RIDGES IN GLASS

Cheniere glass art by Karen Bourque

I have the good fortune of owning fourteen glass pieces created by Karen Bourque, the masterful glass artist of Church Point, Louisiana. Many of these pieces have been photographed for the covers of my books of poetry and now hang on the glass porch of our Celeste residence here in New Iberia, Louisiana, and in the windows of our home on Fairbanks Circle in Sewanee, Tennessee.

 

Karen’s latest glass piece is her interpretation of a Louisiana Cheniere, or ridge, and will be featured in the spring edition of Pinyon Review along with several of my poems. The featured poems derive from Ridges, a book of my poetry that Pinyon Publishing will publish this summer.

 

Karen’s latest piece is a beautiful work of stained glass, Apache Tear, and Kyamite that she created this year. It now hangs on the glass porch of my home here in New Iberia, Louisiana. As I look at the purple sky overhanging a cheniere, I’m lifted out of the Covid doldrums and remember a brighter day's visit I made to Cheniere au Tigre many years ago when three female companions and I traveled by boat to this site.

 

Diane on way to Cheniere au Tigre

Karen’s renderings always evoke strong emotional responses in me. A unique non-traditional glass artist, she creates most of her work in a studio beside the Bourque home that she shares with the former poet laureate and humanist, Darrell Bourque. Before the dreaded Covid caused me and my friends to sequester ourselves, I often visited there.

Karen’s work is featured in the Ernest Gaines Center at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, in a window depicting the Holy Spirit at Christ the King Roman Catholic Church near Opelousas Louisiana, at the Louisiana Book Festival, in an issue of Pinyon Review, and many other venues and homes.

As the maxim reads, “One picture is worth a thousand words,” and this photo of Karen Bourque’s latest rendering affirms that critique. Briefly said, her work is a spiritual experience. 

 

 

PRESENCE

 

Sister Mary Zita's cap

Here it is—a rose-colored cap with red and white stars on it—the last thing Sister Elizabeth slipped into a bag of snacks for us when we left Sewanee a few weeks ago. It was an object that brought forth in me a “gusher” of tears. The cap belonged to Sister Mary Zita, one of the Anglican Sisters at St. Mary’s Convent, Sewanee, Tennessee who sat in her wheelchair before me at weekly Services. She died this year while I was in New Iberia, Louisiana.

Sister Mary Zita is memorialized in many of my books of poetry, and while I wrote about her gardening and flower arranging talents, a paramount thought surfaced when I pulled out the rose-colored cap that was of something called “presence.” Although this small Filipino Sister could read the liturgies in the Book of Common Prayer and was often an echo after each line we recited, she never conversed with me or others in chapel (except with Sister Elizabeth}. She just embodied “presence.”

When I was enrolled in Clinical Pastoral Education preceding my ordination as a deacon in the Episcopal Diocese of Western Louisiana, I learned a lot about presence, the act of being at a bedside without speaking or reciting prayers—just standing alongside a suffering person in inviolate silence, perhaps inwardly praying or just being there in the co-inherence of suffering. Fully Present.

My good friend, Janet Fault-Gonzales wrote a powerful essay about Presence in her book entitled Road Home that I feel is one of the best I’ve read on the subject. It involves a eulogy written at the death of her beloved Grandmother Mae:

“In trying to prepare myself to give her up, I realized in the months prior to her death that my grandmother was the still point for me—the center of peace and stability inside of a world that has proven to be much harder than I anticipated. When everything else I had known seemed chaotic and changing, Mae had been the same. She had been there. That’s all she had to be. She didn’t have to be anything else … She’s the greatest loss I have had. Today, my heart aches for someone with whom I talked about pinks, bachelor buttons, glads, zinnias, and roses—grown from seeds supplied by the Standard Coffee salesman. It isn’t what Mae said or what she accomplished that affected and still affects all of us (family)—it’s simply that she was there.

“Once I heard a minister deliver a sermon about ‘being there.’ He said that our attendance at church makes a difference, not only in our lives, but also in the lives of others. I thought the sermon was about role modeling and influencing others by our attendance. But what I learned from Mae isn’t about role modeling, intentionally setting an example. It’s simply about being—having presence—contributing to others because you exist, hold a place for all you love. Mae remained in Eufaula as the same, the comfortable, the familiar that my relatives still hold dear—that place her sisters and brothers couldn’t get back to but they’re glad to have had—the place where it hurts most to lose: her presence. It’s a powerful thing to be who you are …”

I’ve read and re-read Janet’s essays many times, but the memory of that particular essay always comes up when I think about the word “presence.” I chided Sister Elizabeth for causing me to cry when she passed on Mary Zita’s cap to me, a soft cushion of stars hidden among snacks for the journey back to New Iberia. However it is now a “presence” in my bedroom that reminds me of a “center of peace, stability inside a world that has proven to be much harder than I anticipated …”

Thanks for the cap, Sister Elizabeth.

