Reading My Friends, #5

Reading My Friends, #5

Welcome to Reading My Friends.

This is Lyman Grant, coming to you from the 4 Door Lounge, my backyard study in Harrisonburg, Virginia, deep in the heart of the beautiful Shenandoah Valley.

Thank you for joining me for the fifth installment of this little podcast.  Remember you can subscribe on Substack or find us on the web at 4doorlounge.com.  I also post reminders on Facebook, so befriend me, why don’t you?

I have recently returned from an annual pilgrimage to a poetry festival in Oklahoma, the best part of which is getting to see old friends.  One of these friends is Alan Berecka, recently retired as a librarian at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas.  I have known Alan for fifteen or twenty years.  I think we first met at Windhover poetry festivals that Audelle Shelbourne organized at Mary Hardin Baylor University in Belton, Texas. These were really fun, and extremely well organized events.

Alan is the author of five books of poems, and two chapbooks. Here is a link to his webpage so you can learn more about him and them. More or less at random, I have pulled from my shelves his second book, Remembering the Body.  The book contains 71 poems in two sections, more or less equally divided between the ideas of the human body and the body of Christ. 

Wherever and whenever Alan reads his poems, he is one of the favorites.  He is, by turns, hilariously deadpan and funny and heartbreakingly tender.  The oohs and aahs are as deeply felt as the laughs and chuckles.

Today, though, I am going to do something a little different.  I have chosen to read three of Alan’s poems that are about mutual friends.  So this episode can be called “Reading My Friend Reading Our Friends.”

Let’s start with “The Texas Poet’s Lariat,” written for Larry D. Thomas, the 2008 Texas Poet Laureate.

The Texas Poet's Lariat
          For Larry D. Thomas

Beethoven, always, Beethoven
filling his studio's air, seeping
past his sapphire eyes and deep
into an arid white flatland heat,
or pouring into the lazy Brazos
setting its waters into a red rage.

Through it all, the seated poet rocks,
smoking a teeth-clenched pipe
that burns a fragrant incense
at the altar of his art--his ruled
legal pad, on which his large
sure hand forges crystalline images--
each line a cord that he twists and braids
until he slowly ropes his reader in. 

This is a lovely, small poem that captures so well Larry D. Thomas’ joy and awe at the light and dark of life.  Sapphire eyes, twists and braids, red rage and teeth-clenched pipe.  Alan is a poet who knows Larry’s poetry well.

Our second poem today is one that Alan wrote to one of his writing friends, and like Larry Thomas, a frequent reader at the old Windhover conferences.  This is Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, another wonderful poet and Flannery O’Connor Scholar. Currently she teaches at Fordham University.

So this poem, “A Texan’s Reply to Angela from Baltimore,” is a poem written by a Texan to a Yankee who visits Texas in the winter (the Windhover Conferences took place in early January).  I may be a little odd here, but I seem to hear a little Christopher Marlow and Walter Raleigh: the passionate shepherd and the nymph peeking in between the lines. All tongue in cheek.

A Texan's Reply to Angela from Baltimore 
          'Tis new to thee.    --Prospero  

The cooing winter Texan
 writes warmly in cool blue 
how much she misses 
the Texas she grew to love.  

Well, ma'am here's the news: 
this time of year I miss it, too.  

Your January moon 
has blistered red 
in the white heat 
of August noons.  

Buzzards bake 
to tortured oaks 
and hope death 
will stumble by.  

In this dry heat the earth 
cracks wide, opens to eat  
small pets and skinny kids 
who fall deep into the heart 
of Texas, oh my Texas.  

Long since the last Winnebago 
headed north, we remain, infected 
by a mad bullheadedness, 
the kind that draws lines 
in sand, hunkers down 
in lost causes and Alamos.  

So partner, write your 
poems of blue bonnets 
and whooping cranes, 
but summer up East  
where a cooler sun reigns.  

Next winter when flocks  
of birders migrate through 
the Trans-Pecos and down 
into the Valley to perchance 
catch flashes of mandarin 
flitting along it tropical path,   

I'll polish my Justins, tie 
my bolo, and tilt my Stetson, 
to welcome back cool days, 
star-filled nights and magical 
madrigals from one bright oriole.                            

Ah, want a fun, and silly poem, filled with little hints and winks toward poetry’s traditions.  Only Alan, I think, would write a poem with Winnebagos and madrigals.

Our third poem today was written for the poet Jill Alexander Essbaum, our mutual friend in Austin, Texas. Perhaps all I should point out is that Jill is a one-of-a-kind brilliantly erotic and spiritual writer.  In 2005, Jill published a chapbook of deliciously winking sonnets called Oh Forbidden.  Alan is responding to those poems.

Prayer Said While Igniting a Candle
           For Jill Alexander Essbaum 

Oh forbidden woman, poet of heaven,
prophet, sacred nymphomaniac
of my dreams, your psalms whet my desire
as you sing on your once pristine sheets
now stained with your black art and ink.
I kneel at the altar of your perfect body
of work and pray that yes, oh yes,
dear saint that your heat and flame
might spread and ease throbbing heads,
thaw cold shoulders, melt frozen hearts
and burn away the litany of pettiness 
that keeps us from our mortal mates.
Let this votive lit to your image illuminate
our shame for the thorn and weed that it is,
so we might come to understand the sacrament
of sex and the full love of God, Amen.

Oh what a fun poem. The tropes of sex and religion laid upon the tongue and then placed firmly between the cheek and gums.

Well, I haven’t really given Alan’s poems a fair shake here, but this time reading his book Remembering the Body, I was distracted by these sweet missives addressed to our mutual friends and just had to share them. 

You know what is coming next, don’t you?  Individual episodes devoted to Larry D. Thomas, Angela O’Donnell, and Jill Alexander Essbaum.  Stay turned.  See you soon.