque really “gets with it,” in contemporary language, as he launches into “Sun Choir” (Christ the King Bellevue Choir): 

I sit in one of the back rows with my wife, near Henry Amos. We couldn’t be higher.

There are no names on pews here. I hum. My wife sings out. It, too, is her sun choir. 

I once sat next to both of them at a celebration honoring his wife’s glass work in a triptych of this church and felt the dynamism of the sun choir, so this ghazal resonated with me, and I well understood his line: 

She sings trouble over trouble every Sunday…

The poem reminded me of Rumi’s 

The sunbeam fell upon the wall;

the wall received a borrowed splendor.

Why set your heart on a piece of turf…

When I lived in the sun-baked desert of Khuzestan Province in Persia, I longed to see water: bayou, river, even the aqua blue waters of the Persian Gulf and painted a wall in the dining room of our home a deep blue. I was taken back to that time of blueness when I read Bourque’s “Second Self,” his description of Vermeer’s blue as a way of “finding ways to second self… one self seeking another self…” My own immersion in a blue wall in Ahwaz, Iran led to a self seeking another self in that mysterious mideastern environment to which I had migrated. Expatriates to any country will identify with this ghazal.

Space forces me into brevity, but I hasten to say that migraré is Bourque’s finest gift of poetry, a meditative, mystical work that will “move” readers into the divine afflatus sans forced migration, arriving through phrasings of the same tone as the mystical Persian poets. It’s a beautiful entry into contemplative practice. As I told Darrell after reading migraré “Move over, Rumi.”

As readers can see, the review is not a definitive, scholarly treatment of a beautiful book from Louisiana’s most masterful poet, but it is an appreciative salute to Louisiana’s best ambassador for the mission of celebrating difference. 

Darrell Bourque is professor emeritus in English (University of Louisiana, Lafayette) and former Poet Laureate of Louisiana. He received the 2014 Louisiana Book Festival Writer Award and the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities 2019 Humanist of the Year Award, as well as the Dr. James Oliver-Monsignor Sigur Award by the Louisiana Council on Human Relations for his Social Justice work for minorities and the marginalized.

LET IT BE A DARK ROUX

Twelve years ago, I began writing a blog called A Words Worth and have published at least four posts a month each year since that time. I’ve been faithful to this schedule during that period while living in both Louisiana and Tennessee. This past month I decided to pursue posting only sporadically, probably book reviews and literary events, rather than weekly blog posts written about a variety of subjects. As soon as I made that decision, books by friends and authors, and author events began to show up, and for a while, I may seem to be writing on a schedule, but I’m not. Three books are sitting on my dining room table, and the Pinyon Review that Susan Entsminger published as a salute to my former editor/publisher, Gary Entsminger, is en route, so…

Wednesday night, I attended a Festival of Words event in Grand Coteau, Louisiana that featured Sheryl St. Germain, Louisiana’s Writer of the Year, 2018, who read from two of her books of poetry I purchased that evening. Yesterday morning I opened and read through them in one sitting as St. Germain “spoke to my condition” in her intense, un-self-conscious voice. Of the two volumes I purchased, I chose to write about Let It Be A Dark Roux* because I think it best expresses St. Germain’s lifetime purpose, e.g., in “Flambeau Carriers”:

…I wanted it to be the poet’s job:

to carry the burning night

to hold high our stumbling,

astonished,

street-dancing selves. 

Here is the finest poet I’ve read in a long while, one who has a sensuous, heart-exploding voice, who is unafraid to pour out in exquisite and accessible poetry expressions of pain, nostalgia, femaleness, able to incite nostalgia and sadness, sometimes with deft, sharp blows, but always with this amazingly un-self-conscious voice. I might add that she also has an amazingly soft speaking voice, even when she reads her harshest poems and impresses her audience in Grand Coteau with her humility. Usually, I cite other poets who may seem to be predecessors in the same style as the poet I’m reviewing, but this awesome female poet is uniquely outspoken and dissimilar to any I’ve known or read. She touches readers to the bone.

St. Germain’s Cajun origins emerge throughout Let It Be A Dark Roux, and I was drawn to her “Mother’s Red Beans and Rice,” feeling that no one of Cajun origin can flip the page when St. Germain describes the

…ham bone and marrow

to make the gravy thick,

salt pork to make them meaty, smoky

…The beans would cook all day, filling the house

with their creamy onion pork smell, the sauce slowly

thickening, the beans slowly softening

…I eat them like joy.

St. Germain does not gloss over the agonies of addiction and the woundedness of a family afflicted with the diseases of alcohol and hard drugs — father, brother, son, Sheryl herself — but readers will be moved by her candid witness to these agonies and her courage displayed in recovery. Much of the raw story to which she witnesses is told in the second volume I purchased, The Small Door Of Your Death, published in 2018, but I chose to write about the healing memories/experiences of which she wrote that revealed the redeeming aspects of Art. 

Again, returning to food — the joy of every true Cajun’s life — when I read “Bread Pudding With Whiskey Sauce,” I was reminded of my paternal grandmother’s kitchen (a Vincent descended from Nova Scotian stock), and, as St. Germain writes: 

how sorrow can be transformed

into bread pudding

… dry hard pieces into soft moist bits.

Add raisins and peach halves.

Beat eggs with sugar and cinnamon,

freshly grind allspice and nutmeg.

It will smell like Christmas,

It will smell like your mother’s

happiness. Mix it all together,

bake. The house will fill

with goodness, with the smell

of grace… 

I went hunting for Cajun fare after reading that tribute to good food (and found gumbo on a cold day in Acadiana). 

Perhaps readers will not be able to breathe easily when Germain writes of the heavy breath of God and features vultures in “In the Garden of Eden.” Still she surprises these readers with an unusual take on the giant birds that sometimes cause anxiety in humans when they come upon carrions gathered on highway roadkill: 

their unfeathered heads the red jewels

of the sky of the garden.

They were vegetarian then. 

There were no roadside kills,

no bones to pick, no dead flesh to bloom, ripen.

And they were happy.

They could not imagine

what they would become. 

Here is a poet’s poet, one who brings poets and other readers to the point of redemption and reminds all of us that “…poetry is best at howling/it’s the only way to say the unsayable.” This is what St. Germain does without mawkishness or hopelessness, bringing readers to a deep appreciation of her undaunted spirit.

Sheryl St. Germain is a native of New Orleans and is of Cajun and Creole descent. She is now retired from Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA where she taught poetry and creative non-fiction and is noted for her work as co-founder of the Words Without Walls program. 

*Published by Autumn House Press.