PINYON REVIEW #18, FALL 2020

I wish that Gary Entsminger, former editor and publisher of Pinyon Publishing, had lived to see Pinyon Review #18, the journal he and his wife Susan birthed during his lifetime. This latest special journal with hand sewn Japanese Stab Binding on Mohawk Loop Inkwell Vellum EcoWhite Paper is a limited edition dedicated to Stuart Friebert. The work of Friebert, poet and translator of international fame, first appeared in Pinyon Publishing’s inventory with the award-winning book, Floating Heart, and his work remained a constant contribution to the publications of Pinyon until his death this year.

Susan Entsminger, now editor and publisher of Pinyon Review, introduced this special edition with a brief poem of her own entitled “Perspective,” and voiced the lament that the “sequences” in her life, “which had become as sacred as ritual” are no longer (referring, perhaps, to the sudden death of her beloved husband, Gary.) However, she also speaks of “staying suspended in the universe,” a phrase attributed to the poet, XIA Haitao, whose work appears in this issue of Pinyon Review.

Some of the outstanding authors who have appeared in former issues of Pinyon and whose books have been published by this independent press include Chuck Taylor, Luci Shaw, Martha McFerren, and Neil Harrison. However, more recent poets such as XIA Haitao will transport readers into vistas overlooking the sea from the summit of Mount Tai in China and from which Susan Entsminger derived the line, “Only when you stay suspended in the universe,” in her introduction to this issue of Pinyon Review. During this time of Covid-19, the particular line that resonated with me and inspired me to read further was XIA Haitao’s long poem covering almost ten pages about a mountain that “has been standing/ since 2.4 billion years ago/in silence as if nothing has ever happened/to him.” It’s a tribute poem that illustrates the lastingness of both geographical formations and poetry, and the appearance of Chinese script, side by side with the poem enhances the format of the translation and contributes to the international flavor of this artistic journal published in southern Colorado.

I loved the imagery about a Religious figure in Mark Mitchell’s “Past,” in lines like “…Relics lack/substance, but they can grow real again. She/kept holy cloths handy in case someone/happened past her room — they must never see/through the spells she’d been taught by evil nuns…” The imagery reminded me of supernatural inhabitants in the works of New Orleans author Anne Rice’s works about other world spirits. Mitchell’s poem is brief but is a powerful evocation of the “also world,” which a Religious friend calls the afterlife.

Maria Roca’s contribution of “It’s Always Windy in Portbou,” translated from the Catalan by Sonia Alland and formatted side by side with the Portuguese version, features more of Susan’s placement of multilingual renditions and is a gusty lyric that “pushes a train car over and it falls on the tracks like an enormous dead animal…blows with sudden blasts…everyone tousled with hair blown backwards or forwards…” The poem will remind Louisiana readers of the furious hurricanes that beset Acadian residents in Louisiana each year. Powerful phrasing that describes“windows trembling and beds shaking," may be traumatic for southern Louisianans, but the translation redeems itself with the line that concludes “everything [is] purified by the wind.” However, as a part-time Louisiana resident, I would venture that we’d rather not experience that form of redemption,

A special section by Richard Kent is another example of Pinyon’s photographic surprises. Kent introduces ‘Lessons in Recursion’ in which a recursive image of a scene captured in photography may alter a viewer’s perspective of an ordinary landscape. When Kent encounters blank wooden signs in which messages have been erased by wear and time, he creates “recursive progressions” or transformations of place by photographing landscape scenes and placing the images on blank signs, some of which might startle viewers as they travel through various states. Seven signs showcase his complex photographic representations, several of which are attached to trees throughout the US.

As usual, this Pinyon Review #18 is a small masterpiece, a volume that will invite new readers and delight old ones as well. This edition is a wonderful tribute to Stuart Friebert and to the Entsmingers for preserving outstanding literary and artistic contributions. It contains some of the creative output of our country’s best word and visual artists.

Copies available through links above or snail mail from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403.